Twelve years in the past, throughout a planning session, a facilitator requested us what would occur if Girls With A Imaginative and prescient (WWAV) ceased to exist. Nobody on our group may really reply the query. As an alternative, we replied, “The work will proceed to get performed, it doesn’t matter what.” 

Little did we all know weeks later, on Could 24, 2012, somebody would attempt to burn our places of work, our work, and all that we stand for to the bottom. And but, we’re nonetheless right here. We’re not solely nonetheless right here, however we have now managed to assemble tiny embers from the blaze, are likely to them, and set them free within the type of Fireplace Desires: Making Black Feminist Liberation within the South as a result of we knew, even earlier than the fireplace, that this work should go on, it doesn’t matter what.   

We didn’t intend to put in writing a guide after the assault. We got down to collect the bits of WWAV historical past that had been left and sew them collectively into what turned our residing archive in order that our attacker wouldn’t triumph of their try to bury our legacy of liberation. 

At present, 12 years after the fireplace, 35 years after WWAV’s founding, our world is on fireplace. The forces of white supremacy, colonialism, and racial capitalism are dropping bombs on hospitals, ravenous complete populations, and making land grabs whereas hundreds of thousands are desperately looking for a spot to put their heads at night time free from the sound of bullets. 

Right here in Louisiana, our struggles for bodily autonomy and protected and accessible healthcare have turn into all of the extra urgent beneath a complete abortion ban and a legislature seemingly hell-bent on repressing every little thing that isn’t straight, white, and Christian. 

This political second is ushering within the greatest transformations that many people have seen in our lifetimes. Now’s the time to get again to fundamentals, to the strategies we have now at all times used to free us. We want house to share our biggest fears and to give you our personal options. We have to assist one another open the home windows and doorways of our imaginations to examine the way forward for our goals, and we have to honor the ways in which we’re already working to construct that future in actual time. Most of all, we have to revisit our historical past to maneuver ahead. 

As a company, WWAV has survived the very techniques of white supremacist dispossession and terror which might be in all places proper now. None of those techniques are new, even when they really feel like they’re taking place on an entire different degree. Terror is at all times reactionary. White supremacists see our energy, they see us––Black people, Brown people, ladies, and queer people––residing our full lives, and so they’re greedy on the straws of the outdated world to attempt to cease the brand new one we’re constructing. 

WWAV was born out of necessity and within the lengthy historical past of Black ladies coming collectively to make what their communities wanted to outlive. The arson assault on our places of work occurred simply two months after we efficiently led the NO Justice combat to take away a whole lot of largely poor, Black, and LGBTQ+ people from the Louisiana intercourse offender registry record for participating in survival intercourse work. We’re right here as a result of our neighborhood stepped in and stood with us, and that’s exactly what we have to do for one another now. 

The query that propelled our foremothers to motion within the depths of the AIDS disaster is identical one which drove our work to combat criminalization within the wake of Hurricane Katrina, and is identical one which guides our work now to construct an intersectional method to reproductive justice within the South at the moment: What are we keen to do?

Each day, we honor our neighborhood’s refusal to bow to white supremacy. Fireplace means one thing, particularly within the South. Simply as terrorists, too cowardly to indicate their faces, set crosses ablaze beneath the quilt of night time in an try not solely to violently interrupt radical freedom work but additionally to warn others who would possibly dare to refuse to bow within the face of oppression, our attackers aimed to punish us for daring to combat for our personal liberation. 

Ours shouldn’t be a narrative of resilience. Black individuals have needed to be resilient for too lengthy. The powers-that-be are too fast to label us resilient whereas refusing to query why our lives require such resilience. 

Ours is a narrative of refusal. We refused to cease combating for the rights and dignity of intercourse employees, drug customers, poor Black and Brown ladies, and LGBTQ+ individuals. And that’s what we’re persevering with to do as we ask these throughout us to refuse the world we have now been given in favor of a world in any other case, a world that we’re actively constructing.

Our attackers thought the flames would put an finish to WWAV’s work. They had been improper. These flames, meant to destroy us, birthed new goals. Fireplace Desires: Making Black Feminist Liberation within the South is our story of why. This guide reveals how one thing created from want, in neighborhood, turned highly effective. Within the years for the reason that assault, our work has solely expanded. 

WWAV has been so profitable as a result of individuals see themselves in WWAV. We come from these communities. We all know single motherhood. We’re Black ladies, pressured to make a method from nothing. We all know find out how to hearken to our individuals. Now we have at all times been keen to do and say the issues that different individuals had been afraid to. Our lives rely on it. Now we have additionally been saved out of areas as a result of individuals had been afraid of what we’d say—and we went again anyway. Our freedom is tied to everybody else’s freedom. 

There’s a place for all of us on this combat. We should be in all places—to start out in New Orleans, to work throughout the South, to maneuver nationally and globally. The challenges we face day-after-day are in all places points. We have to transfer rapidly and in unison to cease the destruction that’s taking place. We should additionally do not forget that fireplace could be a highly effective power for rebirth. The long run is ours to create. We will already see the embers of a brand new world glowing throughout us, sparking new goals and new realities. 

Word: This piece was tailored from the foreword to Fireplace Desires: Making Black Feminist Liberation within the South. The issues shaping my pondering on the time of the unique drafting appear ever-more urgent because the tentacles of white supremacy are suffocating us everywhere in the world in innumerable methods. However we the dreamers, freedom fighters, organizers and artists, are desperately calling forth a brand new world. It was my hope final yr, and now, that Girls With A Imaginative and prescient’s work will probably be only one notice within the international clarion name for motion. 

Deon Haywood is an activist, human rights advocate, mom and grandmother, and neighborhood chief from New Orleans. For greater than 30 years, she has advocated for the rights of Black ladies and ladies, poor and dealing class people, intercourse employees, substance customers, and LGBTQ+ communities within the Deep South. She is the Govt Director of Girls With A Imaginative and prescient and co-author of Fireplace Desires: Making Black Feminist Liberation within the South together with author, organizer, and scholar Dr. Laura McTighe. 

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