Those Who Ride The Night Winds
How To Fight Now
In 2016, the day after that shitty election, I called my friend who is a doctor and asked her if she could teach me how to perform abortions. She told me I was overreacting, and I can’t believe I didn’t make a wager at the time. I kept thinking about the Jane Collective from Chicago, a group of women who assisted others in getting abortions from 1969 to 1973. They performed upwards of 11,000 safe, illegal abortions before abortion became legal in most states. There is a recent documentary about them on HBO, in tandem with the Dobbs Decision, that one I haven’t seen. The 1996 documentary by Kate Kertz and Nell Lundy, Jane: An Abortion Service, is how I became familiar with the collective.1
I needed to watch that film because I needed guidance. I worked sometimes in a hotel, cooking for private events, and was able to secure the basement screening room, and its adjacent bar, for no cost. For six months, from January 2017 until May, I programmed social justice documentaries in the Wythe Hotel in Williamsburg, a pretty fancy hotel, with help of Rachael Petach, the hotel’s event coordinator who essentially was my partner in this series. I heavily relied on my friends to recommend films, because I am a cook. Luckily, Naomi works in documentary film and Caitlin is a filmmaker and film professor.
Our first screening was right before the presidential inauguration and the Women’s March in early January. We asked for $20 donations at the door, to go to a different non-profit group each month. I was inspired by the work of Martha Bayne and Sheila Sachs, who run the incredible Soup & Bread community meal in Chicago since 2009. Inspiration abounds. Every week during their season, a different food pantry receives the evening’s donations. For the first screening, proceeds went to Fund Texas Choice, an organization that helps people offset the costs of travel. I was able to get the Jane documentary from Women Make Movies, the largest distributor of films by and about women. One of the highlights of screening the film was watching a Midwestern middle-aged woman wearing a bright floral print described performing her first illegal abortion, dilating the cervix and scraping the uterus in a room full of very stylish, cool Brooklyn people. I just found it satisfying.
We followed Jane with Chisholm ‘72 Unbought and Unbossed, the 2004 documentary by Shola Lynch about Brooklyn native and the first Black woman elected to Congress, Shirley Chisholm, who announced her historic run for president in 1972. If you ever need inspiration or guidance or any kind of positive feeling in your life, this is how a great way to spend 77 minutes. There is something unstoppable about Chisholm, she is a great force, and antidote to dark times.
Every month we screened a documentary and invited people from social justice groups to speak. I called the series How to Fight Now, a bit anemic, I know, but I was at a loss. February’s film was Adama, a 2005 documentary about Adama Bah, a sixteen year old Muslim girl in Harlem who was detained by the FBI as “an imminent threat to the security of the United States,” considered to be a suicide bomber. Bah was encouraged by her teacher to film what was happening in her life and gave her a video camera. Her father was also arrested, then deported to Guinea, Africa. At this time, Bah realizes that she is also undocumented, brought here when she was just 2 years. She thought she was born in the US. Bah drops out of school to work and support her four siblings in her father’s absence, wearing an ankle monitor as a condition of her release. Some of the footage is filmed by her younger brother, it’s really a feat of cinéma vérité. We were lucky enough to have Bah in attendance for the discussion following the film. Proceeds went to MPower Change, a Muslim grassroots advocacy group. This acreening was just a few weeks after the Trump Muslim ban.
And now, Adama Bah is an essential community leader in New York City. During COVID, she was instrumental in feeding her community in the Bronx. She is the founder and director of Afrikana, an organization that helps people from African diaspora navigate the city for support and services. Bah can be found in the early mornings at Port Authority, welcoming migrants who are bussed to New York. In August 2021, she finally received her citizenship.
March saw the German/French 2001 documentary Public Enemy: Reflections of the Black Panthers, interviews from four former Black Panthers—Jamal Joseph, Bobby Seale, Kathleen Cleaver and Nile Rodgers. The policy director of the Innocence Project and a representative from the Brooklyn Community Bail Fund (now Envision Freedom Fund) joined us, explaining why people plead guilty when they are not, how many people sit in Rikers awaiting trial and how the bail fund works. In 2017, New York state, along with North Carolina, were the only two states that automatically charged 16 year olds as adults. We were in the midst of the Raise the Age campaign to increase the age to 18 for automatic adult charges. It passed in October 2018. A lot of this discussion centered around Rikers Island, a true humanitarian crisis, where people are kept uncharged, awaiting trial, sometimes for years.
The most intense documentary screened, in my opinion, was Concerning Violence: Nine Scenes from the Anti-Emperialist Self-Defense Movement in April, a 2014 documentary by Göran Hugo Ollson based on Franz Fanon’s essay from his 1961 book Wretched of the Earth. Narrated by Lauryn Hill, this film is a combination of mostly unseen, archival footage from Swedish filmmakers shot in the 1960s and 1970s. It’s about the violence of colonialism, and how it was met with violence from freedom fighters for liberation in Mozambique, Angola, Guinea-Bissaue and Zimbabwe. Concerning Violence is a brutal and jarring film, because colonialism and white supremacy are brutal and jarring. Many scenes are reminiscent of what we are now witnessing in Gaza and across the world.
The Director of Policy and Campaigns for Just Leadership USA spoke after the screening. JLU is a group of people impacted by the legal system in this country working and advocating for reform and to lower the incarceration rate in this country. Their motto, from founder Glenn E. Martin, who was incarcerated for 6 years, is “People closest to the problem are closest to the solution, but furthest from power and resources.” They’re not wrong. It felt important to continue discussions about prison reform and Rikers, which then NYC mayor Bill DeBlasio in April 2017 committed to closing over a ten year plan. There was a Close Rikers rally at the end of the month we were trying to get more people into attending.
Jackson, a 2018 film by Maisie Crow, is a documentary about the state of women’s health care and access to abortion at the time in Mississippi was screened in May. Mississippi’s politicians were looking to make it the first abortion free state in the country. The film centers on three women: Shannon Brewer, the director of Jackson Women’s Health Organization-the last abortion clinic in the state which closed in July 2022, Barbara Beaver, a leading anti-abortion Bible thumper who runs the Center for Pregnancy Choices and April Jackson, a young woman with an unplanned pregnancy and four children. Dr. Willie Parker, the doctor who travels to the Pink House regularly to offer healthcare is also interviewed, while performing an abortion. We donated money to Dr. Willie Parker’s Abortion Access Fund. Before the screening, Rise & Rally, organizers working to pass the Reproductive Health Act (RHA), tabled and sponsored a postcard writing campaign. The RHA codified Roe v. Wade protections into state law, ensuring access to legal, safe abortions. At the time, 14% of the abortions performed in the US were done here in New York State.
The How To Fight Now social justice documentary series ended with Jim Hubbard’s excellent 2012 documentary United in Anger, about the creation of ACT UP (AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power), using archival footage of their weekly meetings in New York City and protests. It also includes oral history, telling a broad history of this chapter. Between 1981 and 1987, over 40,000 people in the US died from AIDS.2 Ronald Reagan, that terrible president, ignored AIDS until September 1985, when he responded to a question about HIV from the press. His first speech about AIDS was in 1987. We all know that avoidance and denial is a solid plan of action by our government.
United in Anger captures the organizing behind the impactful protests, including the legendary Stop The Church protest with WHAM (Women’s Health and Action Mobilization) at St. Patrick’s Cathedral in Manhattan on December 10, 1989. The St. Patrick’s protest was heavily contested within ACT UP, and we see that. Another iconic protest was outside of the CDC, demanding medicine and research for AIDS and another one at the New York Stock Exchange, targeting the producers of AZT, the only AIDS drug available on the market at the time, whose price made is unattainable for so many.3
United in Anger shows so much of the art, ferocity, and style of ACT UP in the late 1980s, it was all intrinsic to the culture and time. Filmmaker Jim Hubbard recommended a member of ACT UP to come and speak after the screening. Stephen Helmke has been living with AIDS since the 1980s. He appears in the film once, and was a member of ACT UP from 1988-1994, active in the Majority Actions Committee, PISD caucus, and the Alternative and Holistic Treatment Sub-Committee. He rejoined ACT UP in 2013. Stephen was an incredibly warm, knowledgable and funny speaker, who, when asked if he was going to the upcoming ACT UP anniversary celebration, told us he would be attending a leather daddy festival instead. Housing Works was the recipient of the donations.
During the time we hosted these screenings, a lot of people volunteered their time and film suggestions, and some office supplies donated their lives to a higher calling. We certainly didn’t make money, but we almost raised a thousand dollars once, and that money went to the bail fund, which had above a 90% bail funds return rate on bail. All of these films speak to the same things—equal rights and treatment, dignity, resources for everyone, liberation. Resistance is an active word.
I found out about Nikki Giovanni’s passing as I finished this piece. What a giant. It feels appropriate to end with her words. These make sense to me in this context.
“This book is dedicated to the courage and fortitude of those who ride the night winds— who are the day trippers and midnight cowboys — who in sonic solitude or the hazy hell of habit know — that for all the devils and the gods — for all the illnesses and drugs to cure them — Life is a marvelous, transitory adventure — and are determined to push us into the next century, galaxy — possibility.”
Nikki Giovanni—from the dedication page of her 1983 book Those Who Ride The Night Winds
My friend and I first came across people from Jane at our first clinic escort training in some office building after works in downtown Chicago in 1995 or 1996. It was also a tactical meeting about the Right to Life people (antis) coming to town for the 1996 DNC. A group of Jane women were hanging out with each other, and in my young insecure memory they were cool, completely uninterested in us, a bit smug and untouchable, and all-knowing.
Of course these are not complete numbers since the CDC did not have female specific symptoms defined until 1990.
Jewish Voices for Peace demonstrated on October 15, 2024 at the New York Stock Exchange, calling for an Israeli arms embargo and protesting the greed of weapons manufacturers like Lockheed Martin and Raytheon. 200 people were arrested. ACT UP is an inspiration.
Bring it back!
Bring back the series !!!