Lessons for today from Civil Rights Activist Rosemarie Freeney Harding

Hate is on the rise. Democracy feels like it’s failing and failing. Those on any and all margins are being attacked, deported, dehumanized, and demeaned.

So many of us feel overwhelmed, paralyzed, and lost. In these unprecedented moments of history, we can turn to those who embodied their faith during their own complex and unprecedented moments.

Born in Chicago in 1930, Rosemarie Florence Freeney was the baby of nine children. Her family had moved from Georgia in the Great Migration not long before her birth. As an adult, she played a critical role in the Civil Rights Movement alongside her husband, Vincent Harding. Later in life, Rosemarie along with her daughter, Rachel E. Harding, co-authored a book, Remnants: A Memoir of Spirit, Activism, and Mothering. Rosemarie had a perspective of social justice activism that “situated struggle very comfortably alongside hospitality and mothering.” And that perspective is what we need right now as we continue to walk into an unknown future in this new and seemingly dark America. Hospitality and mothering will be needed, and Rosemarie can show us the way.

Rachel says in Remnants:

This is a meaning of activism that I have not seen widely discussed among scholars, but the women of the Southern Freedom Movement (and their families) know about it. More than anything, it is an activism based in “being family”—bringing people into the house, literally and figuratively. Making room and welcome. Letting people know there is room for them in the vision, in the struggle, in the nation, in the family (xi-xii).

Who is not allowed in your vision, struggle, nation, or family? Maybe we need to start there. For me, it’s the politicians and business owners hellbent on excluding people from human and national rights, from healthcare and asylum, from jobs and an education that is honest about this nation’s history.

Making room for others is not easy for us when their hate is so visible and prominent. But it was no easier for Rosemarie. As an active member of the Southern Freedom Movement, Rosemarie and her family, among so many others, were harassed and terrorized by police and the Klan. They “saw and experienced so much violence—people beaten in the streets, in jail. The subtle torture of death threats and jobs lost; and nasty, startling phone calls in the middle of the night” (175). She had friends murdered. She was personally traumatized by people and systems that upheld White Supremacy. And yet her belief in mothering gave her a hope beyond hope.

“Mama used to say that white people were her children, that all of us come from an original African mother and that if they sometimes act with violence and arrogance and immaturity, they need mothering so that they can learn to live in the world as family to the rest of us” (Remnants, 239).

I must confess my own struggle to see with Rosemarie’s eyes, to see that when folks act with violence, arrogance, and immaturity they need mothering. I write these words in the spring of 2025, after losing my job in global development. The administration decided to eliminate 4,100 grants funded by USAID. One humanitarian official called it “a global health massacre.”

I read Rosemarie’s words on forgiveness, and I am taken aback:

…not only do people like former or present Klan members need to come and seek forgiveness, but we who have suffered actually need to forgive. The act of apology and forgiveness is like a sacrament of human community. It is how we remember who we really are to each other. Furthermore, we need to forgive because forgiveness opens space for maturing and growth and change. It brings a transformative energy into the situation (153).

Part of mothering is forgiving and teaching others around us to forgive too. Rosemarie learned of healing and forgiveness from the women in her family and from the visions she had of Pachamamas – “women-spirits from around the world who embody and enable the life force.”

Rachel shared one of her Pachamama dreams in the book: women of all different races who “each had responsibilities for particular people although overall they shared a collective identity and obligations too.” Rachel explained the dream further to her mom:

There was also a white Pachamama. This one was yours, Mom. She was a large, sturdy woman, both gentle and serious at the same time. She was protecting you behind her skirts, kind of standing between you and me. She said to me, “What do you know of Mothering?” It was a reprimand. A way of telling me I could not approach you, I could not touch you, if not with gentleness. She would not let anyone harm you (230).

So I close my eyes and imagine Rosemarie and Rachel. I stretch my neck and shoulders in circular patterns and imagine my Pachamamas: Anna, Gina, Grace, Azucena, Rosemarie, Dolly, Shirin, Adrienne, and Bell welcoming me into their circle. Can you close your eyes? Who are the Pachamamas in your circle?

They tell me it’s OK to rage with anger—to storm. They wrap their weathered hands around mine. Tell me it’s good to demand respect even if it makes me a misfit—to stare arrogance in its face without becoming arrogant myself. They tell me that, like them, I can treat others with dignity, even the ones who insist on violence and arrogance—they begin to chant the sound “ahhh” in different musical notes. And I join in, singing the melodies of reverberating hope, remembering how to breathe fully. I must keep my eyes, my hands, and my heart open to a world of abundance where even our enemies are given space in the circle, even our betrayers are given food at our tables, mothered into self-love that blossoms into love for each other.

And as the circle continues to sway, I see my unforgiveness and my hatred fall to the ground like cracking pottery, crushed by our bare feet. I’m reminded that the option of violence always provides “a way to deny [my] connection to [my] so-called enemy” (169). I must not deny my connection to every other human being in this world. I must not deny that we all come from the womb of the same original African Mother.

We become like Her as we learn to be mothered into abundance. Yes, we are overwhelmed, but also, we are mothered. We can find our Pachamama circle anytime we need it. And as we mother others and walk alongside each other in the valleys of death, we will not let our fear turn us toward scarcity, unforgiveness, or greed. As Martin said, only love can drive out hate, and as Rosemarie said, “There is no scarcity of love. There is plenty. And always more” (ix).