CHAPTER 6

Refusal, Service, and Collective Agency

The term “activist” often brings to mind the actions of people who disrupt institutions through direct action like protesting and marching in the streets. In this chapter, we explore another facet of resistance, the everyday, quiet resistance of southern Black women and men, many of whom are religious and see their work as a part of their Christian duty to uplift their communities. We argue that their resistance to the racial, social, political, and economic structures within which they live, work, play, and pray is a radical act often overlooked by social movement scholars. We characterize their resistance as quiet and quotidian acts that are “unspoken, or unsaid, unremarked, unrecognized or overlooked” (Campt 2017, 32). The quietness of the act does not detract from the power of these actions; instead, it necessitates that as scholars we pay closer attention to the ways people contest systems of oppression, not just as individuals but as collectives. In this way, we highlight the ways these quiet, everyday acts disrupt liberal thought by constructing intentional and unintentional alternative sites for resistance that may seem unthinkable within the white liberal gaze. However, for these activists, their actions are oftentimes representative of routines present in their everyday lives.

We draw on our work with the Newtown Florist Club and Wheat Street Baptist Church. Ellen spent five years volunteering and conducting participant observation with the Newtown Florist Club (NFC), a social and environmental justice organization in Gainesville, Georgia. Priscilla spent a little over a year volunteering and conducting participant observation research at Wheat Street Baptist Church’s Action Mission Ministry (AMM), an emergency food program and clothing ministry. Both organizations have, since their inception, worked to sustain the lives of the people around them through a commitment to the social justice missions of their communities. As Elwood et al. remind us in the introduction to this collection, we oftentimes look to organizations like the AMM and NFC when the failure of the liberal state affects everyone. However, neither organization has ever expected much from the liberal state. They understand that it should work for Black communities but have witnessed firsthand the continuous onslaught of racial, economic, food, and environmental injustices that occur from the neglect of the state. Still, these organizations and many like them persist and quietly work to maintain and build liberated communities. Seemingly, the state is interested in these communities only when displacing Black people is advantageous for the state’s economic goals. The communities continually respond by creating their own systems of care and support. Over time, as the fabrics of the communities they serve have transformed, the NFC and the AMM have transformed with them.

This chapter focuses on everyday acts of resistance that draw from ways of being and knowing that are often overlooked as powerful tools of community engagement and social change (Pottinger 2017; Martin, Hanson, and Fontaine 2007; Horton and Kraftl 2009). First, we lay out the histories of both the NFC and Wheat Street Baptist Church’s AMM. Second, we explain quiet and quotidian processes as acts of refusal. Third, we explore how service as acts of refusal, self-determination through service, collective agency and community resilience, and self-determined humanity and liberation acknowledges forms of activism that can be unthinkable to mainstream society but support, maintain, and sustain the communities these groups serve. In conclusion, we demonstrate that their quiet and quotidian acts of activism do not just provide services to their community or contest specific injustices. Instead, their work represents a quiet contestation of the systemic intersectional oppressions that structure their lives. Through their everyday acts, they are not just providing food or support for community members but working together to create a shared sense of community. Their actions exist outside the purview of what liberalism allows. They are, in part, inspired by an active faith to imagine and build a beloved community to not only survive but thrive.

History of Organizations

THE NEWTOWN FLORIST CLUB

The NFC, a social and environmental justice organization, was founded in 1950 by a group of Black women who lived in the segregated Newtown neighborhood in Gainesville, Georgia. Their social club was founded on an ethos of care. When people were sick or dying, they would shop for them, clean their house, cook for them, and watch their children. When someone in the community died, they supported the family. They also acted as flower bearers during funerals as a sign of solidarity with the family (Spears 1998). The NFC formalized what had been an informal system of care.

Over the years, the activism of the NFC expanded. They advocated for their streets to be paved and for basic services in their homes. After schools were integrated in 1969, the women of NFC created after-school activities for the community’s children, who were not allowed to participate in most extracurricular activities. As their focus expanded, they maintained their original mission of caring for the sick and dying.

An ethos of care has remained an essential part of the organization. It was this mission that led them to the discourse of environmental justice. They began to notice that people in their community were dying of the same types of cancer (throat, mouth, and lung cancer) and from lupus, an autoimmune disease. They started to wonder if it was a result of the fourteen polluting industries within a one-mile radius of their homes. In response, they expanded their focus to also include environmental issues. The club continues its work advocating for social and environmental justice, but they also build community, empower youth, and address immediate concerns to Gainesville’s Black community. Their work is not always loud, but it is persistent.

WHEAT STREET BAPTIST CHURCH’S ACTION MISSION MINISTRY

Wheat Street Baptist Church (Wheat Street) is a historically Black Baptist church in Atlanta, Georgia. The church was founded in 1869 on the historic Auburn Avenue, a bustling Black business and residential area once known as the Harlem of the South (Dwyer and Alderman 2008; Inwood 2011; McCutcheon 2015). In its inception, Wheat Street was led by Rev. William Holmes Borders, a Civil Rights leader known not only for his fiery preaching but for his work to make an equitable and just life for Black people in Atlanta. Across the street from Wheat Street is Wheat Street Towers, the first federally funded housing project for seniors. Wheat Street Credit Union is on the first floor (Wheat Street Baptist Church 2020). For many, Wheat Street is a reminder of the glorious past of Auburn Avenue. Its continued existence is seen as an act of survival in a neighborhood where public housing has been torn down and replaced by structures that appeal to a whiter and richer income bracket.

The increasingly aging membership of Wheat Street continually responds to changes in the community, primarily through the AMM, a registered 501(c)(3) arm of the church. The AMM includes a clothing bank and emergency food program, where volunteers cook and serve tasty food to hundreds of people twice a week. McCutcheon (2015) argues that volunteers serve “emergency soul food” that comes from the heart and is a part of their mission from God. Volunteers also direct those coming in to be served to resources including SNAP benefits, mental health services, and monthly HIV/AIDS testing. AMM is a traditional emergency food program, plagued by many of the problems that Poppendieck (1999) identifies, mainly insufficient food quantity and indignity. On the other hand, AMM is composed entirely of Black volunteers, who hope to impart on the guests they serve a humanity that they believe has been stripped from Black people.

Black Futurity and Politics of Refusal

Black people’s activism has been narrowly defined, erasing the work of many people who work behind the scenes to bring about social change (Brown 2018; Simien and McGuire 2014; Robnett 1997; Barnett 1993). Oftentimes, we focus on individual leaders and their public actions, without acknowledging the everyday actions that contribute as much, if not more, to social movements. Women of color, whether by choice or by circumstance, often play different roles in social movements from men. When their work is acknowledged, it is oftentimes attributed to male leadership (Collier-Thomas and Franklin 2001; Isoke 2013; Brown 2018). This is due in part to the representation of women’s work as care work, as they do what needs to be done for their families’ and children’s survival.

Social movement theorists have worked to identify and name these often invisible parts of social movements. Robnett (1997, 19) uses the term “bridge leaders” to identify women who worked behind the scenes to make connections within social movements and between the social movement and community members. These bridge leaders also played an important role in integrating strategies that focused on personal, individual change and consciousness with those that focused on tactical decisions to challenge state structures. Cooper (2017) defines race women as Black women who fought for social justice without overshadowing Black men, while also adopting normative values of white womanhood. Naples (1998) refers to activist mothering, or the cross-generational ways women within communities drew on their social networks to nurture their community and leverage resources from outside sources. These conceptions try to uncover the invisible work that is done in spaces that cross the public-private threshold or done in ways that are not seen as activism (Martin, Hanson, and Fontaine 2007). Importantly, all of this work is not invisible, but work that includes care or mothering is often not seen and is undervalued, particularly when the body doing the work is a Black woman’s. There are also challenges to conceptions of leadership and participation that can reify gender norms and reduce women’s activism to care work.

We draw on Reese’s (2018) conceptions of geographies of self-reliance to complicate what it means to be an activist or participate in activism, particularly for Black men and women driven by their Christian faith. Geographies of self-reliance center “Black agency, considering how this agency becomes spatialized within the structural constraints” (Reese 2018, 408). While Reese discusses how Black people contest the processes through which food injustices arise, we contend that the geographies of self-reliance can be expanded beyond the work of food justice to other forms of social justice where “Black folks navigate inequalities with a creativity that reflects a reliance on self and community” (Reese 2018, 408). The geographies of self-reliance necessitate that we pay attention not just to the loud acts of resistance but also to quiet and quotidian acts of defiance.

To understand the role of quiet and quotidian, we draw on the work of Campt (2014, 2019). She urges attention to quiet and quotidian acts, which are often seen as invisible and unremarkable, but which she contends are not passive or invisible. Instead, quiet acts require careful listening, and the quotidian is a “practice honed by the dispossessed in the struggle to create possibility within the constraints of everyday life” (Campt 2017, 32). One way these quiet acts and quotidian processes are mobilized and enacted is through everyday practices of refusal, which not only question the current structure of society but also draw attention to the possibility of what the future can be. While the word “quiet” does rightfully indicate that someone does not hear or is not listening to the activities or activism of these communities, the someone is generally the dominant white society who ignores these everyday acts.

The politics of refusal rejects contemporary conditions and systems of oppression and instead builds on conceptions of Black futurity. Black futurity does not just look to the future but acknowledges contemporary actions that reflect, imagine, and strive for what the future can and should be. Future conditions are enacted in the present (Campt 2014). Refusal is an action, and “practicing refusal names the urgency of rethinking the time, space, and fundamental vocabulary of what constitutes politics, activism, and theory, as well as what it means to refuse the terms given to us to name these struggles” Campt (2019, 80). Acts of refusal are not just responses to authority or a new form of resistance. Instead, they are intentionally political, often social, “generative and strategic” acts that work to create movement from the old to the new (McGranahan 2016, 319). Through the act of refusal, Black activists are not only refusing to be silenced but also taking up space and (re)defining what it means to create Black geographies (Kohl 2020).

THE EVERYDAY POLITICS OF REFUSAL OF BLACK SOUTHERN ACTIVISTS

The politics of refusal and Black futurity can be operationalized in multiple ways. The act of refusal extends beyond what we normally think of as resistance and activism. It can be surviving and thriving (Reese 2019), restoration of self and community (Dunnavant 2020), an act of disengagement (Sojoyner 2017), or choosing where and when to participate (McCutcheon and Kohl 2019). It can be telling your story, so your experiences are not erased or altered (Hua 2013), or staying silent about your role for the success of the overall movement. While silence can be an important political tool, through our rewriting of histories, silence can be amplified, leaving out the important work of activists.¹ Finally, the politics of refusal can be imagining an alternative future (Kelley 2002). By practicing the politics of refusal, activists and community members are not trying to increase participation in the current system but are instead reimagining what that system can and should look like (Finney 2014; Isoke 2013; Kelley 2002; White 2011).

The politics of refusal highlights everyday resistance, which White (2018, 6) defines as “less confrontational, incurs less repression, and is usually enacted by individuals or small groups.” In Freedom Farmers: Agricultural Resistance and the Black Freedom Movement, White theorizes past and present Black farming cooperatives through collective agency and community resilience (CACR). She notes that while CACR highlights everyday acts of resistance, even it does not account for “activities that are not disruptive but rather constructive, in the sense that the aggrieved actively build alternatives to existing political and economic relationships. The acts of building knowledge, skills, community, and economic independence have a radical potential that the term does not encompass” (White 2018, 6). While quiet, these less confrontational acts have “radical potential” (White 2018, 6) because they lean toward restoration. Restoration is both individual and community and in many Black social justice organizations is geared toward restoring humanity in oneself and one’s community.

The politics of refusal connects the past and present to “unearth, invoke, reenact, and most importantly, re-envision historic legacies of struggle against injustice” (Isoke 2013, 2). The act of refusal is also deeply spatialized and performed by Black bodies in spaces they seek to transform. Humanity is at the core of this transformation, as Black people seek to create spaces in which they are allowed to be fully human and liberated, two things that are not often afforded to Black people. For Black people, this is a self-determined humanity and liberation that must be created by Black people and offered to other Black people in obvious and less obvious ways. The less obvious ways, or the acts of refusal, may take the form of “service,” an act that in many cases is guided by an ethos that makes resistance difficult to parse out.

ACTIVISM AS SERVICE TO OTHERS

Service to others is an integral part of the Black religious ethos, which values communal responsibility.² Service to others is not a passive act; instead, it is a quiet act and a quotidian process of defiance that refuses to accept anything less than full humanity by creating places, where even just for a small moment Black people can be free, in the Black Radical Tradition (Kelley 2002), and liberated. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s thoughts on service are instructive. Near the end of his famous “Drum Major for Justice” speech, he preaches about how he wants to be remembered:

I’d like somebody to mention that day that Martin Luther King, Jr., tried to give his life serving others. I’d like for somebody to say that day that Martin Luther King, Jr., tried to love somebody. I want you to say that day that I tried to be right on the war question. I want you to be able to say that day that I did try to feed the hungry. And I want you to be able to say that day that I did try in my life to clothe those who were naked. I want you to say on that day that I did try in my life to visit those who were in prison. I want you to say that I tried to love and serve humanity. (King [1968] 1998)

For him, being a drum major for justice is tied to his mission to “feed the hungry and clothe the naked,” a biblical directive from Matthew 25:35–45, in which Christ lays out a mandate for how Christians should treat the “least of these.” Service to others is giving to the “least of these,” while also acknowledging that those serving have been or are the least of these. For Black people, being of service to each other is an act of refusal as it acknowledges a humanity within themselves and the humanity among a community of Black people. More importantly, Black people giving of themselves to each other signals that self-determination is central to their conceptions of humanity.

Intentional and unintentional acts of service have always been a part of Black-led food and environmental justice movements. Revolutionary food and environmental justice initiatives, many of which were rooted in the Civil Rights and Black Power movements, have served as a chief part of their mission. The role of service should not be overlooked in the structure, goals, and motivations of these organizations. The Black Panther Party’s free breakfast program was political. As Heynen (2009) reminds us, the Black Panther Party’s free breakfast program was not just about feeding children but was also used as a tool to build Black power and Black pride in individual Black people and in the Black community at large. However, in reflecting on the Black Panther Party’s free breakfast program, we oftentimes neglect the acts of service occurring in them. We highlight the revolutionary teachings of the Black Panther Party, without acknowledging that the service of food is within itself a revolutionary act. Black people serving each other meant they could control what was served, how it was served, and the meaning and intention behind it. It created places where they could not just survive but also thrive (Reese 2019).

For the members of AMM and NFC, notions of self always include their communities. The individual “I” is in conversation with the collective “we,” which is clearly articulated through a shared sense of community, which challenges liberal notions of individualism. An emphasis on community and collective within the Black community is not only a reaction to white supremacy but also a way to construct joy outside the white gaze and to create spaces to not just survive but thrive (Reese 2019). It is a choice, not just something they are forced to do. For both groups, this shared sense of community becomes as important to the individual as it is to the collective. This can also be seen in the approach to activism of other organizations, such as the Black Panther Party. While the party’s free breakfast program explicitly served others as part of their activism, there are countless other examples of service by Black women during the Civil Rights and Black Power movements (Williams-Forson 2006).

Service, as noted above, is self-determination. By service, we argue that giving to oneself and giving to other Black people is a part of community building both politically and geographically. This service is oftentimes framed as the backbone of the movement as Black women oftentimes used Black-owned restaurants to feed organizers and provide sites where groups could meet and strategize. Examples of these places still exist, with one of the most well-known being Paschal’s restaurant in Atlanta. On its website Paschal’s is described as the “‘meeting place’ for some of the most notable entertainers, politicians and business people, including Aretha Franklin, Dizzy Gillespie, Andrew Young, Maynard Jackson, Vice President Al Gore, and Martin Luther King just to name a few” (Paschal’s Restaurant n.d.). Paschal’s served Civil Rights leaders and countless Black students who attended Atlanta’s historically Black colleges and universities. Oftentimes when we think about Black people serving food, it is wrapped up in a race-based and class-based hierarchy, in which Black people (in many cases Black women) are serving food to white people. However, service as an act of refusal is Black people giving of themselves to their community. In these historical examples, we argue service should not simply be categorized as the backbone of a social movement, supporting the real activist work of protesting and sit-ins. Instead, service as an act of refusal is a distinct type of activist work.

While service to others through food is perhaps more intuitive, service as an act of refusal can also be understood in the environmental justice movement. Kurtz (2007) provides a useful entry point to understanding service activism in her interrogation of gender in the public and private sphere in the environmental justice movement. She notes that women were often uniquely positioned to participate in and lead the environmental justice movement because they observed the deleterious effects of pollution on their children inside the private sphere of the home. While nurturing might not be seen as activism, these women were best equipped to identify the health effects of pollution. Perkins (2012) cautions us to not reify gender roles nor the reasons women get involved in environmental justice activism. Despite this caution, current constructions of gender give women abilities to move between the public and private realm, which grants them access to places they might otherwise not be able to gain access (Kurtz 2007).

Black feminist literature on mothering provides another avenue through which we can examine quiet and quotidian activism of service. Boris delineates mothering among Black women and white women activists. She notes that “Black activists’ references to ‘highest womanhood’ and ‘true motherhood’ appeared to subvert a social script written for them by the larger culture that sought to deny them the possibility of nurturing, motherhood and family maintenance” (1989, 30). So service by Black women as understood through service to one’s family in the private sphere could be considered a revolutionary act. This will become evident in our analysis of the NFC, a Black environmental justice organization founded by women who were serving Black families in their communities after a loved one had passed.

QUIET ACTS OF REFUSAL

Until her retirement in December 2014, Ms. Faye Bush would leave her home and cross DeSota Street to the house that served as NFC’s headquarters. Ms. Bush, who took over as executive director in 1990, joined the NFC in 1952 when she was eighteen years old. Her mother, Maggie Johnson, was one of the eleven women who founded the organization. Despite her dedication to social and environmental justice, and her local, regional, and national recognition, Ms. Bush does not see herself as an activist. Instead, she saw herself as someone who helps others, someone who is driven by a love for her community and a desire to care for her community (Ferris 2009). Her approach to activism reflects the quiet acts and quotidian processes that are acts of refusal. She, and the members of NFC, refuse to accept the intersectional environmental contaminants in their community (Ducre 2018). Instead, she imagines what her community can and should look like and works to make those images a reality. She and NFC members listen carefully to differentiate between their beloved community and the physical surroundings and systems of oppression that are causing them harm.

Similar to Ms. Bush, many of the older volunteers at Wheat Street have been dedicated to serving the people of Auburn Avenue for decades. Priscilla met Dr. Johnson, a longtime AMM volunteer, when she was ninety-one years old. Dr. Johnson spoke about the glory days of Auburn Avenue and her work to establish the AMM. She was a humble woman but not afraid to talk about her life and work, a life full of firsts and milestones. It is this proud humility that guides her activism at AMM as she works tirelessly to instill in others the pride she feels for herself, Black people, and the Auburn Avenue community. She trained Priscilla on her first day and impressed in her the importance of looking every guest in the eye, shaking their hands, and giving them a hug.³ Priscilla watched Dr. Johnson follow the food limits set by the kitchen while simultaneously giving guests as much food as they would ask for as long as the food was there. Like Ms. Bush, Dr. Johnson was guided by a love for her Auburn Avenue community, which has undergone drastic changes. In some cases, guests coming in to be served were people who once attended the church on a regular basis, had fallen on hard times, and were often embarrassed to come to church on a Sunday when members would see their suffering. While Dr. Johnson would often encourage them to come to church, her ministry was intended to make guests feel comfortable and safe on Monday and Wednesday during food service.

Newtown and Wheat Street volunteers serve through quotidian processes that they have been honing for decades. They draw on long-term everyday interactions to assess the needs of their community and find new ways to address these concerns. For NFC members, the direct care of the 1950s evolved through the discourse of Civil Rights and the need for youth-based activities. In the 1990s, Newtown members learned the language of environmental justice, which enabled them to articulate their growing concerns about the connections between people dying of the same diseases and the environmental conditions in their neighborhood. Similarly, the actions of Wheat Street volunteers were often a response to the times. The leadership of the church, from its inception in the late 1800s, always knew that land ownership and food were key to them achieving their goal to support Black people. While they established institutions like a grocery store on Auburn Avenue and a farm outside of Atlanta, it was the act of bringing fresh produce to the church on Sunday that continues to be embedded in the individuals and institutions who run the AMM. For someone like Dr. Johnson, the quiet acts endure even when institutions change or no longer exist. The present-day AMM is a culmination of almost a century of activism and a realization that meeting basic needs was a necessity for a changing urban community. Both programs have expanded and evolved. However, they continue to maintain their original missions of care. Through these processes, they have worked to “create possibility within the contains of everyday life” (Campt 2017, 32). These changes reflect the quiet ways they listen to the needs of their community and adapt their activism to these needs. They continually look to the future but remember the past. The past serves as a quiet reminder of what the future can and should be.

SERVICE AS ACT OF REFUSAL

NFC members and AMM volunteers see possibility through their everyday lives as they find ways to celebrate rather than wallow in despair. Much of this is done through formal and informal acts of service. For NFC members, as Gainesville’s Black community became more dispersed and access to social services increased, their direct form of service, caring for the sick and dying, took a back seat to other forms of service. Their acts of service reflect the changing needs of their community, but also the changing needs of the organization. The acts of service ranged from small, individual acts to large, coordinated acts with implications across the city. Regardless of what the act of service was, it was done with the mission to improve the conditions within their community and, as is discussed below, as constructive and restorative acts.

Individual acts of service are a hallmark of the NFC. For Ms. Bush and other members of the NFC board, this work comes from love. When asked by a reporter how she felt about being an activist, Ms. Bush responded, “An activist must always act from a place of love. When we started this organization, we would go in and bathe sick people. We did it out of love and the closeness that we have in this community. We just needed to help people, and that’s what it’s still about” (quoted in Ferris 2009). Their commitment to love and care is not a passive act but an act of refusal. They refuse to see their community members as dispensable; instead, they are vital members of society who deserve love and care.

While the mission of caring for their community is still integral to their work, what it means to care for individuals has changed. At times, it is still attending funerals, when families request it, but more often than not it is providing a listening ear and a safe space for community members who are facing hardship. NFC is often looked to as the heart of the Black community through their service to Gainesville and the surrounding areas. “People call the Florist Club for everything, like we’re the NAACP or SCLC. . . . People just associate us with community justice. We’re going to press on and help in every way that we can” (Faye Bush, quoted in Thomas 2008, 42). The way the community sees the NFC is based on how they respond to community needs. If there is something that needs to be done, they do it. They do this because they recognize that if they fail to then no one will do it for them. They serve others in order to serve themselves. Both groups use service to reclaim power within their community through self-determination to serve the collective. While white supremacy is a constant, it is not a constant that either organization chooses to accept. They both see white supremacy as something that has been constructed and therefore something that can be deconstructed. Through their consistent daily actions, both the NFC and Wheat Street show that serving Black people and treating them with dignity and respect are services they give to their communities, but also resistance to oppression.

Hope is a part of AMM volunteers’ belief system, as it is the charitable arm of a church that has withstood community changes. Wheat Street’s motto is “the church in Atlanta with Atlanta in its heart” (Wheat Street Baptist Church 2016). Volunteers embody the church’s mission and think of themselves as “of Atlanta” in a way that other churches are not. When talking to longtime volunteers at Wheat Street, they never disparage other large churches in the area that receive considerably more media attention. However, Wheat Street volunteers often spoke about how their work is not for show; instead, such work comes from a deep commitment to Atlanta, Auburn Avenue, and its people. Caring for guests coming in to be served means meeting basic needs the city has neglected to provide. When guests come in to be served, some volunteers will give them soap to wash with. Though most of the guests are male, many female guests who come in are in need of sanitary items. More often than not, these items did not come from the AMM’s budget or inventory, both of which were often sparse. Instead, volunteers brought what they had at home and supplemented the inventory as much as possible. Volunteers often harkened back to a time when even more of the church’s fellowship hall was used for service to the community. Wheat Street takes up almost a block on Auburn Avenue, and the fellowship hall was built to be a place to serve the community and the church. Though much of the fellowship hall is still used today, there is an en-tire second floor that used to provide temporary housing for residents of Auburn Avenue. There were also additional bathrooms in which AMM guests could bathe. During Priscilla’s time at Wheat Street, she always felt as though they were doing as much as they could. The average age of volunteers was sixty, and it seemed impossible for them to open up temporary housing and provide baths. However, volunteers always wanted to do more, and this vision was based on a past reality.

Any acts of service done by members of Wheat Street, similar to the NFC, are intentional acts of refusal based on a history of service and an investment in community. When Priscilla was crafting her dissertation research, she was aware of the three big churches of Auburn Avenue: Ebenezer Baptist, Big Bethel African Methodist Episcopal, and Wheat Street Baptist. As she inquired about the three churches, she was immediately told that Wheat Street was the one doing the work on Auburn Avenue and had a reputation for following their mission and giving of themselves to the community, often without recognition. Service as an act of refusal should also be understood as intentionally occurring behind a cloak, at least to middle- and upper-class white people. AMM volunteers care about popularity, but audience matters. Their community is the “least of these,” on Auburn Avenue, and they believe that feeding them leads to a healthy, happy, and thriving community.

SERVICE AS SELF-DETERMINATION

Self-determination is a spatial politics. In Barbershops, Bibles and BET, Harris-Lacewell (2004) defines self-determination as the ability of Black people to control their own lives and communities. Self-determination is rooted in a realization by many Black people and communities that government programs were never meant to truly serve Black people. While Harris-Lacewell acknowledges the importance of the community level, we draw on Reese’s spatialization of self-determination. In Black Food Geographies (2019), Reese finds that members of the Deanwood neighborhood create self-determined communities through Black-owned grocery stores and gardens in sometimes unlikely places. For both organizations, Black people insisting on self-determined communities means insisting over almost a century on their collective right to exist and thrive in these communities.

Self-determination as a spatial ideology is evident at the AMM, in part because the emergency food program occupies a space in which the city seeks to erase any sign of Blackness. Wheat Street members often recount their many discussions and battles with city hall officials over the police department’s continued harassment of Black people who are walking across the street to AMM and are threatened with arrest for jaywalking. Ironically, much of the city’s justification is their desire to keep poor Black people hidden from the many tourists who visit the MLK National Historical Park. The fact that Wheat Street continues to stand in spite of the city’s attempt to erase their very presence speaks to Wheat Street’s claim that this is their community, ironic given that much of Dr. King’s mission was dedicated to serving the poor. For the members of NFC, the spatiality of self-determination can be seen in their fight for voting rights and emphasis on the immediate concerns of their community. Gainesville still maintains an at-large voting system, a system that has been used to disenfranchise populations. The council member for each district must reside in the district, but they are elected by the city as a whole. As a result, members of NFC do not feel as if their council member represents their interests. They have challenged this system through a lawsuit based on the 1990 elections and by supporting a lawsuit brought by members of the Latinx community (Johnson v. Hamrick 2001).

Self-determination is also evident in the type of space that AMM volunteers create, a space where they believe guests can be themselves while also being respectful. For AMM volunteers, this is expressed in the way they welcome guests. When guests come into Wheat Street to be served, they sit around tables that are reminiscent of dinner tables and are served water by volunteers. They are then served food after a church service. For many guests whom Priscilla spoke to, the church service is their ability to worship without being judged. For others, this church service is insulting and offensive because they are not Christian. And then for still others, this service is a nuisance, standing in the way of what for many is the only meal they will receive throughout the day. However, for AMM members, the serving of food is important to them creating and maintaining a thriving community that many of them remember.

The desire to create a thriving community also drives members of the NFC. This can be seen in their activism since the 1990s to move a junkyard, which is adjacent to houses and a church in their neighborhood. When they talk about moving the junkyard, they talk not just about what they do not want in their community but also about what they do want: a sign surrounded by flowers welcoming people to Newtown, biking trails instead of industry, quiet lawns with people gardening. Just as with AMM members, they draw on the past to create a new sense of what the future can and should be.

COLLECTIVE AGENCY AND COMMUNITY RESILIENCE

The quiet resistance of AMM and NFC can be seen in the constructive work that builds a sense of community, connection, and knowledge (White 2018). Historically, NFC did this because they wanted to create safe spaces where they and their children could thrive. This was done through both formal organizations, such as a young women’s club, after-school activities, and an annual Fourth of July neighborhood party, and informal organizations, where people would gather in each other’s yards and porches to build community. It is through the informal gatherings where Ms. Rose Johnson, the current executive director of the NFC, got her education in social and environmental justice. The older women took her in, and she learned from them by observing.

The CACR work NFC mobilizes has changed over the years. Following the end of legal segregation, Gainesville’s Black population is dispersed, not concentrated in and around Newtown. A focus on youth involvement and empowerment is one way NFC maintains its leadership position in the community and expands its conceptions of community beyond the physical boundaries of the neighborhood. Through their work with youth, they see the future in the present, as Ms. Bush explains: “We’re getting on in age, so if we don’t teach them now. . . . We want them to be able to carry the struggle on, and I’m always impressed with the summer program. The girls are so excited and ask amazing questions. If one of them makes something happen here, it will be well worth it” (quoted in Crist 2010). For them, educating the next generation is a radical act of restoration and resiliency.

Wheat Street has always had a positive presence in the Auburn Avenue neighborhood. Wheat Street’s work is steeped in the Baptist tradition, in which ministries are formalized as missions. The AMM’s biweekly act of serving food is coordinated with other historically Black churches in the immediate area. When Priscilla volunteered at Wheat Street, they coordinated their efforts with both Big Bethel African Methodist Episcopal Church (AME) and Ebenezer Baptist Church. No one church was serving food at the same time as another church, and both volunteers and guests knew the schedule. While Auburn Avenue changed at the end of legal segregation, the racial makeup of the neighborhood remained mostly Black. Arguably, the most drastic changes to the neighborhood were spurred by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development’s HOPE VI program. The stated goal of HOPE VI was to bring more mixed-use developments to urban neighborhoods. Many argue that it instead sped up the process of gentrification. Grady Homes, Atlanta’s largest housing project, was torn down less than a block away from Wheat Street. When Grady Homes was torn down, residents had nowhere to go, a struggle that was compounded by the lack of shelters in the city.

The work of the NFC and of Wheat Street has been disruptive, but also constructive and restorative. At the NFC, they want to declare not just what Newtown is not (a haven for toxic pollution) but also what Newtown is (a beloved community). Through this declaration of humanity, they are contesting their community as a neglected, forgotten wasteland and instead working to create a place where members can thrive, even if the intersection of the physical, social, political, and economic conditions within their community make this difficult (Ducre 2018; Reese 2018). At Wheat Street, they are as invested in saying what Auburn Avenue is not as in saying what Auburn Avenue is. Through small acts, they are clear that Auburn Avenue is a neighborhood of people who take care of each other. While they understand that poverty exists, they fully believe that the type of poverty that they see in front of their eyes is not what and who Wheat Street or Auburn Avenue is. Their vision of Auburn Avenue is in many ways historic, as they remember it as a Black bustling space that was socially, economically, and politically prominent. All were not wealthy on Auburn Avenue, but they lived as a community with fulfilling lives.

SELF-DETERMINED HUMANITY AND LIBERATION

Volunteers at Wheat Street’s AMM and NFC are quiet activists whose work is often overlooked in part because their activism is through service. They make bold statements, through their actions and interactions, through their service, about the humanity of themselves and other Black people. We are defining humanity through our volunteers’ actions, which means volunteers’ recognition that those they serve are living, breathing souls who desire and need touch, affection, and conversation in the same way the volunteers do. While reaffirming humanity is not something we might think of as a quiet and quotidian act, it is an act Black people have always done for themselves and each other in a world that seeks to strip this humanity from them. For AMM volunteers, a self-determined humanity means looking at guests in the eye, shaking their hands, and hugging those they know while giving them an extra squeeze at the end. Serving humanity also means getting to know guests through one-on-one conversations that can last for hours. Through these conversations, volunteers come to understand why people are in the situation of needing food and also how fragile even their own economic situations are. While hugging someone may seem small, for AMM volunteers this action indicates that they are one with their guests.

For NFC members, reaffirming humanity is a foundational principle. As mentioned in the organization’s description, the club began to deliver flowers to Black people in the community after the death of a loved one. Flowers are symbolic of many funeral rituals, but one meaning they represent is that life in the soul is eternal. Given the emotions surrounding death, it is difficult for both the giver and the family receiving these flowers. We believe the act of giving flowers is representative of the humanity that members of the NFC see in the people of their community. This act of care does not end after the flowers are given; arguably the giving is the beginning of the care. A florist club that believes in a self-determined humanity and liberation wants not just to know why Black people die but ultimately to stop premature Black death.

While reaffirming the humanity of oneself and one’s community might be a quiet act of refusal, it has always been a part of the work that Black communities have done. We can see this, for example, in the discourse of the Civil Rights and Black Power movements. While these movements were fighting obvious oppressions, they were also fighting the dehumanization of Black people that was a part of this oppression. The often-heard expression in many Black communities that “you are somebody” is Black people reaffirming to themselves their pride and strength in being Black. Similarly, Black theology, which is seen in many Black religious and nonreligious organizations, is focused on reaffirming humanity. Its founder, James Cone (1970), argues that ideas about liberation should come from the oppressed who are uniquely situated to see a future with liberation at the heart. However, to do so, individuals must first be liberated themselves, as individual liberation leads to community liberation. So this notion of seeing humanity in oneself and one’s people is not small. However, the ways in which this happens often include these less obvious acts of refusal where reaffirming humanity is at the core.

Quiet Resistance

Many societies teach people to listen to those who are the loudest, socializing them to speak up for themselves and use their voices to convey their message. As activists and scholars, we are not immune from making these same categorizations about ourselves and the communities we work with. Often, activists and scholars strategically position particular people as the face of movements, all the while leaving others in the background. Even when the quiet work is acknowledged, it is categorized as supporting the more “important” public work being done. Moreover, history records those whose voices are heard, and they are often heralded as the heroes of movements. Rarely are there historical accounts of those who are responsible for the less public and often mundane acts that are a part of all social movements.

This chapter has interrogated the quiet and quotidian acts of Black southern environmental and food justice activists. Both organizations are rooted in the Civil Rights and Black Power movements, and fighting for change is ingrained in them. The NFC and Wheat Street’s AMM do important work on a daily basis, work that is often overlooked and, when mentioned, rarely categorized as activist work. We show that the work of NFC and Wheat Street’s AMM supports larger movements and is also in itself a radical act. These quiet quotidian acts are used to build self-reliant and self-determined communities, where Black people reaffirm themselves and their place in the community.

Acts of care, resiliency, and restoration are increasingly seen and valued in contemporary justice work. The NFC and Wheat Street’s AMM centralize acts of care that are integrated within broader agendas of activism. Whether through serving food to communities or acting as pallbearers at funerals, these actions operate alongside both groups’ louder activist work. Considering the totality of both groups’ work, we reject the notion that Black people, Black communities, and the work they do can be neatly packaged into liberal categories that predetermine what is or isn’t radical enough. We challenge ourselves and others to be quiet and listen closely; in doing so, we may be able to recognize these quotidian acts that often go unnoticed.

Telling the story of quiet and quotidian acts of service is vital to the longevity of organizations like NFC and Wheat Street. Storytelling plays an essential role in how they communicate their work to the next generation, and this act of educating is a radical act of restoration and resiliency. Storytelling is especially important because the organizations have aging memberships. Moreover, in both Atlanta and Gainesville, the Black population, which used to be spatially concentrated due to legal segregation, is now more dispersed. Despite this dispersion, Auburn Avenue and Newtown are still seen as the hearts of their respective Black communities. This is due in part to the work of these organizations, which continue to both care for and create space for Black communities to thrive (McCutcheon 2015; Kohl 2021). Through their work, they not only serve the collective but work to maintain a sense of the collective.

Paying attention to the quiet and quotidian highlights complex histories of resistance that go beyond singular figures and historical moments. This is evident both in the work of the NFC and Wheat Street and in the ways we pay attention to their quiet acts in our research. These orientations open a window onto what and whom we have missed by excluding everyday acts of service. These acts are not done in isolation but rather sustain and connect to larger moves to upend white supremacy and capitalism. These quiet acts represent efforts by the collective to change these systems day by day.

NOTES

1. One example of silence amplified in history is the role women from Bennett College role played in the Greensboro sit-ins. These women began planning the sit-ins, but men from nearby North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State University (A&T) began the boycotts (it is contested as to whether this was in conjunction with the women or preempted their actions). The Bennett women continued to organize, support, and participate in the sit-ins but remained silent on their role. This silence has been amplified in the retelling of this history that glorifies the Greensboro Four but writes out the women of Bennett College (Brown 2018).

2. A Black religious ethos emphasizes “notions of communal responsibility and was manifested in church-sponsored civic, educational, economic and political activity” (Taylor, Chatters, and Brown 2014).

3. For Action Mission Ministry volunteers, it is a show of respect for them to refer to those coming in to be served as guests.

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