A Freedom Summer

By Jean-Luc Rwogera, Belgium

June 9^th 2024, at the ITD house. It was around 10.30am. The sky was a bit grey, the sun struggled to break through the heavy blanket of clouds above us. I started the coffee machine. I wanted it to be strong this time, as we were going on an excursion with our host family for the day. I had just reread their biography for the second time. I was meeting them for the first time. I wasn’t necessarily nervous. They were probably more nervous than I was. The couple, Dina and Shel, in their sixties, Jewish, originally from New York as they told me later, had moved to Amherst to live and work. They married young, and have been together ever since. Like many self-respecting Americans, they wore t-shirts and caps with their political opinions written on them. They both loved poetry and were socially committed, said the bios.

While I waited for them to arrive, I continued reading the book ‘Freedom Summer’ by Watson while sitting on a wooden chair, in the backyard, facing the bright green garden. I was voraciously reading the history of this American movement of the sixties, where white people (mostly from the North, Jewish and highly educated) had come down to the South to ally themselves with the black cause, still under the terror of the white supremacists who prevented them from voting.

After each paragraph of the book, I couldn’t help but stop and reflect on my own experience as a black male teacher, back there in my country, Belgium. The conditions were quite different, certainly. But there was still something inside me that told me that ‘it wasn’t enough’. That more could be done for the black cause of black men around the world. The list of victims cited in the book, such as Herbert Lee, Medgar Evers, echoed so much the death of Georges Floyd. Finally, the figure of Bob Moses and his SNCC movement inspired me more than ever. Yes, we needed a similar movement in Europe, even beyond I dare say. Because ‘our’ democracy was under threat. The rise of the far right was an increasingly distressing reality for me. And as an educated black man, I was not going to be spared. I’m Rwandan by origin after all… Everything suddenly became an existential question.

What if my summer at ITD was my own ‘Freedom Summer’? The sun had now broken clearly through the sky. I smiled. That’s when I heard a car approaching the house. It was probably Dina and Shel. I closed my book. It was time to meet them and go all together…