Lorraine Hansberry’s Radicalism

In October of 1964 , three months after the passage of the Civil Rights Act , Lorraine Hansberry ’ s play The Sign in Sidney Brustein ’ s Window opened on Broadway .
At the time , Hansberry was already famous for A Raisin in the Sun , but the intervening years had not been kind .
Shingles racked her body , and she ’ d been diagnosed with cancer .
Weakened by the disease , she moved into a hotel next to the theater so she ’ d be closer to the rehearsals .
The singer Nina Simone went @ @ @ @ @ @ @ recalled Hansberry saying , “ I must get well .
I must go down to the South.
” Even with her play in production and cancer killing her , she hoped to join the civil rights protests that had engulfed the South and “ find out what kind of revolutionary ” she was .
Looking for Lorraine : The Radiant and Radical Life of Lorraine Hansberry Most people these days know Hansberry for A Raisin in the Sun , a play that took housing segregation as its subject .
But as Imani Perry @ @ @ @ @ @ @ for Lorraine : The Radiant and Radical Life of Lorraine Hansberry , the revolutionary Hansberry has long been hidden in plain sight .
A Raisin in the Sun is often understood as the story of a black family fighting racist housing discrimination to purchase a home in a white neighborhood .
Yet Hansberry always insisted that the play was not simply about black people ’ s right to spend their money freely .
It was also a critique of employment discrimination , Northern white racism , and American poverty .
Hansberry ’ s @ @ @ @ @ @ @ of 34 , curtailed her work ’ s more radical , materialist , and socialist analyses .
Later liberal histories of the civil rights era would likewise narrow the scope of a movement that was opposed not only to segregation and disenfranchisement but also to the inequalities and violence that capitalism and liberalism produced—a set of concerns central to Hansberry ’ s oeuvre .
Consulting her unpublished writings and diaries as well as her published work , Perry recovers this more radical side .
Although raised in an elite milieu in Chicago , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ from an early age , to undoing the injustices that enabled that culture as she was invested in decrying poor housing conditions .
As she grew older , these commitments manifested themselves in an increasingly radical politics .
Amid the rabid anticommunism of the 1950s , she risked getting blacklisted by advocating for socialism , both at home and in the still decolonizing world , because she believed that freedom from racism also required global freedom from capitalism .
After Raisin ’ s success made her a de facto spokesperson on African American @ @ @ @ @ @ @ who neglected the poor to advance their own careers .
Black freedom , for Hansberry , required amplifying the voices of the black working class .
At times , this commitment caused her to focus more on politics than on her art , and at times it put her at odds with her less radical peers .
Yet , as Perry shows , Hansberry was hard to pin down .
“ Though she was an internationalist , and something of a Black nationalist , a Marxist , and a socialist , she was @ @ @ @ @ @ @ capitalist and racist America stemmed from a deep attachment to the culture and people who felt its violence .
Her investment in American politics did not lead to a simplistic patriotism or a belief in American exceptionalism but rather to a desire to see her country realize its ( not unique ) democratic potential .
Hansberry , in this way , was deeply committed to the United States , wanting to make it a more equitable and humane force—for women , for black people , for queer people , and for colonized people @ @ @ @ @ @ @ in Chicago in 1930 , to parents whose wealth and social status helped buffer their family in her early years from the full brunt of the Depression .
Her mother , Nannie Hansberry , was a teacher and a representative in local politics .
Her father , Carl Hansberry , made enough money in the real estate business , providing housing for poor black Chicagoans , to send Lorraine to school in a fur coat ( where her poorer classmates beat her up ) .
Because the small number of people in the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ of the family friends who visited her childhood home were socialists or radicals of various kinds .
The Hansberrys lived above Ray Hansborough , a member of the Communist Party and secretary of the National Negro Commission , and Carl Hansberry worked with Truman Gibson Sr. , the executive director of the American Negro Exposition , a kind of African American World ’ s Fair .
In time , Lorraine Hansberry ’ s politics would resemble less her parents ’ than their friends ’ .
The influence of her parents ’ social network @ @ @ @ @ @ @ racism , helped radicalize Hansberry when she was still young .
In 1937 , when she was 7 , the family moved into a home in Washington Park , a white neighborhood , where angry white mobs gathered in the hopes of forcing them out .
Around the same time , a segregationist landowners ’ association challenged the sale .
Suspecting he might one day need legal support , Carl Hansberry had already reached out to the NAACP to take the segregationists to court , which the organization proceeded to do .
While @ @ @ @ @ @ @ right to remain in their new home , Nannie Hansberry stayed up in the evenings with a pistol to protect their children .
Though Carl Hansberry ultimately prevailed in a Supreme Court case , Hansberry v. Lee , in 1940 , his daughter ’ s experience in Washington Park taught her that wealth and the legal system provided no guaranteed security against racism .
While Lorraine Hansberry ’ s early life exposed her to the difficulties that black people had appealing to the state for protection , her education gave her hope for @ @ @ @ @ @ @ 1947 , when she was 17 , white students at her high school went on strike to protest the increasing number of black students there .
As she recounted in To Be Young , Gifted , and Black , the black students from a nearby school , “ the children of the Unqualified Oppressed , ” came “ pouring out of the bowels of the ghetto ” to demonstrate .
The mayor and the school board intervened , and the police dispersed the striking white students .
In Hansberry ’ s eyes , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ below : Working-class people were central agents when it came to ameliorating black suffering .
In 1948 , Hansberry left Chicago for the University of Wisconsin , Madison , where she began to tie her interest in the politics of poor black people to a growing interest in art .
Reading the work of the Irish dramatist Sean O ’ Casey and then studying in Ajijic , Mexico , with the Guatemalan painter Carlos Mérida and others , she was introduced to an art that aimed at representing the global working class , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ were being exploited in similar ways as black people in the United States .
Hansberry ’ s budding interest in art took her to New York in 1950 .
There she published her first poem , “ Flag From a Kitchenette Window , ” which depicts the American flag as seen through the window of a poor black person ’ s apartment .
In the poem ’ s middle section , the hinge connecting racism at home and abroad appears in one perfect line : “ Black boy in a window ; Algiers @ @ @ @ @ @ @ undergo many changes in the coming years , the view from this window would remain her compass .
The next few years saw Hansberry ’ s entry into black radical politics on the page and in the streets .
In 1951 she moved to Harlem and began working for Paul Robeson ’ s Marxist newspaper Freedom— ” the journal of Negro liberation , ” in Hansberry ’ s words .
There she wrote about everything from Richard Wright ’ s novel The Outsider , which she disliked , to Kwame Nkrumah ’ s @ @ @ @ @ @ @ which she applauded .
She also began taking and teaching classes at Marxist adult education centers alongside such famous black radicals as Claudia Jones , Alice Childress , and W.E.B .
Du Bois .
In March of 1952 , when Robeson couldn ’ t attend a conference in Uruguay because the United States had stripped him of his passport for being a communist , he sent Hansberry in his stead .
She was not yet 22 , but thanks to her writing and teaching , preeminent black Marxist intellectuals of an earlier generation @ @ @ @ @ @ @ legacy .
That position made her marginal to many of her less radical peers in the civil rights movement , especially those who had turned away from the communist politics of the 1930s and ’ 40s .
In 1952 , as the movement entered its pivotal years and Brown v. Board of Education went before the Supreme Court , Hansberry grew increasingly interested in what was happening abroad .
In a letter to Reporter magazine , she declared her support for Jomo Kenyatta , an anti-colonial activist in Kenya arrested for his putative @ @ @ @ @ @ @ militant group that fought to expel the occupying British colonial forces .
Her growing internationalism was motivated by her belief that the battle against racism must be fought on all fronts and that any progress on the home front was only a beginning : Colonialism and capitalism still needed to be uprooted .
In 1952 , Hansberry began dating Robert Nemiroff , a Jewish graduate student at New York University , and married him the following year .
Like her , he was a dedicated leftist ; the day before their wedding , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Julius and Ethel Rosenberg .
Politics dominated their family life as much as it did their public lives .
Beginning in the mid-1950s , Hansberry identified as a lesbian , even though she remained married to Nemiroff .
She joined the Daughters of Bilitis , a lesbian organization , and wrote a letter to its publication arguing that sexism and anti-queer oppression sprang from the same source and that combating one required combating the other .
Later in the decade , she continued this project by writing queer fiction under the pseudonym Emily @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , anticolonialist , and Marxist , ” Perry explains , “ and her sexuality became an essential part of her thinking through human relations.
” In 1959 , Hansberry ’ s life changed dramatically .
A Raisin in the Sun debuted on Broadway—a feat never before accomplished by a black woman playwright—with a cast that included Sidney Poitier , Ruby Dee , and Claudia McNeil .
But even more important was how the radical play was received : America ’ s mainstream ( and often conservative ) theater critics applauded it .
“ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Raisin , ” recalled Ossie Davis , who eventually replaced Poitier as Walter Lee Younger , “ was how much the Younger family was just like any other American family.
” The play ’ s popular reception proved , over the years , to be a gift and a curse .
The central arc of the story focuses on an inheritance .
After Walter ’ s father dies , his mother receives a life insurance payment and decides to purchase a home in a white neighborhood .
Yet the Youngers are soon confronted @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ’ association , which offers to buy the house from them for more than they paid for it in order to keep them from moving into the neighborhood .
The play was a powerful indictment of American racism and segregation , but it also left room for both conservative and radical interpretations .
Many audience members identified with the Youngers because they saw their conflict as quintessentially American : What could be more so than acquiring a home ?
But in doing so , audiences ignored how it was a uniquely black story @ @ @ @ @ @ @ limited black people ’ s liberties .
While some chose to ignore the issues of race in the play , others ignored its none-too-subtle socialist politics .
The play argued that white homeowners collaborated to use their wealth to enforce segregation and , where possible , dispossession .
An FBI agent who watched the play as part of the bureau ’ s surveillance of Hansberry , however , reported that Raisin “ contains no comments of any nature about Communism as such ” and instead focuses on “ negro aspirations , ” as @ @ @ @ @ @ @ she looked , people seemed to regard her as far less radical than she was .
Hansberry did all that she could to combat this misunderstanding .
In 1960 she began working on Les Blancs , a play about three sons mourning their father ’ s death as their country fights for independence .
Les Blancs tells their story by examining the mixed legacy of their father , an anti-colonial fighter , as well as the brutal and paternalistic legacy of their country ’ s colonizers .
Through the play , Hansberry reminded @ @ @ @ @ @ @ anti-colonial in outlook and anything but an American liberal .
The following year , she was even more pointed in her criticism of both black and white paternalism in the United States .
After the Congolese independence leader Patrice Lumumba was assassinated in 1961 , African Americans across the nation protested .
Ralph Bunche , then an undersecretary-general of the UN , called the protesters “ misguided misfits.
” In response , Hansberry wrote a letter to The New York Times , arguing that “ Negro leaders ” who gained their position by @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the white community has made it clear it wishes to hear ” shirk their duties to black people around the world .
African American equality also required anti-colonial liberation .
Hansberry was often willing to criticize black elites in her pursuit of a more radical and egalitarian society , one that was socialist and feminist , anti-capitalist and anti-imperialist , that would uplift working-class people—and in particular , women—around the world .
She recruited other artists to this capacious cause .
The night Nina Simone debuted at Carnegie Hall , Hansberry called not @ @ @ @ @ @ @ she could do to aid the civil rights movement .
“ It was always Marx , Lenin and revolution—real girls ’ talk , ” Simone recalled of their friendship .
Within two months , they were fundraising together .
In addition to fundraising , Hansberry continued to critique the inclusion of a privileged few black people ( including herself ) while excluding voices from the black working class .
At the 1963 Negro History Week program of the Liberation Committee for Africa , she gave a speech in which she insisted : When @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the unequal distribution of power and wealth—even when it meant her own material gain—Hansberry wanted no part of it .
Instead , she wanted “ the good of all.
” As time went on , Hansberry grew increasingly frustrated by the special treatment accorded the black elite and began to believe that she could help poor black people only by giving them her platform .
She followed through on this commitment in 1963 .
After the civil rights campaign in Birmingham , Alabama , Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy invited Hansberry , James @ @ @ @ @ @ @ activists to discuss the protests .
During the meeting , Kennedy spoke to the more famous intellectuals , ignoring Jerome Smith , a founder of the New Orleans chapter of the Congress of Racial Equality .
This incensed Hansberry ; according to Baldwin , she told Kennedy , “ You have a great many very accomplished people in this room , Mr. Attorney General , but the only man you should be listening to is that man [ Smith ] over there.
” After a moment in which Kennedy sat absolutely still , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ “ That is the voice of twenty-two million people.
” Afterward , Smith spoke about his work at some length .
As Hansberry interrogated her own position and those of other members of the black elite in the civil rights movement , she also began to question their commitment to nonviolence .
At a forum hosted by the Association of Artists for Freedom called “ The Black Revolution and the White Backlash , ” she discussed the long history of racist repression and black resistance .
“ Since 1619 , Negroes have tried @ @ @ @ @ @ @ of their situation from petition to the vote , everything , ” she said .
The time had come to consider violence as well as nonviolence as a tool for social change .
Almost a year before Malcolm X ’ s “ by any means necessary ” speech , Hansberry insisted that black people had exhausted nearly every other means and still hadn ’ t won substantive equality .
In an essay from the year of Malcolm X ’ s speech , written for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee ’ s fundraising book @ @ @ @ @ @ @ question of whether nonviolence was enough .
“ Twenty million people began to ask with a new urgency , ” she wrote , “ IS nonviolence the way ?
” For Hansberry , the failures of nonviolent protest not only were a matter of tactics but also reflected the intransigence of her generation—a theme she explored in The Sign in Sidney Brustein ’ s Window .
The play follows a white couple with radical tendencies and artistic inclinations living in the countercultural enclave of New York City ’ s Greenwich Village .
As @ @ @ @ @ @ @ and achieve success as artists , they also have difficulty understanding the radical nature of the ’ 60s .
Hansberry wrote sympathetically of this couple ; she shared with them a bohemian past in New York .
But she was unreserved about what she felt were their cultural and political flaws , too .
“ The artistic and political grounds on which they had grown , ” Perry explains , had left their “ generation ill prepared for responding to the struggles for racial emancipation.
” Liberal reformism was no longer adequate , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ very foundations of American democracy needed to be transformed .
A profoundly pessimistic play in Perry ’ s reading , The Sign in Sidney Brustein ’ s Window diagnoses the problem but fails to provide a solution .
Although Hansberry ’ s untimely death preempted her ability to explore the kinds of solutions that might create such a foundational transformation , her funeral provided a rallying cry for activists and artists in the generations to come .
At the service , the civil rights organizer James Forman , a former high school classmate @ @ @ @ @ @ @ demonstrated the importance of acting on one ’ s beliefs .
Baldwin , who couldn ’ t attend the service , sent a wire insisting that “ we ” must not fail her .
As Perry tells us , the mourners also included : By the second half of the 1960s , many of the most influential and increasingly radical voices of the civil rights movement were being extinguished prematurely .
Helping to realize their aspirations would prove to be a task for others to take up .
As Perry suggests , this @ @ @ @ @ @ @ leftists confronting the intertwining forces of sexism , racism , classism , homophobia , and American imperialism .
Perry ’ s Looking for Lorraine joins a growing body of histories and biographies seeking to recover the political traditions of the black radicals of the 1940s , ’ 50s , and ’ 60s .
As Alan Wald argues in American Night : The Literary Left in the Era of the Cold War , these figures have been neglected because the anti-communist hysteria of the mid-20th century “ enforced forgetting ” of the black and @ @ @ @ @ @ @ era ’ s liberalism and sought to better the conditions of the poor .
Working against what Wald calls a “ memory crisis , ” Perry , as well as scholars like Mary Helen Washington and Lawrence Jackson , have demonstrated what has been omitted from the few histories of the left that were published , to say nothing of the liberal histories of the period .
Black leftists , committed to socialist and anti-colonialist politics , not only persisted through the Cold War but also left a powerful legacy that can help @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , socialism , and black liberation in the midst of counterrevolutionary times .
In Black Internationalist Feminism : Women Writers of the Black Left , 1945–1995 , Cheryl Higashida reminds us that “ racism , patriarchy , and homophobia have combined potently with anticommunism to marginalize and silence radical Black women within communities , social movements , academia , and U.S. society at large.
” A new generation of scholars is helping us recover those traditions of radical egalitarianism that were often erased by anti-communist historiography .
Much of this work has been @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Perry , Dayo Gore , and Carole Boyce Davies , who have helped sustain this rich tradition of black egalitarianism that combated sexism as well as racism and poverty .
In their works , they remind us that black radical women read or otherwise learned from one another .
Angela Davis read the preeminent black left feminist of the postwar years , Claudia Jones .
Maya Angelou admired the art of Hansberry and Abbey Lincoln .
The Combahee River Collective ’ s identification with socialism was not surface-level or a departure from the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ long history of black feminism ’ s concern with poverty , labor , and oppressive forms of governance .
Although Hansberry has often been incorporated into more liberal readings of the civil rights era , she remained committed to uprooting oppressive structures on a variety of fronts , like the other black left feminists of the era .
She was a daughter of the black elite , but she believed working people were the agents for change and was committed to seeing the violence against them end .
She was anti-imperialist but also @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , she would likely have been both a black power nationalist and an anti-colonial internationalist .
As Perry deftly demonstrates , Hansberry occupied these seemingly contradictory positions because her concern for people ’ s suffering led her to take up a variety of positions , no matter how much they might appear , at first glance , to be in tension with one another .
In this way , Hansberry remained true to her radical commitments even on her deathbed .
She did not assume she knew all the answers , but she @ @ @ @ @ @ @ and more revolutionary world brought into existence .
Hansberry never survived to see that world , but Perry ’ s recovery of her vision has made it all the more possible .

This article appears in the May 4/11, 2020 issue.
In October of 1964, three months after the passage of the Civil Rights Act, Lorraine Hansberry’s play The Sign in Sidney Brustein’s Window opened on Broadway. At the time, Hansberry was already famous for A Raisin in the Sun, but the intervening years had not been kind. Shingles racked her body, and she’d been diagnosed with cancer. Weakened by the disease, she moved into a hotel next to the theater so she’d be closer to the rehearsals. The singer Nina Simone went to visit her there, and she recalled Hansberry saying, “I must get well. I must go down to the South.” Even with her play in production and cancer killing her, she hoped to join the civil rights protests that had engulfed the South and “find out what kind of revolutionary” she was. Books in Review Looking for Lorraine: The Radiant and Radical Life of Lorraine Hansberry By Imani Perry Buy this book
Most people these days know Hansberry for A Raisin in the Sun, a play that took housing segregation as its subject. But as Imani Perry chronicles in her new biography, Looking for Lorraine: The Radiant and Radical Life of Lorraine Hansberry, the revolutionary Hansberry has long been hidden in plain sight. A Raisin in the Sun is often understood as the story of a black family fighting racist housing discrimination to purchase a home in a white neighborhood. Yet Hansberry always insisted that the play was not simply about black people’s right to spend their money freely. It was also a critique of employment discrimination, Northern white racism, and American poverty. Hansberry’s death in 1965, at the age of 34, curtailed her work’s more radical, materialist, and socialist analyses. Later liberal histories of the civil rights era would likewise narrow the scope of a movement that was opposed not only to segregation and disenfranchisement but also to the inequalities and violence that capitalism and liberalism produced—a set of concerns central to Hansberry’s oeuvre.
Consulting her unpublished writings and diaries as well as her published work, Perry recovers this more radical side. Although raised in an elite milieu in Chicago, Hansberry was every bit as committed, from an early age, to undoing the injustices that enabled that culture as she was invested in decrying poor housing conditions. As she grew older, these commitments manifested themselves in an increasingly radical politics. Amid the rabid anticommunism of the 1950s, she risked getting blacklisted by advocating for socialism, both at home and in the still decolonizing world, because she believed that freedom from racism also required global freedom from capitalism. After Raisin’s success made her a de facto spokesperson on African American politics, she openly criticized black leaders who neglected the poor to advance their own careers.
Black freedom, for Hansberry, required amplifying the voices of the black working class. At times, this commitment caused her to focus more on politics than on her art, and at times it put her at odds with her less radical peers. Yet, as Perry shows, Hansberry was hard to pin down. “Though she was an internationalist, and something of a Black nationalist, a Marxist, and a socialist, she was also deeply American.” Her critique of capitalist and racist America stemmed from a deep attachment to the culture and people who felt its violence. Her investment in American politics did not lead to a simplistic patriotism or a belief in American exceptionalism but rather to a desire to see her country realize its (not unique) democratic potential. Hansberry, in this way, was deeply committed to the United States, wanting to make it a more equitable and humane force—for women, for black people, for queer people, and for colonized people across the globe. Popular "swipe left below to view more authors"Swipe → The Evisceration of a Public University The Evisceration of a Public University Lisa M. Corrigan The Patronizing Moralism of David Brooks The Patronizing Moralism of David Brooks Chris Lehmann “The Blind Side” Was Always Trash “The Blind Side” Was Always Trash Dave Zirin How the “Brooks Brothers Riot” Set the Stage for Insurrection How the “Brooks Brothers Riot” Set the Stage for Insurrection Chris Lehmann Popular "swipe left below to view more authors"Swipe → The Evisceration of a Public University The Evisceration of a Public University Lisa M. Corrigan The Patronizing Moralism of David Brooks The Patronizing Moralism of David Brooks Chris Lehmann “The Blind Side” Was Always Trash “The Blind Side” Was Always Trash Dave Zirin How the “Brooks Brothers Riot” Set the Stage for Insurrection How the “Brooks Brothers Riot” Set the Stage for Insurrection Chris Lehmann
Hansberry was born in Chicago in 1930, to parents whose wealth and social status helped buffer their family in her early years from the full brunt of the Depression. Her mother, Nannie Hansberry, was a teacher and a representative in local politics. Her father, Carl Hansberry, made enough money in the real estate business, providing housing for poor black Chicagoans, to send Lorraine to school in a fur coat (where her poorer classmates beat her up). Because the small number of people in the black elite were politically diverse, many of the family friends who visited her childhood home were socialists or radicals of various kinds. The Hansberrys lived above Ray Hansborough, a member of the Communist Party and secretary of the National Negro Commission, and Carl Hansberry worked with Truman Gibson Sr., the executive director of the American Negro Exposition, a kind of African American World’s Fair. In time, Lorraine Hansberry’s politics would resemble less her parents’ than their friends’.
The influence of her parents’ social network, combined with her early exposure to racism, helped radicalize Hansberry when she was still young. In 1937, when she was 7, the family moved into a home in Washington Park, a white neighborhood, where angry white mobs gathered in the hopes of forcing them out. Around the same time, a segregationist landowners’ association challenged the sale. Suspecting he might one day need legal support, Carl Hansberry had already reached out to the NAACP to take the segregationists to court, which the organization proceeded to do. While he was away fighting for their legal right to remain in their new home, Nannie Hansberry stayed up in the evenings with a pistol to protect their children. Though Carl Hansberry ultimately prevailed in a Supreme Court case, Hansberry v. Lee, in 1940, his daughter’s experience in Washington Park taught her that wealth and the legal system provided no guaranteed security against racism.
While Lorraine Hansberry’s early life exposed her to the difficulties that black people had appealing to the state for protection, her education gave her hope for a different kind of society. In 1947, when she was 17, white students at her high school went on strike to protest the increasing number of black students there. As she recounted in To Be Young, Gifted, and Black, the black students from a nearby school, “the children of the Unqualified Oppressed,” came “pouring out of the bowels of the ghetto” to demonstrate. The mayor and the school board intervened, and the police dispersed the striking white students. In Hansberry’s eyes, the victory showed that change came from below: Working-class people were central agents when it came to ameliorating black suffering. Current Issue View our current issue
In 1948, Hansberry left Chicago for the University of Wisconsin, Madison, where she began to tie her interest in the politics of poor black people to a growing interest in art. Reading the work of the Irish dramatist Sean O’Casey and then studying in Ajijic, Mexico, with the Guatemalan painter Carlos Mérida and others, she was introduced to an art that aimed at representing the global working class, those colonized people around the world who were being exploited in similar ways as black people in the United States.
Hansberry’s budding interest in art took her to New York in 1950. There she published her first poem, “Flag From a Kitchenette Window,” which depicts the American flag as seen through the window of a poor black person’s apartment. In the poem’s middle section, the hinge connecting racism at home and abroad appears in one perfect line: “Black boy in a window; Algiers and Salerno.” While her life would undergo many changes in the coming years, the view from this window would remain her compass.
The next few years saw Hansberry’s entry into black radical politics on the page and in the streets. In 1951 she moved to Harlem and began working for Paul Robeson’s Marxist newspaper Freedom—”the journal of Negro liberation,” in Hansberry’s words. There she wrote about everything from Richard Wright’s novel The Outsider, which she disliked, to Kwame Nkrumah’s election as prime minister of Ghana, which she applauded. She also began taking and teaching classes at Marxist adult education centers alongside such famous black radicals as Claudia Jones, Alice Childress, and W.E.B. Du Bois. In March of 1952, when Robeson couldn’t attend a conference in Uruguay because the United States had stripped him of his passport for being a communist, he sent Hansberry in his stead. She was not yet 22, but thanks to her writing and teaching, preeminent black Marxist intellectuals of an earlier generation looked to her to carry on their legacy.
That position made her marginal to many of her less radical peers in the civil rights movement, especially those who had turned away from the communist politics of the 1930s and ’40s. In 1952, as the movement entered its pivotal years and Brown v. Board of Education went before the Supreme Court, Hansberry grew increasingly interested in what was happening abroad. In a letter to Reporter magazine, she declared her support for Jomo Kenyatta, an anti-colonial activist in Kenya arrested for his putative affiliation with the Mau Maus, a militant group that fought to expel the occupying British colonial forces. Her growing internationalism was motivated by her belief that the battle against racism must be fought on all fronts and that any progress on the home front was only a beginning: Colonialism and capitalism still needed to be uprooted. Related Article Toni Morrison’s Revolution in American Literature Jesse McCarthy
In 1952, Hansberry began dating Robert Nemiroff, a Jewish graduate student at New York University, and married him the following year. Like her, he was a dedicated leftist; the day before their wedding, they protested the death sentence imposed on Julius and Ethel Rosenberg. Politics dominated their family life as much as it did their public lives. Beginning in the mid-1950s, Hansberry identified as a lesbian, even though she remained married to Nemiroff. She joined the Daughters of Bilitis, a lesbian organization, and wrote a letter to its publication arguing that sexism and anti-queer oppression sprang from the same source and that combating one required combating the other. Later in the decade, she continued this project by writing queer fiction under the pseudonym Emily Jones. “She was a feminist, anticolonialist, and Marxist,” Perry explains, “and her sexuality became an essential part of her thinking through human relations.”
In 1959, Hansberry’s life changed dramatically. A Raisin in the Sun debuted on Broadway—a feat never before accomplished by a black woman playwright—with a cast that included Sidney Poitier, Ruby Dee, and Claudia McNeil. But even more important was how the radical play was received: America’s mainstream (and often conservative) theater critics applauded it. “One of the biggest selling points about Raisin,” recalled Ossie Davis, who eventually replaced Poitier as Walter Lee Younger, “was how much the Younger family was just like any other American family.”
The play’s popular reception proved, over the years, to be a gift and a curse. The central arc of the story focuses on an inheritance. After Walter’s father dies, his mother receives a life insurance payment and decides to purchase a home in a white neighborhood. Yet the Youngers are soon confronted by a representative of a segregationist homeowners’ association, which offers to buy the house from them for more than they paid for it in order to keep them from moving into the neighborhood. The play was a powerful indictment of American racism and segregation, but it also left room for both conservative and radical interpretations. Many audience members identified with the Youngers because they saw their conflict as quintessentially American: What could be more so than acquiring a home? But in doing so, audiences ignored how it was a uniquely black story about the ways the capitalist housing market limited black people’s liberties.
While some chose to ignore the issues of race in the play, others ignored its none-too-subtle socialist politics. The play argued that white homeowners collaborated to use their wealth to enforce segregation and, where possible, dispossession. An FBI agent who watched the play as part of the bureau’s surveillance of Hansberry, however, reported that Raisin “contains no comments of any nature about Communism as such” and instead focuses on “negro aspirations,” as though one precluded the other. Everywhere she looked, people seemed to regard her as far less radical than she was.
Hansberry did all that she could to combat this misunderstanding. In 1960 she began working on Les Blancs, a play about three sons mourning their father’s death as their country fights for independence. Les Blancs tells their story by examining the mixed legacy of their father, an anti-colonial fighter, as well as the brutal and paternalistic legacy of their country’s colonizers. Through the play, Hansberry reminded her domestic audience that she was fundamentally anti-colonial in outlook and anything but an American liberal.
The following year, she was even more pointed in her criticism of both black and white paternalism in the United States. After the Congolese independence leader Patrice Lumumba was assassinated in 1961, African Americans across the nation protested. Ralph Bunche, then an undersecretary-general of the UN, called the protesters “misguided misfits.” In response, Hansberry wrote a letter to The New York Times, arguing that “Negro leaders” who gained their position by telling “the white community exactly what the white community has made it clear it wishes to hear” shirk their duties to black people around the world. African American equality also required anti-colonial liberation.
Hansberry was often willing to criticize black elites in her pursuit of a more radical and egalitarian society, one that was socialist and feminist, anti-capitalist and anti-imperialist, that would uplift working-class people—and in particular, women—around the world. She recruited other artists to this capacious cause. The night Nina Simone debuted at Carnegie Hall, Hansberry called not to congratulate her but to discuss what she could do to aid the civil rights movement. “It was always Marx, Lenin and revolution—real girls’ talk,” Simone recalled of their friendship. Within two months, they were fundraising together. In addition to fundraising, Hansberry continued to critique the inclusion of a privileged few black people (including herself) while excluding voices from the black working class. At the 1963 Negro History Week program of the Liberation Committee for Africa, she gave a speech in which she insisted:
Fair and equal treatment for Ralph Bunche, Jackie Robinson and Harry Belafonte is not nearly enough. Tea parties at the White House for the few will not make up for 300 years of wrong to the many. The boat must be rocked for the good of all.
When “inclusion” meant an entrance into the unequal distribution of power and wealth—even when it meant her own material gain—Hansberry wanted no part of it. Instead, she wanted “the good of all.”
As time went on, Hansberry grew increasingly frustrated by the special treatment accorded the black elite and began to believe that she could help poor black people only by giving them her platform. She followed through on this commitment in 1963. After the civil rights campaign in Birmingham, Alabama, Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy invited Hansberry, James Baldwin, and other black intellectuals and activists to discuss the protests. During the meeting, Kennedy spoke to the more famous intellectuals, ignoring Jerome Smith, a founder of the New Orleans chapter of the Congress of Racial Equality. This incensed Hansberry; according to Baldwin, she told Kennedy, “You have a great many very accomplished people in this room, Mr. Attorney General, but the only man you should be listening to is that man [Smith] over there.” After a moment in which Kennedy sat absolutely still, staring at her, she added, “That is the voice of twenty-two million people.” Afterward, Smith spoke about his work at some length.
As Hansberry interrogated her own position and those of other members of the black elite in the civil rights movement, she also began to question their commitment to nonviolence. At a forum hosted by the Association of Artists for Freedom called “The Black Revolution and the White Backlash,” she discussed the long history of racist repression and black resistance. “Since 1619, Negroes have tried every method of communication, of transformation of their situation from petition to the vote, everything,” she said. The time had come to consider violence as well as nonviolence as a tool for social change. Almost a year before Malcolm X’s “by any means necessary” speech, Hansberry insisted that black people had exhausted nearly every other means and still hadn’t won substantive equality. In an essay from the year of Malcolm X’s speech, written for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee’s fundraising book The Movement, she again raised the question of whether nonviolence was enough. “Twenty million people began to ask with a new urgency,” she wrote, “IS nonviolence the way?”
For Hansberry, the failures of nonviolent protest not only were a matter of tactics but also reflected the intransigence of her generation—a theme she explored in The Sign in Sidney Brustein’s Window. The play follows a white couple with radical tendencies and artistic inclinations living in the countercultural enclave of New York City’s Greenwich Village. As they struggle to reconcile their romantic tensions and achieve success as artists, they also have difficulty understanding the radical nature of the ’60s.
Hansberry wrote sympathetically of this couple; she shared with them a bohemian past in New York. But she was unreserved about what she felt were their cultural and political flaws, too. “The artistic and political grounds on which they had grown,” Perry explains, had left their “generation ill prepared for responding to the struggles for racial emancipation.” Liberal reformism was no longer adequate, nor was a countercultural avant-gardism. The very foundations of American democracy needed to be transformed. A profoundly pessimistic play in Perry’s reading, The Sign in Sidney Brustein’s Window diagnoses the problem but fails to provide a solution.
Although Hansberry’s untimely death preempted her ability to explore the kinds of solutions that might create such a foundational transformation, her funeral provided a rallying cry for activists and artists in the generations to come. At the service, the civil rights organizer James Forman, a former high school classmate of hers, said that her life demonstrated the importance of acting on one’s beliefs. Baldwin, who couldn’t attend the service, sent a wire insisting that “we” must not fail her. As Perry tells us, the mourners also included:
someone [who] risked his life to attend her funeral and milled about in the snow-covered crowd: Malcolm X. He was then in hiding and under constant death threats, yet frenetically trying to organize the Organization of Afro-American Unity. Like Lorraine, Malcolm was pursuing an anticolonial, internationalist model of freedom…. They both ran out of time. Three weeks after Lorraine’s funeral, on Nina [Simone]’s birthday, Malcolm was murdered.
By the second half of the 1960s, many of the most influential and increasingly radical voices of the civil rights movement were being extinguished prematurely. Helping to realize their aspirations would prove to be a task for others to take up. As Perry suggests, this work continues in the work of American leftists confronting the intertwining forces of sexism, racism, classism, homophobia, and American imperialism.
Perry’s Looking for Lorraine joins a growing body of histories and biographies seeking to recover the political traditions of the black radicals of the 1940s, ’50s, and ’60s. As Alan Wald argues in American Night: The Literary Left in the Era of the Cold War, these figures have been neglected because the anti-communist hysteria of the mid-20th century “enforced forgetting” of the black and white leftists who were unsatisfied by the era’s liberalism and sought to better the conditions of the poor. Working against what Wald calls a “memory crisis,” Perry, as well as scholars like Mary Helen Washington and Lawrence Jackson, have demonstrated what has been omitted from the few histories of the left that were published, to say nothing of the liberal histories of the period. Black leftists, committed to socialist and anti-colonialist politics, not only persisted through the Cold War but also left a powerful legacy that can help us envision how to fight for anti-imperialism, socialism, and black liberation in the midst of counterrevolutionary times.
In Black Internationalist Feminism: Women Writers of the Black Left, 1945–1995, Cheryl Higashida reminds us that “racism, patriarchy, and homophobia have combined potently with anticommunism to marginalize and silence radical Black women within communities, social movements, academia, and U.S. society at large.” A new generation of scholars is helping us recover those traditions of radical egalitarianism that were often erased by anti-communist historiography.
Much of this work has been led by black left feminists such as Perry, Dayo Gore, and Carole Boyce Davies, who have helped sustain this rich tradition of black egalitarianism that combated sexism as well as racism and poverty. In their works, they remind us that black radical women read or otherwise learned from one another. Angela Davis read the preeminent black left feminist of the postwar years, Claudia Jones. Maya Angelou admired the art of Hansberry and Abbey Lincoln. The Combahee River Collective’s identification with socialism was not surface-level or a departure from the norm but rather the result of a long history of black feminism’s concern with poverty, labor, and oppressive forms of governance.
Although Hansberry has often been incorporated into more liberal readings of the civil rights era, she remained committed to uprooting oppressive structures on a variety of fronts, like the other black left feminists of the era. She was a daughter of the black elite, but she believed working people were the agents for change and was committed to seeing the violence against them end. She was anti-imperialist but also an American. Had she lived longer, she would likely have been both a black power nationalist and an anti-colonial internationalist. As Perry deftly demonstrates, Hansberry occupied these seemingly contradictory positions because her concern for people’s suffering led her to take up a variety of positions, no matter how much they might appear, at first glance, to be in tension with one another. In this way, Hansberry remained true to her radical commitments even on her deathbed. She did not assume she knew all the answers, but she did want to see a less violent and more revolutionary world brought into existence. Hansberry never survived to see that world, but Perry’s recovery of her vision has made it all the more possible.


thenation--2020-04-21--Trump’s Pandemic Priorities? Incite Violence, Increase Pollution.

The Signal ?
This week , with the media and public ’ s attention focused on the pandemic , Trump ’ s Orwellian EPA announced an extraordinary rollback of Obama-era air quality controls .
In particular , it allowed coal plants to send skyward vastly increased amounts of mercury , arsenic , and other heavy metals , despite all the evidence suggesting that this will increase the number of heart attacks , acute asthma episodes , and other potentially fatal health consequences .
The new rules replace strict quality standards with a nebulously calculated cost-benefit analysis that , critics argue @ @ @ @ @ @ @ industry a green light to simply say that any regulations it doesn ’ t like are too expensive to be feasibly implemented .
That ’ s a clear example of putting the fox in charge of the henhouse .
The EPA ’ s own in-house experts believe that the rules Trump ’ s team has gutted were saving 11,000 premature deaths per year .
Now that progress is being put at risk .
At the same time , the Agriculture Department is working on ways to lower the pay of foreign farmworkers , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , deemed “ essential ” by the government , is vital to the already-at-risk food security of the country .
These measures are on a par with the rest of the administration ’ s haphazard and cruel response to the Covid-19 pandemic .
Time and again Trump has shown that he cares far more about the headline economic numbers than the body count , and he ’ s using the pandemic as cover to expand the administration ’ s anti-immigrant policies .
Last week , the Washington Office on Latin America released a @ @ @ @ @ @ @ American countries whose airspace was otherwise largely closed to incoming traffic , as well as plans to ratchet up the number of deportations to Haiti , Colombia , and other countries .
Since ICE is only doing basic temperature-checks of detainees on these flights , there is great risk , as I noted in last week ’ s column , that these deportations will spread the contagion into desperately poor countries whose health systems will be unable to cope with large numbers of sick Covid-19 patients .
Indeed , advocacy groups have documented @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the disease have nonetheless been deported to Port-au-Prince .
That same callousness seems to hold for the administration ’ s response to the rising number of lives lost .
Since early April , somewhere in the region of 2,000 Americans have died per day .
By mid-afternoon on Sunday , the US death toll had crossed the 40,000 threshold .
In a country with rational leadership , the president would be hewing closely to advice from public health and infectious diseases experts .
In Trumpland , however , rationality doesn ’ t hold @ @ @ @ @ @ @ The president tweets out “ LIBERATE MICHIGAN , ” “ LIBERATE MINNESOTA , ” and LIBERATE VIRGINIA ” —not because any of these states is under foreign occupation or because the military has carried out a coup , but because duly elected governors have chosen to follow the advice of their public health specialists and the federal Centers for Disease Control and issued temporary shelter-in-place orders for nonessential workers .
Washington Governor Jay Inslee ’ s response summed it all up .
The president ’ s messages , he said , in inciting @ @ @ @ @ @ @ solid majority of the public disapproves of Trump ’ s performance and opposes most of his signature policies .
Now , with Great Depression–era levels of unemployment , his only hope for reelection is to play the blame game—to position himself as being on the side of angry , frustrated , scared people worried about both their health and their finances , and against allegedly out-of-touch liberal governors , do-gooder public health experts , and purportedly China-friendly international agencies such as the World Health Organization .
The most powerful man on earth isn @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ; he ’ s now throwing matches and oil onto the blaze .

EDITOR’S NOTE: The Nation believes that helping readers stay informed about the impact of the coronavirus crisis is a form of public service. For that reason, this article, and all of our coronavirus coverage, is now free. Please subscribe to support our writers and staff, and stay healthy.
The Signal? This week, with the media and public’s attention focused on the pandemic, Trump’s Orwellian EPA announced an extraordinary rollback of Obama-era air quality controls. In particular, it allowed coal plants to send skyward vastly increased amounts of mercury, arsenic, and other heavy metals, despite all the evidence suggesting that this will increase the number of heart attacks, acute asthma episodes, and other potentially fatal health consequences.
The new rules replace strict quality standards with a nebulously calculated cost-benefit analysis that, critics argue, will essentially give the fossil fuel industry a green light to simply say that any regulations it doesn’t like are too expensive to be feasibly implemented. That’s a clear example of putting the fox in charge of the henhouse.
The EPA’s own in-house experts believe that the rules Trump’s team has gutted were saving 11,000 premature deaths per year. Now that progress is being put at risk.
At the same time, the Agriculture Department is working on ways to lower the pay of foreign farmworkers, despite the fact that their back-breaking work, deemed “essential” by the government, is vital to the already-at-risk food security of the country. More Signal:Noise ‘The President Is Not a King’: NY Attorney General Tish James Sasha Abramsky Amazing Grace and Courage Amid the Plague Sasha Abramsky
These measures are on a par with the rest of the administration’s haphazard and cruel response to the Covid-19 pandemic. Time and again Trump has shown that he cares far more about the headline economic numbers than the body count, and he’s using the pandemic as cover to expand the administration’s anti-immigrant policies. Last week, the Washington Office on Latin America released a report on continuing deportation flights to Central American countries whose airspace was otherwise largely closed to incoming traffic, as well as plans to ratchet up the number of deportations to Haiti, Colombia, and other countries.
Since ICE is only doing basic temperature-checks of detainees on these flights, there is great risk, as I noted in last week’s column, that these deportations will spread the contagion into desperately poor countries whose health systems will be unable to cope with large numbers of sick Covid-19 patients. Indeed, advocacy groups have documented instances in which Haitians potentially exposed to the disease have nonetheless been deported to Port-au-Prince.
That same callousness seems to hold for the administration’s response to the rising number of lives lost. Since early April, somewhere in the region of 2,000 Americans have died per day. By mid-afternoon on Sunday, the US death toll had crossed the 40,000 threshold. In a country with rational leadership, the president would be hewing closely to advice from public health and infectious diseases experts. In Trumpland, however, rationality doesn’t hold. Instead, we get Noise: The president tweets out “LIBERATE MICHIGAN,” “LIBERATE MINNESOTA,” and LIBERATE VIRGINIA”—not because any of these states is under foreign occupation or because the military has carried out a coup, but because duly elected governors have chosen to follow the advice of their public health specialists and the federal Centers for Disease Control and issued temporary shelter-in-place orders for nonessential workers. Current Issue View our current issue
Washington Governor Jay Inslee’s response summed it all up. The president’s messages, he said, in inciting violence were “unhinged rantings.”
A solid majority of the public disapproves of Trump’s performance and opposes most of his signature policies. Now, with Great Depression–era levels of unemployment, his only hope for reelection is to play the blame game—to position himself as being on the side of angry, frustrated, scared people worried about both their health and their finances, and against allegedly out-of-touch liberal governors, do-gooder public health experts, and purportedly China-friendly international agencies such as the World Health Organization.
The most powerful man on earth isn’t just fiddling while Rome burns; he’s now throwing matches and oil onto the blaze.


thenation--2020-04-21--This Earth Day, Stop the Money Pipeline

This Earth Day, Stop the Money Pipeline

This story was originally co-published by Columbia Journalism Review and The Nation as part of Covering Climate Now , a global journalistic collaboration to strengthen coverage of the climate story .
Nineteen-seventy was a simpler time .
( February was a simpler time too , but for a moment let ’ s think outside the pandemic bubble . )
Simpler because our environmental troubles could be easily seen .
The air above our cities was filthy , and the water in our lakes and streams was gross .
There was nothing subtle about it .
In New York City , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ permanently yellow horizon : “ I not only saw the pollution , I wiped it off my windowsills.
” Or consider the testimony of a city medical examiner : “ The person who spent his life in the Adirondacks has nice pink lungs .
The city dweller ’ s are black as coal.
” You ’ ve likely heard of Cleveland ’ s Cuyahoga River catching fire , but here ’ s how New York Governor Nelson Rockefeller described the Hudson south of Albany : “ one great septic tank that has been @ @ @ @ @ @ @ for swimming , or to support the rich fish life that once abounded there.
” Everything that people say about the air and water in China and India right now was said of America ’ s cities then .
It ’ s no wonder that people mobilized : 20 million Americans took to the streets for the first Earth Day in 1970—10 percent of America ’ s population at the time , perhaps the single greatest day of political protest in the country ’ s history .
And it worked .
Worked politically @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Act and the Clean Water Act and scientifically because those laws had the desired effect .
In essence , they stuck enough filters on smokestacks , car exhausts , and factory effluent pipes that , before long , the air and water were unmistakably cleaner .
The nascent Environmental Protection Agency commissioned a series of photos that showed just how filthy things were .
Even for those of us who were alive then , it ’ s hard to imagine that we tolerated this .
What if Australia Were Its Own Planet ?
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ Death Star But we should believe it , because now we face even greater challenges that we ’ re doing next to nothing about .
And one reason is you can ’ t see them .
The carbon dioxide molecule is invisible ; at today ’ s levels you can ’ t see it or smell it , and it doesn ’ t do anything to you .
Carbon with one oxygen molecule ?
That ’ s what kills you in a closed garage if you leave the car running .
But two @ @ @ @ @ @ @ trap heat in the atmosphere .
Melt ice caps .
Raise seas .
Change weather patterns .
But slowly enough that most of the time , we don ’ t quite see it .
And it ’ s a more complex moment for another reason .
You can filter carbon monoxide easily .
It ’ s a trace gas , a tiny percentage of what comes from a power plant .
But carbon dioxide is the exact opposite .
It ’ s most of what comes pouring out when you burn coal or @ @ @ @ @ @ @ no catalytic converter for CO2 , which means you have to take down the fossil fuel industry .
That in turn means you have to take on not just the oil companies but also the banks , asset managers , and insurance companies that invest in them ( and may even own them , in the wake of the current economic crash ) .
You have to take on , that is , the heart of global capital .
And so we are .
Stop the Money Pipeline , a coalition of environmental @ @ @ @ @ @ @ small and specialized to the Sierra Club and Greenpeace , formed last fall to try to tackle the biggest money on earth .
Banks like Chase—the planet ’ s largest by market capitalization—which has funneled a quarter-trillion dollars to the fossil fuel industry since the Paris Agreement of 2015 .
Insurers like Liberty Mutual , still insuring tar sands projects even as pipeline builders endanger Native communities by trying to build the Keystone XL during a pandemic .
April 22 , 1970 : Earth Day Is Celebrated For the First Time This campaign @ @ @ @ @ @ @ be getting traction until the coronavirus pandemic hit .
In January , BlackRock announced that it was going to put climate at the heart of its investment analyses .
Liberty Mutual , under similar pressure from activists , began to edge away from coal .
And Chase—well , Earth Day would have seen activists engaging in civil disobedience in several thousand bank lobbies across America , sort of like the protest in January that helped launch the campaign ( and sent me , among others , off in handcuffs ) .
But we @ @ @ @ @ @ @ no way we were going to risk carrying the microbe into jails , where the people already locked inside have little chance of social distancing .
Still , the pandemic may be causing as much trouble for the fossil fuel industry as our campaign hoped to .
With the demand for oil cratering , it ’ s clear that these companies have no future .
The divestment campaign that , over a decade , has enlisted $ 14 trillion in endowments and portfolios in the climate fight has a new head of steam @ @ @ @ @ @ @ faced our Earth Day predecessors 50 years ago—is to force the spring .
We need to speed the transition to the solar panels and wind turbines that engineers have worked so mightily to improve and are now the cheapest way to generate power .
The only thing standing in the way is the political power of the fossil fuel companies , on clear display as President Trump does everything in his power to preserve their dominance .
That ’ s hard to overcome .
Hard but simple .
Just as in 1970 , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ That pressure is coming .
Indigenous nations , frontline communities , faith groups , climate scientists , and savvy investors are joining together , and their voices are getting louder .
Seven million of us were in the streets last September .
That ’ s not 20 million , but it ’ s on the way .
We can ’ t be on the streets right now .
So we ’ ll do what we can on the boulevards of the Internet .
Join us for Earth Day Live , three days of @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ’ re in a race , and we ’ re gaining fast .

This article appears in the May 4/11, 2020 issue.
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This story is published as part of Covering Climate Now, a global journalism collaboration strengthening coverage of the climate story.
Nineteen-seventy was a simpler time. (February was a simpler time too, but for a moment let’s think outside the pandemic bubble.)
Simpler because our environmental troubles could be easily seen. The air above our cities was filthy, and the water in our lakes and streams was gross. There was nothing subtle about it. In New York City, the environmental lawyer Albert Butzel described a permanently yellow horizon: “I not only saw the pollution, I wiped it off my windowsills.” Or consider the testimony of a city medical examiner: “The person who spent his life in the Adirondacks has nice pink lungs. The city dweller’s are black as coal.” You’ve likely heard of Cleveland’s Cuyahoga River catching fire, but here’s how New York Governor Nelson Rockefeller described the Hudson south of Albany: “one great septic tank that has been rendered nearly useless for water supply, for swimming, or to support the rich fish life that once abounded there.” Everything that people say about the air and water in China and India right now was said of America’s cities then.
It’s no wonder that people mobilized: 20 million Americans took to the streets for the first Earth Day in 1970—10 percent of America’s population at the time, perhaps the single greatest day of political protest in the country’s history. And it worked. Worked politically because Congress quickly passed the Clean Air Act and the Clean Water Act and scientifically because those laws had the desired effect. In essence, they stuck enough filters on smokestacks, car exhausts, and factory effluent pipes that, before long, the air and water were unmistakably cleaner. The nascent Environmental Protection Agency commissioned a series of photos that showed just how filthy things were. Even for those of us who were alive then, it’s hard to imagine that we tolerated this. Popular "swipe left below to view more authors"Swipe → The Evisceration of a Public University The Evisceration of a Public University Lisa M. Corrigan The Patronizing Moralism of David Brooks The Patronizing Moralism of David Brooks Chris Lehmann “The Blind Side” Was Always Trash “The Blind Side” Was Always Trash Dave Zirin How the “Brooks Brothers Riot” Set the Stage for Insurrection How the “Brooks Brothers Riot” Set the Stage for Insurrection Chris Lehmann Popular "swipe left below to view more authors"Swipe → The Evisceration of a Public University The Evisceration of a Public University Lisa M. Corrigan The Patronizing Moralism of David Brooks The Patronizing Moralism of David Brooks Chris Lehmann “The Blind Side” Was Always Trash “The Blind Side” Was Always Trash Dave Zirin How the “Brooks Brothers Riot” Set the Stage for Insurrection How the “Brooks Brothers Riot” Set the Stage for Insurrection Chris Lehmann More From Bill McKibben “Handshake Activism” Won’t Defuse the Climate Emergency June 17, 2022 Why What Happens In Vermont Shouldn’t Stay In Vermont June 3, 2022 Autocracies and Fossil Fuels Go Hand in Hand April 11, 2022
But we should believe it, because now we face even greater challenges that we’re doing next to nothing about. And one reason is you can’t see them.
The carbon dioxide molecule is invisible; at today’s levels you can’t see it or smell it, and it doesn’t do anything to you. Carbon with one oxygen molecule? That’s what kills you in a closed garage if you leave the car running. But two oxygen molecules? All that does is trap heat in the atmosphere. Melt ice caps. Raise seas. Change weather patterns. But slowly enough that most of the time, we don’t quite see it.
And it’s a more complex moment for another reason. You can filter carbon monoxide easily. It’s a trace gas, a tiny percentage of what comes from a power plant. But carbon dioxide is the exact opposite. It’s most of what comes pouring out when you burn coal or gas or oil. There’s no catalytic converter for CO2, which means you have to take down the fossil fuel industry. Current Issue View our current issue
That in turn means you have to take on not just the oil companies but also the banks, asset managers, and insurance companies that invest in them (and may even own them, in the wake of the current economic crash). You have to take on, that is, the heart of global capital.
And so we are. Stop the Money Pipeline, a coalition of environmental and climate justice groups running from the small and specialized to the Sierra Club and Greenpeace, formed last fall to try to tackle the biggest money on earth. Banks like Chase—the planet’s largest by market capitalization—which has funneled a quarter-trillion dollars to the fossil fuel industry since the Paris Agreement of 2015. Insurers like Liberty Mutual, still insuring tar sands projects even as pipeline builders endanger Native communities by trying to build the Keystone XL during a pandemic. Earth Day 1970 April 22, 1970: Earth Day Is Celebrated For the First Time Richard Kreitner and The Almanac
This campaign sounds quixotic, but it seemed to be getting traction until the coronavirus pandemic hit. In January, BlackRock announced that it was going to put climate at the heart of its investment analyses. Liberty Mutual, under similar pressure from activists, began to edge away from coal. And Chase—well, Earth Day would have seen activists engaging in civil disobedience in several thousand bank lobbies across America, sort of like the protest in January that helped launch the campaign (and sent me, among others, off in handcuffs). But we called that off; there’s no way we were going to risk carrying the microbe into jails, where the people already locked inside have little chance of social distancing.
Still, the pandemic may be causing as much trouble for the fossil fuel industry as our campaign hoped to. With the demand for oil cratering, it’s clear that these companies have no future. The divestment campaign that, over a decade, has enlisted $14 trillion in endowments and portfolios in the climate fight has a new head of steam.
Our job—a more complex one than faced our Earth Day predecessors 50 years ago—is to force the spring. We need to speed the transition to the solar panels and wind turbines that engineers have worked so mightily to improve and are now the cheapest way to generate power. The only thing standing in the way is the political power of the fossil fuel companies, on clear display as President Trump does everything in his power to preserve their dominance. That’s hard to overcome. Hard but simple. Just as in 1970, it demands unrelenting pressure from citizens. That pressure is coming. Indigenous nations, frontline communities, faith groups, climate scientists, and savvy investors are joining together, and their voices are getting louder. Seven million of us were in the streets last September. That’s not 20 million, but it’s on the way.
We can’t be on the streets right now. So we’ll do what we can on the boulevards of the Internet. Join us for Earth Day Live, three days of digital activism beginning April 22. We’re in a race, and we’re gaining fast.


thenation--2020-04-21--‘My Entire Life Has Been Spent in a Refugee Center’

“ I ’ m Hazira .
Hazira !
” the woman yells at the people who are slowly gathering around her .
Article by Meta Krese .
Photography by Jošt Franko .
Translated by Tina Mahkota .
“ Look at the state of you , ” someone says finally .
Hazira Đafič , not even 50 years of age , is a toothless , wrinkled old woman .
“ I no longer have a husband , a brother , a father , an uncle… , ” she tells them .
“ We lost them too , all of us , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ callously .
This past December , Hazira returned to her home village , Blječevo , for the first time in 27 years .
Situated on a hillside just above Srebrenica in eastern Bosnia and Herzegovina , Blječevo was declared a safe area by a United Nations Security Council resolution in 1993 , near the beginning of the Bosnian war .
In the tumult that followed the dissolution of Yugoslavia , the ethnically diverse Republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina was wracked by some of the most brutal conflict and ethnic cleansing seen in Europe @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , as Orthodox Christian Serbs fought their former Muslim Bosniak and Catholic Croat neighbors .
In 1995 , the Bosnian Serb Army under the command of general Ratko Mladić rounded up 8,000 unarmed Bosniak boys and men in Srebrenica and murdered them over the course of two days , while the whole world watched , and drove thousands of wives , daughters , mothers , and grandmothers from their homes .
Blječevo is now located in the Republika Srpska , the Serbian enclave within the country of Bosnia and Herzegovina , and so @ @ @ @ @ @ @ In 1992 , before the onset of the war , Blječevo was made up of more than 100 houses inhabited by Muslim Bosniak families like Hazira ’ s .
Today , there are only 11 houses left .
As Hazira climbs the steep hillside , Mevlo Jarašević , a friend from her youth , explains to her : “ Hamed Bešić ’ s house used to be here , that was Muje Amidž ’ s house , there was Savra ’ s house , and there at the back , that was Imre @ @ @ @ @ @ @ and asking questions , although she ’ s not listening to the answers .
She understands it all .
She survived the war , she survived Srebrenica .
And she survived 25 years of living in a refugee camp in Ježevac , near Tuzla in eastern Serbia .
When the Dayton agreement was signed in November , 1995 , ending the Bosnian war , more than 2 million people had been internally displaced in Bosnia and Herzegovina , amounting to more than half of the population of the republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina @ @ @ @ @ @ @ .
Most of these displaced people ended up in 23 refugee camps , set up quickly to solve the immediate problem of communities torn from their homes and families ripped apart .
But these temporary camps never went away—in fact , many widows , their children , and now even their grandchildren continue to live in these places .
For 26 years , since 1994 , Hazira has been living in one of these refugee camps with her daughter , son , and her new partner , whom she met in Ježevac .
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ genocide , but her life has never been the same .
Her surviving family members were also displaced during the conflict , but as soon as peace was signed , they wanted to return to their home : In 1995 , she set off with her family to Blječevo .
As they approached the ruins that used to be their home , her little sister ran towards the house impatiently .
Her father tried to stop her , but all he remembers hearing was the land mine exploding .
At the doorstep of @ @ @ @ @ @ @ lost both legs .
No member of Hazira ’ s extended family ever returned to their home village again .
With the help of tranquilizers and sleeping pills , like most women in the refugee center , Hazira struggles to make it through the early hours of the morning .
Her own therapy is to maniacally tidy up her house , cultivating the garden and gathering firewood .
“ I worry so much that I can ’ t sleep .
I get up at 5 am .
I think about what I ’ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ’ re going to eat , and then I ’ m off to get us firewood , ” she says .
To survive the winter , Hazira climbs the steep slopes surrounding the camp with her female friends , several times a day , venturing into the dark , gloomy forest surrounding the secluded center to collect firewood .
They wear black , non-heeled rubber boots that protect their feet from sharp rocks , but the boots ’ hard edges cut wounds into their ankles as they hurry through the thicket .
They @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , dying tree .
They knock on trunks expertly to establish which ones will bend under their weight .
They tie up the fallen trunks with string , which is the only tool they use as they carry out this dangerous task .
Then they descend into the valley , dragging behind them the wood which halts at each of the rotting roots , and overtakes them on steep , muddy footpaths , smooth as ice .
Her partner , Zaim Alić , is unable to help her .
Actually , he is @ @ @ @ @ @ @ clear on this : Women are allowed to gather wood , men aren ’ t .
“ I would leave immediately , if I could !
But I have nothing .
Not in the Federation [ of Bosnia and Herzegovina ] , nor in the Republika Srpska over there.
” For Hazira , every place besides her camp is far away .
She can not remember when she was in Tuzla last .
“ I don ’ t know where Sarajevo is .
I have never been to Sarajevo but would like to @ @ @ @ @ @ @ I only go as far as the nearest town to see the doctor .
I collect my pills and head home straight away .
And into the woods.
” Dr. Branka Antić-Štauber , president and founder of the association Snaga žene ( Women ’ s Power ) , the only organization that still maintains contact with the widows in Ježevac , believes that the situation in the refugee center was completely unacceptable from the very beginning .
She has been visiting Ježevac on a regular basis since 1994 when she started working as @ @ @ @ @ @ @ a thousand people lived in the camp ’ s 60 temporary huts when they were built by the Dutch government in 1994 .
There were up to 24 people sharing a 35-square-meter housing unit consisting of a bathroom and toilet , a living room serving as a kitchen , and two tiny bedrooms .
These days , in winter , the weathered wooden walls allow the gusts of icy wind to penetrate the huts .
In summer , the heat renders the huts almost uninhabitable .
Wooden floors laid straight onto the bare @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ago .
“ You have no peace and quiet .
It gets really bad when you can ’ t sleep or finish a single meal without interruption .
No one explores in-depth these little things that affect everyone on a personal basis , everyone is keen on solving problems at a political level .
‘ Globally ’ , this is the catch phrase , whereas the refugee trauma is personal , and the refugees ’ problems are diverse and complex.
” Antić-Štauber is convinced that there is not a single person in the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ traumas even after so many years .
Some have been able to assimilate them and manage to carry on living , while for many , the traumas have developed into depression and anxiety—indeed , many suffer from the symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder .
Dire poverty affects all refugee camps in the Tuzla canton , the rate of unemployment is high , and the women have miserable pensions averaging about 170 euros a month , which they receive only because they lost their sons and husbands .
Meanwhile , their children , who @ @ @ @ @ @ @ adults in their 20s , are largely unemployed .
Some have married and have children of their own , but no income .
And their children , born two decades after the peace agreement was signed , tell any visitor who will listen that they are refugees .
Adnan Mekić spent his childhood and school years in another camp close to Tuzla , the Mihatovići refugee center , where he met his wife .
He has recently built a small house right next to it .
Although the house has not been finished @ @ @ @ @ @ @ their four children .
“ My entire life has been spent in a refugee center .
A long time ago , my friends and I decided to go to France .
I really wanted to do it .
But my mother cried so much and told me that she had lost three sons and a husband .
So I stayed here , got married and never tried to move again .
My friends managed to sort out the papers and now they work there.
” In the mid-1990s , Mihatovići was the largest @ @ @ @ @ @ @ and Herzegovina .
At some point , it had about 2,000 inhabitants .
Many of them managed to escape from its grips , explains Mekić : They emigrated to the USA , Austria , Germany , Sweden , Australia… But 310 people still live here registered as refugees , and the many empty houses have not been demolished .
The municipality of Tuzla is slowly filling them up with other people in need of housing , the Roma , former prisoners .
Young people in refugee camps are very well-educated , emphasizes Aiša @ @ @ @ @ @ @ which was built at the same time as the Mihatovići camp .
Most of them finish high school , and some also go to college , which , unfortunately , does not help them a lot because of the high unemployment rate in the country .
Šaha Beganović ’ s grandson graduated from the Faculty of Health Sciences .
Now he unloads trucks at a nearby shopping mall .
He would easily get a job abroad but is unable to leave his grandmother , who lost three sons and a husband and looked @ @ @ @ @ @ @ dementia .
Hadila Musić , their neighbor , points out that it was even more difficult a year or two ago when there were absolutely no regular jobs in the camp : “ There was nothing for women to do but to work as caretakers for ill and infirm old people in town or to clean houses .
There wasn ’ t a single house in Tuzla that I did not clean .
Often , I would leave home at 7 am and return at midnight .
This is still the most common @ @ @ @ @ @ @ 11 euro a day.
” Halida Dudić , at the Oskova refugee center , has decided to take a different course of action .
She and her husband have set up a garden right next to the camp to keep goats .
They allocated a small section for chickens .
Farming earns Halida a modest income and , perhaps more importantly , distracts her from constantly confronting her past .
“ My family are all dead : all my sons-in-law , brothers-in-law , all my uncles on my mother ’ s and my @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , my sister… ” Her sister Ajka managed to escape with her two children from the deadly Srebrenica enclave at the height of the conflict : A relative spotted her as she sat on a bus that was to take them to liberated territory .
And that was the last time anyone saw her alive .
Driven by utter despair , she jumped into the gushing Drina river when when the bus stopped nearby , and drowned with her children .
The youngest was strapped to her chest , the older was strapped @ @ @ @ @ @ @ to talk about them , so that they are not forgotten , ” says Halida Dudić adamantly .
Salčin Isaković , named after his grandfather , who went missing in Srebrenica , has lived in the Karaula refugee center since he was born .
He knows a lot about Srebrenica , but he says he ’ s found most of the information on the Internet .
For his father , a survivor of a death march who managed , after days of hunger , unarmed , under constant fire and at the mercy @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , to reach liberated territory in July 1995 , this is a forbidden topic .
In schools , Srebrenica is only mentioned offhandedly .
Salčin , who is now 19 , remembers Karaula as a tidy refugee village during his childhood .
“ Now it is as if a black cloud has set upon us , ” he says .
A children ’ s playground is littered with rubbish ; school kids collect scrap iron in their free time , and crush rocks into sand at a construction site adjacent to the village @ @ @ @ @ @ @ in all , the refugee villages in the Tuzla region are gradually emptying out .
Some residents used donations to repair the family houses they had been forced out of during the war , and some were assigned flats in housing estates built by the canton of Tuzla and other municipalities .
But the trauma caused by the war and living in the refugee centers will not be easily eliminated , nor will the new housing in the blocks of flats make it easier for them to integrate with the local population , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ .
The refugee camp Špijunica near Srebrenik was demolished last year , but on the same site , two buildings are being built to house them together , isolated from the local population .
Their closest neighbors are Roma people living in semi-demolished sheds .
Many , however , continue to live in refugee camps , in living quarters in dire need of repair .
The federal government , as well as the cantons and municipalities , have been promising for years to take care of their housing problem , so the residents @ @ @ @ @ @ @ expected to be closed by 2018 : The women and their families who have nowhere to resettle were to have been allocated social housing in Tuzla and in the surrounding area .
Hazira Đafić no longer believes this story .
So she continues to maniacally clean , wash , and tidy up to maintain at least an illusion of a normal life in this stigmatized environment .

“I’m Hazira. Hazira!” the woman yells at the people who are slowly gathering around her. Article by Meta Krese. Photography by Jošt Franko. Translated by Tina Mahkota. THis article was created with the support of the Pulitzer Center for Crisis Reporting.
“Look at the state of you,” someone says finally.
Hazira Đafič, not even 50 years of age, is a toothless, wrinkled old woman.
“I no longer have a husband, a brother, a father, an uncle…,” she tells them.
“We lost them too, all of us,” says one of the village women callously.
This past December, Hazira returned to her home village, Blječevo, for the first time in 27 years. Situated on a hillside just above Srebrenica in eastern Bosnia and Herzegovina, Blječevo was declared a safe area by a United Nations Security Council resolution in 1993, near the beginning of the Bosnian war. In the tumult that followed the dissolution of Yugoslavia, the ethnically diverse Republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina was wracked by some of the most brutal conflict and ethnic cleansing seen in Europe since the end of World War II, as Orthodox Christian Serbs fought their former Muslim Bosniak and Catholic Croat neighbors. In 1995, the Bosnian Serb Army under the command of general Ratko Mladić rounded up 8,000 unarmed Bosniak boys and men in Srebrenica and murdered them over the course of two days, while the whole world watched, and drove thousands of wives, daughters, mothers, and grandmothers from their homes.
Blječevo is now located in the Republika Srpska, the Serbian enclave within the country of Bosnia and Herzegovina, and so is the town of Srebrenica itself. In 1992, before the onset of the war, Blječevo was made up of more than 100 houses inhabited by Muslim Bosniak families like Hazira’s. Today, there are only 11 houses left. As Hazira climbs the steep hillside, Mevlo Jarašević, a friend from her youth, explains to her: “Hamed Bešić’s house used to be here, that was Muje Amidž’s house, there was Savra’s house, and there at the back, that was Imre’s house…” Hazira is crying and asking questions, although she’s not listening to the answers.
She understands it all. She survived the war, she survived Srebrenica. And she survived 25 years of living in a refugee camp in Ježevac, near Tuzla in eastern Bosnia and Herzegovina. When the Dayton agreement was signed in November, 1995, ending the Bosnian war, more than 2 million people had been internally displaced in Bosnia and Herzegovina, amounting to more than half of the population of the republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina. That included the widows of Srebrenica. Most of these displaced people ended up in 23 refugee camps, set up quickly to solve the immediate problem of communities torn from their homes and families ripped apart. But these temporary camps never went away—in fact, many widows, their children, and now even their grandchildren continue to live in these places.
“My life is a total mess.”
For 26 years, since 1994, Hazira has been living in one of these refugee camps with her daughter, son, and her new partner, whom she met in Ježevac. She survived the war and the Srebrenica genocide, but her life has never been the same. Her surviving family members were also displaced during the conflict, but as soon as peace was signed, they wanted to return to their home: In 1995, she set off with her family to Blječevo. As they approached the ruins that used to be their home, her little sister ran towards the house impatiently. Her father tried to stop her, but all he remembers hearing was the land mine exploding. At the doorstep of their house, Hazira’s sister lost both legs. No member of Hazira’s extended family ever returned to their home village again.
With the help of tranquilizers and sleeping pills, like most women in the refugee center, Hazira struggles to make it through the early hours of the morning. Her own therapy is to maniacally tidy up her house, cultivating the garden and gathering firewood.
“I worry so much that I can’t sleep. I get up at 5 am. I think about what I’m going to cook, what we’re going to eat, and then I’m off to get us firewood,” she says.
To survive the winter, Hazira climbs the steep slopes surrounding the camp with her female friends, several times a day, venturing into the dark, gloomy forest surrounding the secluded center to collect firewood. They wear black, non-heeled rubber boots that protect their feet from sharp rocks, but the boots’ hard edges cut wounds into their ankles as they hurry through the thicket. They stop when they come upon a smaller, dying tree. They knock on trunks expertly to establish which ones will bend under their weight. They tie up the fallen trunks with string, which is the only tool they use as they carry out this dangerous task. Then they descend into the valley, dragging behind them the wood which halts at each of the rotting roots, and overtakes them on steep, muddy footpaths, smooth as ice.
Her partner, Zaim Alić, is unable to help her. Actually, he is not allowed to. Forestry inspectors are clear on this: Women are allowed to gather wood, men aren’t.
“I would leave immediately, if I could! But I have nothing. Not in the Federation [of Bosnia and Herzegovina], nor in the Republika Srpska over there.”
For Hazira, every place besides her camp is far away. She cannot remember when she was in Tuzla last.
“I don’t know where Sarajevo is. I have never been to Sarajevo but would like to see what it’s like. I only go as far as the nearest town to see the doctor. I collect my pills and head home straight away. And into the woods.”
Dr. Branka Antić-Štauber, president and founder of the association Snaga žene (Women’s Power), the only organization that still maintains contact with the widows in Ježevac, believes that the situation in the refugee center was completely unacceptable from the very beginning. She has been visiting Ježevac on a regular basis since 1994 when she started working as an infectious disease specialist.
More than a thousand people lived in the camp’s 60 temporary huts when they were built by the Dutch government in 1994. There were up to 24 people sharing a 35-square-meter housing unit consisting of a bathroom and toilet, a living room serving as a kitchen, and two tiny bedrooms. These days, in winter, the weathered wooden walls allow the gusts of icy wind to penetrate the huts. In summer, the heat renders the huts almost uninhabitable. Wooden floors laid straight onto the bare earth fell into disrepair a long time ago. “You have no peace and quiet. It gets really bad when you can’t sleep or finish a single meal without interruption. No one explores in-depth these little things that affect everyone on a personal basis, everyone is keen on solving problems at a political level. ‘Globally’, this is the catch phrase, whereas the refugee trauma is personal, and the refugees’ problems are diverse and complex.”
Antić-Štauber is convinced that there is not a single person in the refugee center who managed to overcome their traumas even after so many years. Some have been able to assimilate them and manage to carry on living, while for many, the traumas have developed into depression and anxiety—indeed, many suffer from the symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder. Dire poverty affects all refugee camps in the Tuzla canton, the rate of unemployment is high, and the women have miserable pensions averaging about 170 euros a month, which they receive only because they lost their sons and husbands. Meanwhile, their children, who survived the worst atrocities and are now adults in their 20s, are largely unemployed. Some have married and have children of their own, but no income. And their children, born two decades after the peace agreement was signed, tell any visitor who will listen that they are refugees.
Adnan Mekić spent his childhood and school years in another camp close to Tuzla, the Mihatovići refugee center, where he met his wife. He has recently built a small house right next to it. Although the house has not been finished yet, the couple lives there with their four children.
“My entire life has been spent in a refugee center. A long time ago, my friends and I decided to go to France. I really wanted to do it. But my mother cried so much and told me that she had lost three sons and a husband. So I stayed here, got married and never tried to move again. My friends managed to sort out the papers and now they work there.”
In the mid-1990s, Mihatovići was the largest refugee center in the Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina. At some point, it had about 2,000 inhabitants. Many of them managed to escape from its grips, explains Mekić: They emigrated to the USA, Austria, Germany, Sweden, Australia… But 310 people still live here registered as refugees, and the many empty houses have not been demolished. The municipality of Tuzla is slowly filling them up with other people in need of housing, the Roma, former prisoners.
Young people in refugee camps are very well-educated, emphasizes Aiša Halilović, principal of the elementary school which was built at the same time as the Mihatovići camp. Most of them finish high school, and some also go to college, which, unfortunately, does not help them a lot because of the high unemployment rate in the country. Šaha Beganović’s grandson graduated from the Faculty of Health Sciences. Now he unloads trucks at a nearby shopping mall. He would easily get a job abroad but is unable to leave his grandmother, who lost three sons and a husband and looked after him until she fell ill with dementia. Hadila Musić, their neighbor, points out that it was even more difficult a year or two ago when there were absolutely no regular jobs in the camp: “There was nothing for women to do but to work as caretakers for ill and infirm old people in town or to clean houses. There wasn’t a single house in Tuzla that I did not clean. Often, I would leave home at 7 am and return at midnight. This is still the most common employment for our women. They earn 11 euro a day.”
Halida Dudić, at the Oskova refugee center, has decided to take a different course of action. She and her husband have set up a garden right next to the camp to keep goats. They allocated a small section for chickens. Farming earns Halida a modest income and, perhaps more importantly, distracts her from constantly confronting her past. “My family are all dead: all my sons-in-law, brothers-in-law, all my uncles on my mother’s and my father’s side, my brother, my sister…” Her sister Ajka managed to escape with her two children from the deadly Srebrenica enclave at the height of the conflict: A relative spotted her as she sat on a bus that was to take them to liberated territory. And that was the last time anyone saw her alive. Driven by utter despair, she jumped into the gushing Drina river when when the bus stopped nearby, and drowned with her children. The youngest was strapped to her chest, the older was strapped to her back.
“We need to talk about them, so that they are not forgotten,” says Halida Dudić adamantly.
Salčin Isaković, named after his grandfather, who went missing in Srebrenica, has lived in the Karaula refugee center since he was born. He knows a lot about Srebrenica, but he says he’s found most of the information on the Internet. For his father, a survivor of a death march who managed, after days of hunger, unarmed, under constant fire and at the mercy of ambushes set up by Bosnian Serbs, to reach liberated territory in July 1995, this is a forbidden topic. In schools, Srebrenica is only mentioned offhandedly.
Salčin, who is now 19, remembers Karaula as a tidy refugee village during his childhood. “Now it is as if a black cloud has set upon us,” he says. A children’s playground is littered with rubbish; school kids collect scrap iron in their free time, and crush rocks into sand at a construction site adjacent to the village to earn money for schoolbooks.
All in all, the refugee villages in the Tuzla region are gradually emptying out. Some residents used donations to repair the family houses they had been forced out of during the war, and some were assigned flats in housing estates built by the canton of Tuzla and other municipalities. But the trauma caused by the war and living in the refugee centers will not be easily eliminated, nor will the new housing in the blocks of flats make it easier for them to integrate with the local population, as they are being resettled together again. The refugee camp Špijunica near Srebrenik was demolished last year, but on the same site, two buildings are being built to house them together, isolated from the local population. Their closest neighbors are Roma people living in semi-demolished sheds.
Many, however, continue to live in refugee camps, in living quarters in dire need of repair. The federal government, as well as the cantons and municipalities, have been promising for years to take care of their housing problem, so the residents constantly anticipate their relocation. Ježevac was expected to be closed by 2018: The women and their families who have nowhere to resettle were to have been allocated social housing in Tuzla and in the surrounding area. Hazira Đafić no longer believes this story. So she continues to maniacally clean, wash, and tidy up to maintain at least an illusion of a normal life in this stigmatized environment.