Stayed On Freedom

“Beautiful, inspiring, heartbreaking, gut-wrenching, and thought-provoking…Highly recommended.” 

"A page turner.… a critical text to help the current generation of radicals, the Black Lives Matter activists, study lessons of lives well-lived.” 

“In this regard, with subtle urgency, Stayed on Freedom also reads like a timely admonition for our times.” 

“Both personal and with a big-picture view—a welcome contribution to the literature of the civil rights movement.”

Stayed On Freedom is a movement story and a love story all wrapped together. It does not avoid or elide the problems and contradictions of a movement life—the traumas and costs, disappointments and betrayals. Dan Berger assembles a sensitive, honest, and beautiful intergenerational account of the extraordinary lives of Michael and Zoharah Simmons, their kin and comrades, and the worlds they dreamed and, still, try to create. Stayed On Freedom not only compels us to rethink the Black freedom movement but radically alters our understanding of love and struggle.

Dan Berger yet again brings together superb research, a deep commitment to justice, and beautiful writing in Stayed On Freedom. This is a rare intimate portrait of the stakes, evolution, and expansiveness of the Black freedom movement that will join classic texts on this period. 

"Stayed On Freedom is a triumph of storytelling. Dan Berger generously offers an ever-blooming portrait of two people's struggle without reducing their story to struggle alone. This is a deeply loving, deeply caring text that is both tender and ferocious in approach."

“Dan Berger is one of our most gifted historians of Black radical thought and activism of the 1960s and 1970s. By way of a political biography of two relatively unknown organizers, Michael Simmons and Zoharah Simmons, Berger casts the spotlight away from already known figures and unearths the work of ordinary Black people in sustaining the Black radical movement known as Black Power in the late 1960s and beyond. Told through the experiences of rank-and-file movement participants, Stayed On Freedom powerfully refutes the conventional wisdom of Black Power as the destructive undoing of good will created by the Civil Rights Movement, instead showing it to be propelled by love and an abiding desire for freedom. An original and necessary book.”

"I have to praise this book in at least three ways. In the literary sense, this is some of the best historical storytelling I have ever read. Politically speaking, we need more histories like this, that move beyond the individual and examine how liberation moves through interpersonal relationships, and we need to do it like Dan Berger does it, with love. And personally speaking, this book is a literal revelation! I've known this family for most of my adult life and I learned things from this book I would have never otherwise known. This book is a miracle, a model, and a must-read. Thank you Dan Berger!"