Growing up mixed race with civil right attorneys as parents, Samuel Ng, a Smith College professor of Africana Studies, has always been interested in questions of race, citizenship, and belonging.
“I always felt kind of in between spaces… and studying the histories, especially of marginalized people in the country helped me for my own sake,” Ng said. “I felt most compelled by Black history and the Black freedom struggle, because it seems like it was the foundation for so many struggles, plural. It felt like an anchor point – like the key that unlocked all the questions I had about why things were the way they were.”
Now an Assistant Professor at Smith College, Ng is interested in how people experience time– especially during periods of loss and grief. Ng’s forthcoming book, Assemblies of Sorrow: The Politics of Black Mourning in the United States, 1917–1955, focuses on how Black mourning and grief are central to politics and creating change.
Ng argues that the community base at the forefront of the civil rights movement should not be taken for granted, due to the massive political work it took to build. The central question of his book is, “How do we have something like a mass Black political movement in the twentieth century such that by the time you get to the civil rights movement, you already have in place a self-conscious nationwide sense of Black community?”
Ng’s research focuses on mourning as a crucial process in bringing people from oppressed groups together, and intensifying the urgency to make political change. His book highlights five different examples that showcase the importance of mourning: Black silent marches in 1917-1922, female-led prayer movements protesting lynching in the 1920s, theatrical
depictions on the effects of lynching on Black families, Billie Holiday’s Strange Fruit, and Emmett Till’s death.
In one chapter, Ng focuses on the prayer movements of the 1920s led by the Anti-Lynching Crusaders, Black women affiliated with the NAACP. Nine hundred Black women circulated a paper pamphlet with a prayer written on it on behalf of an anti-lynching campaign. In coordinating prayer, these women were able to develop consciousness, raise money, and mourn together. These women galvanized support to get anti-lynching legislation passed by having Black and white women across the country pray together every day.
“It’s very much a statement of grief and loss, and it’s kind of like we pause every day and do this work of thinking about this loss, especially the lynching of Black people systemically,” he said.
Characterized by Ng as “the politics of common folk,” this vision of politics is accessible, open to everyone to participate in, and does not require special resources or capabilities. The prayer movements are an example of what politics of common folk look like, and how it is utilized to intensify urgency for change, to develop mass consciousness and awareness, and to build a common goal among various groups.
In the present moment, whether it be a pandemic that has killed millions of people worldwide, violence against Black people, or a recent surge in anti-Asian hate crimes, we as a society are in the midst of a tumultuous time of grief, loss, and mourning. Feelings of hopelessness, isolation, and exhaustion have been prevalent since COVID-19’s outbreak and spread. After the murder of George Floyd in 2020, people all across the United States and worldwide banded together to honor the life of Floyd, protest police brutality and systemic racism, and call for change on a national level.
Ng argues that in order to have a mass Black political movement, much political work must be done. This “work” can be accomplished through mourning and grief, he argues. Unlike changing legislation at the nation-wide level, electing new politicians, or creating reform within our systems, mourning is very accessible and open to anyone.
Mourning does not require political status, money, or political officials willing to comply. There is no platform needed for mourning to take place – yet it is able “to help people contextualize grief and appreciate the politics of it,” Ng notes.
Ng highlights that for something to be considered political, it has to be public on some level. Thus, with this definition in mind, mourning can be a political process, and collects people together into a united front.
Such unification and awareness of the different kinds of oppression that are happening to Black people everyday are vital in creating a political movement, Ng argues. In a 2013 scholarly article titled, “Trans Power!: Sylvia Lee Rivera’s STAR and the Black Panther Party,” Ng elucidates how Sylvia Lee Rivera’s Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries (STAR) united forces with the Black Panther Party (BPP) to band together different groups of oppressed peoples and create unity. Huey P. Newton, co-founder of the BPP, “saw the alliance less in terms of directly overlapping interests and more as a practical means to gain support from other groups generally mired in capitalist, police oppression.” This formation of a united front facilitated new conceptions of power, including diverse groups coming together to fight the status quo of racist, transphobic America.
Everyone has experienced loss and disappointment sometime in their lives, yet the years 2020 and 2021 are exceptional examples of a collective world-wide experience of loss. In Ng’s eyes, this loss leads to mourning which creates strong awareness of particular issues, provides hope and possibility of oppression ceasing to exist, intensifies the urgency for change to happen, is accessible to all, founds the basis for common concern fueling political action, and is a necessary prerequisite for any type of tangible political change to be created.
Political mourning is based on uniting people, and gathers the ingredients needed to make political change happen. Ng hopes “to help people contextualize their grief historically and politically, and to appreciate the politics of it,” as he illustrates that mourning creates a collective consciousness filling the empty space of what has been lost.
[Image: Samual Ng, professor of Africana Studies at Smith College (photo via Smith College)]
