This is one of many reasons why historian Dan Berger’s new book is so essential. Providing one of the first detailed accounts of the Atlanta Project and its ideas, his book shows the lie to these long-standing, simplistic accounts. It does so by bringing two under-appreciated lives to the foreground, leaders of the Atlanta Project: Zoharah Simmons (Gwendolyn Robinson) and Michael Simmons. Crafted by the careful hands of a skilled historian of Black Power, Stayed on Freedom: The Long History of Black Power through One Family’s Journey provides one of the first, full accountings of the Atlanta Project. More than that, by homing in on the multilayered politics of the Simmonses—who were comrades-turned-spouses and then comrades again—it illuminates the many facets of Black Power that so often do not make the leap from academic to trade press, from people’s lived experiences into a larger public domain. The Simmonses’s life histories, as told by Berger, are the stories of Black Power that the public needs and deserves.
Berger’s expertise in Black Power, deep research, accumulation of publications, and beautiful narrative writing make him well-placed to tell the Simmonses’s stories. Moreover, Zoharah and Michael are excellent subjects to make the leap from archival collections and scholarly monographs to a wider audience. Born Gwendolyn Robinson, Zoharah Simmons grew up in Memphis listening to her grandmother Rhoda talk about voting as “about power, not candidates,” the same kind of framing that she would later bring to SNCC (25). She defied her family’s wishes when she joined SNCC, first as a volunteer and then as a paid organizer and project manager during its iconic 1964 Freedom Summer. Her path to Black Power was thus informed by both how her family viewed Black people’s lived experiences and by the militancy of organizations like SNCC and the Nation of Islam. In later years—during what were arguably Black Power’s heydays of the late 1960s and early ’70s—she promoted Black pride and self-determination in her paid work for the National Council of Negro Women (NCNW), through her fleeting membership in the Nation of Islam, as the founder of a food co-op in Philadelphia, and in her job at the American Friends Service Committee (AFSC). Propelling her journey were her politics and her enduring curiosity around faith.