… Until Everyone Is Free
Image description: No one is free until everyone is free ‒ SURJ Toronto. Handmade fabric banner with brightly coloured text above a row of flowering plants.
“No one is free until everyone is free.” SURJ Toronto uses this tagline on our website and messaging to succinctly encapsulate a core value. But it’s by no means an original thought.
Like with most received wisdom, we owe a debt to our ancestors in the struggle, known and unknown, whose work for liberation makes our own work possible. The wording was not simply pulled out of the air; we can ‒ and should ‒ retrace its origins.
Most famously, Fannie Lou Hamer ‒ a Black American woman, lifelong civil rights activist, and organizer of the Freedom Summer movement in 1964 to register African American voters in Mississippi (that led directly to the passage of the US Civil Rights Act) ‒ is widely cited as saying, “Nobody’s free until everybody’s free.”
The thought is also attributed to Martin Luther King Jr.; here’s Maya Angelou using the phrase “No one of us can be free until everybody is free” in a discussion of King’s legacy. It may be a paraphrase of one of his themes rather than a direct quote. For example, in his 1963 Letter from a Birmingham Jail, King wrote, “Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny.”
Decades earlier, in 1883, Jewish American poet Emma Lazarus (whose “New Colossus” poem is excerpted on the Statue of Liberty) wrote in a reflection on the wave of antisemitism that was roiling her community: “Until we are all free, we are none of us free.”
The Combahee River Collective, in a seminal statement of Black Feminism, came at the theme this way in 1977: “If Black women were free, it would mean that everyone else would have to be free since our freedom would necessitate the destruction of all the systems of oppression.”
Muri Elder Lilla Watson’s articulation of mutuality – “If you have come to help me, you are wasting your time. But if you have come because your liberation is bound up with mine, then let us work together.” – has inspired many activists since she said these words at the 1985 United Nations Decade for Women Conference in Nairobi. Its origins, too, are complex: Watson credits the phrase to the collective work of Aboriginal activists in Queensland, Australia.
All of these strands feed into our tagline: “No one is free until everyone is free.” It’s directly related to the core SURJ value of mutual interest. We need to move from the idea of helping others, or just thinking about what is good for us, to understanding that our own liberation as white people ‒ our own humanity ‒ is inextricably linked to racial justice. We cannot overcome the challenges we face unless we work for racial justice and decolonization. Our own freedom is bound up in the freedom of Black, racialized, Indigenous, and other oppressed/marginalized communities.
With gratitude to our ancestors in the struggle and to the Black, Indigenous, and racialized co-conspirators whose lead we follow, let us keep up the work ‒ until everyone is free.