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Finding the Free School

Michelle Lyu

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In 2019, I encountered the Saturday Free School. I was 22. Almost from the start, I knew I had found what, without having been able to name it, I’d been searching for all my life. At various stages of school, beginning with Kindergarten I’d been asked what I wanted to become: teacher, then doctor, maybe researcher, cook—the older I became, the more broad and ambiguous the possibilities seemed to be. But really, I wanted to become the person I’d always sought to be, someone living a life in purpose.

Absorbing the ideas of Free School and knowing their transformative potential, what this moral weight carries for my own life, has been a long and great endeavor. At the very beginning of this process, and before it in some ways, I was amazed to be a witness of the fruitful world I saw before me, the people and relationships Free School had produced. A world of ideas, honest intellect and moral courage and vibrance, rooted in a clear record of history and the truth. Our work and struggle are concerned with what and how it means to really live, to be in the world, and to inherit the great task of achieving our nation. In the world of moral struggle and responsibility, single days flower into lifetimes, and great individuals embody the spirit and strivings of a thousand human souls.

The Saturday Free School for Philosophy and Black Liberation was first organized in 2012 under the instruction of Du Boisian scholar Anthony Monteiro, who thinks and works in the tradition of revolutionary scientist and freedom fighter Henry Winston, with whom he worked closely for 15 years. It is a wellspring of creative political struggle that represents today a new consciousness in the American people, in renewal of the ideas and advancements of the Civil Rights Movement and world anti-colonial struggles. These photographs celebrate the lifeworld of Free School and the people, actions, and aspirations that great ideals nurture.

Contents:

  1. What A Diff’rence A Day Made (2019)
  2. These Are Soulful Days (2020-2022)
  3. Someday We’ll All Be Free (2022-2023)

What A Diff’rence A Day Made (2019)

“And the struggle is never over. It’s never over, and it’s always continuing. And you always have to ask yourself, to yourself. Be true to yourself. And the fact that it might not be; sometimes it looks like the change, sometimes it doesn’t. But you keep doing what you’re doing and you keep moving forward, irregardless of whatever happens. You keep moving forward.

And in the struggle, you might not live to see the change, I know. But I’m not gonna lose myself because of that. I’m not gonna give up. This is my belief now—it is my duty to help somebody else. I really believe that. I was taught that as a kid. But I truly believe it is my duty to help, best I can. And it is my duty to speak truth to power. You know, ‘This is not right. What’s going on here, it’s not right.’ And you gotta be able to say, ‘No, this is wrong. This is wrong.’

And therein lies the secret to the whole thing. There’s so much to this. You guys got so much on your plate… We all wanna be happy and in love. And dealing with the earth, and Mother Nature I call it… This is what King… They were men who were touched by something and they understood. Baldwin, all of them. They had a special thing. They weren’t perfect men but they understood what their purpose was, and that was to help humanity. And that’s what we have to do, we have to do our best, irregardless of the outcome… You do, so you could look in the mirror and feel good about yourself.”

—Hugh ‘Munchie’ Moore, Conversations for a Beloved Community

In dedication to Munchie, steadfast member of the Free School and exemplar of the criteria of being a revolutionary: deep faith in the capacity of all people and especially the youth, moral courage to stand for what is right, and abiding love for mankind.
In dedication to Robert Dickerson. Members of the Universal African Dance & Drum Ensemble from Camden, New Jersey, under the vision and leadership of Robert and Wanda Dickerson, performing at Philadelphia City Hall for the Year of Gandhi 2019.
Our yearlong celebration of Mahatma Gandhi’s 150th birth anniversary renewed the legacy of the Indian anti-colonial struggle and the Black Freedom Movement in the struggle for world peace.
Ramya Shankaran’s Adhyaatma School of Performing Arts.
Dinner with Reverend James Lawson, the leading theorist of synthesizing the Indian nonviolent philosophy with the African American freedom struggle, who led a Black student collective in Nashville, Tennessee which studied and put into practice Gandhian principles. Rev. Lawson worked closely with Martin Luther King Jr. to develop the theoretical foundations and strategies of the Civil Rights Movement.
Jacob Harris and Serafina Harris, singing.
Student Minister Rodney Muhammad of Mosque #12 speaking at the Church of the Advocate for Now is the Time.
The Church of the Advocate. 
Reverend James Lawson.
The lifeworld of the Saturday Free School. Breaking bread together on Christmas Eve in the home of Anthony Monteiro in North Philadelphia, where he grew up and where countless Free School meetings and gatherings have been hosted. 
Reading Jimmy’s Blues.
Toward the end of the evening, Munchie sharing what the young people of Free School mean to him. Grady, Tony, Nandita, and others, listening. “And I will love you, forever.” 
Lifelong renowned Philadelphia R&B and jazz musician Alfie Pollitt, playing the John Coltrane ballad Say It (Over and Over Again) at the Church of the Advocate in North Philadelphia, 2019. The Advocate transformed into a revolutionary people’s institution for art, culture and political struggle under the visionary leadership of Father Paul Washington during the 1960s-80s.

These Are Soulful Days (2020-2022)

“Love takes off the masks that we fear we cannot live without and know we cannot live within. I use the word ‘love’ here not merely in the personal sense but as a state of being, or a state of grace—not in the infantile American sense of being made happy but in the tough and universal sense of quest and daring and growth.”

—James Baldwin, The Fire Next Time

Never Can Say Goodbye, 2020.
Artist Alfie Pollitt, photographed as a part of our interview of his life A Musical Journey Through the Byways of Life. Alfie toured the world playing piano for R&B superstar Teddy Pendergrass.
Appreciating portraits of The Most Honorable Elijah Muhammad and Clara Muhammad in Alfie’s home, 2020.
Organizing for the China Conference commemorating the 100th anniversary of the founding of the Communist Party of China, 2021. “For seven months, we shared our lives.”
One of the panels of our art exhibition The Long March and Humanity’s Struggle for Freedom at the China Conference at the Church of the Advocate, which expressed world humanity’s historic, common strivings for dignity and freedom. The Long March crystallized the values and leadership for the new China to emerge. 

The panel highlights the role of motherhood, leadership, and the youth in the movement for freedom: Mother India by Amrita Sher-Gil, Sketches from the Long March by Huang Zhen, March on Washington by Norman Lewis, a photograph of Zhu De by Edward Snow, Lily Yeh and the Village of Arts and Humanities in North Philadelphia, I’ve Been ‘Buked and I’ve Been Scorned by Charles White, and the Civil Rights Movement.
Artist Lily Yeh at the Village of Arts and Humanities, 2022. 

Lily worked closely with Arthur Hall to bring into life the vision for the Village. Arthur, pioneering dancer who established the great Ile Ife Black Humanitarian Arts Center stated, “We have changed the world through our music and dance. There is no place you go without listening to Black music. There is no place now where you go and people are not dancing like Black people. We have touched the heart of the world. I call this the quiet revolution. We have changed the world, and we didn’t use a gun.”
Discussions at our event Revolutionary Love, dedicated to understanding the theological contributions of Howard Thurman as a part of our commemoration of the 75th Year of the Indian Freedom Struggle, 2022.
Studying Black Reconstruction in America, Du Bois’s magnum opus.
Tributes to Our Heroes as a part of The Future Is Ours to Win, an intercivilizational concert organized on the final day of our celebration of the Free School’s Tenth Anniversary, 2022.
Watching Free School’s first documentary, centered on the Afro-Asiatic struggle through the lives, legacies, and struggles of Marien Ngouabi, Patrice Lumumba, Modibo Keita, Amilcar Cabral, Kwame Nkrumah, Sekou Toure, and Chris Hani, created by members of the Free School as a part of the Tenth Anniversary Conference, 2022. 
Seeing Serafina Harris’s new mural in the Church of the Advocate for the first time, which she’d completed the night before. Saturday morning at the Free School, 2021.

Someday We’ll All Be Free (2022-2023)

“I have loved my work, I have loved people and my play, but always I have been uplifted by the thought that what I have done well will live long and justify my life, that what I have done ill or never finished can now be handed on to others for endless days to be finished, perhaps better than I could have done.”

—W.E.B. Du Bois, The Last Message to the World

Dancers from the Korean School of Southern New Jersey for Korean Civilization and Paths to Peace & Reunification, 2023.
Indian dancers with Ramya Shankaran’s Adhyaatma School of Performing Arts at our Intercivilizational Festival celebrating the Magnificent Lives of Paul Robeson and The Most Honorable Elijah Muhammad.
Free Jazz, Music of the Future.

Isaiah Collier and William Parker, playing with Bobby Zankel as The Wonderful Sound Time Travelers. Philadelphia avant-garde jazz musician and composer Bobby Zankel played and worked closely with Cecil Taylor.
Bobby Zankel for his album A Change of Destiny.
Members and friends of the Saturday Free School at the historic Rage Against the War Machine rally, which represented a new emergent anti-war coalition of the American people, in Washington, D.C. in February 2023.
Members of the Nation of Islam, the Free School, musicians, artists and people of Philadelphia touring an exhibition organized for our event Unconquered Love commemorating the lives of Paul Robeson and The Most Honorable Elijah Muhammad.
How To Eat To Live. Student Minister Abel Muhammad from the Nation of Islam, Mosque Maryam, and friends of the Nation walking us through a neighborhood garden for the people in Woodlawn, Chicago.
Listening to the music of Osiris Wildfire, who plays in the African American folk tradition of Richie Havens, 2023. The Black Proletariat Imaginary is the grounding for the new American civilization.
Dr. Anthony Monteiro at his home in North Philadelphia during an interview of members of the Free School about their unique paths to joining the Free School, their political practice, and their strivings, in preparation for the Tenth Anniversary Conference held in 2022. 

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