“How We Stay Free” is a powerful collection that invites us all to celebrate Black life, find our place in an ongoing rebellion, and organize our communities for the creation of new, better and freer worlds. It is a celebration of the organizing that sustained the uprising in Black Philadelphia in 2020 after the death of George Floyd and others.
The book consists of reflections, testimonies, prose and poetry from those on the frontlines of the movement: how it got started, where it stands and where it goes from here. The book was commissioned by the West Philadelphia Cultural Alliance/Paul Robeson House & Museum.
You can buy the book here: https://www.commonnotions.org/how-we-stay-free
Join a Solidarity campaign to get free copies to students, elders, organizers, and political prisoners all around Philadelphia: https://www.commonnotions.org/hwsf-solidarity
Advance praise for the book:
“How We Stay Free is a living archive built by a community of freedom fighters. In its pages, readers walk the streets of West Philadelphia, stepping into Hakim’s Bookstore, marching up Broad St. with the Philly Black Student Alliance, sharing food at the Bunny Hop in Malcolm X Park, or sitting in the parlor at 4951 Walnut where Paul Robeson’s voice still thunders in the walls. This is poetic record of resistance from the 2020 uprisings. From the ashes of the MOVE bombing to the surviving nail where Frank Rizzo’s statue once stood, these are blueprints for a future being made in the present. A beautiful compendium of struggle.”—Christina Heatherton, coeditor of Policing the Planet: Why the Policing Crisis Led to Black Lives Matter