“There is a real opportunity in getting to practice what it is we’re trying to do in the world. We have certain ways of being, values, and dreams for the world, our communities, and our families. And we have a chance to practice that with folks. And, if we don’t, then it’s just a lost opportunity for us to get better at what we’re trying to do out in the world.” – Thomas, to the Free Minds Free People 2021 organizing committee

As I was trying to come up with the right words to explain our hopes for the memorial, I got tied up in trying to secure a DJ for it. That task turned out to be the very embodiment of the spirit of the gathering, so I share the story here as a way to help explain our intentions for this day together. In Thomas style, this will be a long and roundabout way to illustrate the point. But by the end, just as with him, you’ll understand it so much better than if I used my usual direct Carla style.

Who to ask for DJ recommendations? I turned to Ms. Marisol, one of the co-founders of the Boggs School. She is my first stop for community-based arts people, orgs, and partners. (Ms. Mari helped us set up the altar in our home after losing Thomas, and we love her for a thousand reasons.) She suggested Kenny, the newest addition to the Boggs School board. Kenny is a therapist at the Radical Wellbeing Center here in Detroit. When he joined the board last summer, I learned of the Radical Wellbeing Center for the first time. Now, it is where Akenna and I get the best massages in the universe from the gifted Ms. Ebony, and where I finally found a therapist who is helping me with my grief. Had Kenny not joined the Boggs School board, we may never have made these connections.

But who knew Kenny DJ’ed??? As it turns out, Kenny is an avid record collector and music enthusiast, with a particularly robust collection of female artists. He has never met me or Thomas in person – a fact I regret when I consider the ways those two would’ve talked music. I take my chances and send Kenny a text message, cold, to make the request. He responds that he has of course heard all about Thomas, and would be happy to do it, but has mostly transitioned out of DJ’ing so doesn’t have any of his own equipment anymore.

We go back and forth. Things get confusing. He suggests a call.

A new thread in the still-growing web of Thomas’s beloved community is woven, in and through our conversation. We could just get someone to set up a laptop and do a digital playlist, he suggests. But I explain to him about Thomas and his relationship to music. I tell him about Thomas’s own remaining record collection sitting in our basement. We talk about T’s tastes, his connections to certain artists, the generation of hip hop that helped shaped his political consciousness in critically important ways.

In my mind, I recall the memory of T sharing his sister Catherine’s (aka GLOC) original songs when we first met at Harvard, bragging on her talents with such pride. The CD he gave me of her early album, The Total Package, is well-worn; I still keep it in my car and listen to it more than I’m sure she would ever believe. Track 15 always made him cry. Now it makes me cry.

I recall how he played me They Schools by Dead Prez when he wanted to quickly summarize what brought him to grad school in the first place. Now we listen to Lupe Fiasco’s Food and Liquor on repeat in the car because it was always one of his go-to albums on long road trips, and it makes us feel like he is somehow still with us as we travel along. Akenna has his Tuesday morning alarm set to Lovely Day by Bill Withers. Hardly a typical choice for a 13 year-old, but not at all surprising when you consider that he is Thomas’s son.

Kenny, understanding T’s relationship to music immediately, agrees to try to figure out a way to secure turntables so we can do things right. Maybe Patrick, he suggests?

Patrick is another former Boggs School board member. Kenny makes the request. “Anything for Thomas,” Patrick replies. “We served on the board together. You are welcome to borrow my turntables and mixer (I have another one which isn’t giving me problems like before). I don’t think I have a PA, but think I can borrow one. Give me a day or two to check on that.” Patrick, by the way, has his roots in urban farming (pun intended), and cares about and works on sustainable food systems and food justice. This isn’t necessarily relevant to the story, but why does he have turntables? These are the kinds of people we are blessed to have in the beloved community: professors with pilot licenses; healers who taught kindergarten; mamas who also raise chickens; therapists who DJ; farmers with turntables.

An hour later, we have a plan for securing all the equipment and getting it to the school the night before the memorial to make sure everything works. The plan will necessarily involve the indefatigable Ms. Ebonee, my memorial co-planner extraordinaire who happens to work at the school. She is the creative solver of all problems (aka a “Boggs solutionary”), and key member of Akenna’s beautiful and vast network of extra mamas. And making the music happen will also include our friend Brian from the board of the Education for Liberation Network – the son of two retired Philadelphia public school music teachers – a professor who had once been MCing/rapping as a side thing. Brian and Kenny will connect to talk over the playlist, and they will no doubt talk hip hop and Thomas and all the things, weaving yet another new thread of connection into the fabric of the beloved community. And then they will get to meet in person on July 16.

The smallest of tasks requires so many hands on deck. The beloved community includes all of those hands, and they are always on deck. We cannot count the number of people who are helping out and chipping in to make this memorial come together. Case in point: I told T’s high school friend, Chad, that we needed outdoor toilets. Lots of poop emojis were exchanged. No glory in the task, but he had them rented 48 hours later.

The beloved community is how we make the music happen, and it is also how we raise our children, how we survive the most painful of losses, how we fight for freedom, how we change the world. We pool our talents and gifts, we share our equipment and resources, and we love each other into networks of collective care, mutual aid, and solidary struggle.

There is no way to describe the ways in which the beloved community carried our family through T’s illness and continues to carry us now through our grief. They have been our everything. YOU have been our everything. This gathering is a chance to offer our gratitude in person, but even more important, to grow the beloved community. We want you to meet each other and make your own new connections. We want T’s friends from the Peace Corps to meet his Boggs people to talk community. We want his high school friends to meet his college friends to exchange stories. We want his Ed Lib folks to meet his Harvard crew to grow the movement for education justice together. We want my family to break bread with his family. And we want all our children – from all these different communities and collectives – to play together, and to remain in touch long after the memorial, so that we might seed the next generation(s) of the beloved community. This could not happen at a more traditional funeral, so we instead planned a day of food, music, fun, and freedom. T told us this was his wish, and we are so happy to make it happen.

I will always think of Thomas as the ultimate seeder and nurturer of the beloved community. Wherever he went, he carried and planted the seeds and then gathered people together to offer and to share their sunshine and their rain. His relationships were everything. His model of organizing and of social change was built on his belief that connecting the right people at the right time – in shared struggle, with shared principles and values – was a primary means to freedom. It’s no wonder he found himself directing a network. For Thomas, the collective itself, the beloved community itself, can be, should be, and must be freedom in practice. He cared about how we be together, not just what we do together. He wanted us to practice the ways of being that we are fighting for and struggling toward. He wanted us to make mistakes, to get better, and to try again, in the safety of – and with accountability to – the beloved community.

Even a memorial can be a chance to practice freedom, to grow the beloved community by forging new relationships and connections that support and advance justice, collective care, healing, and love. A memorial for T must be that. There is no better way to honor him because we – this beloved community he left behind – are part of his legacy. In us, he is still here. Through us, his work continues. And in our love for each other, we can feel his love for each of us. That is the intended spirit of our gathering, and we are grateful to have you join us in that spirit.

Love,

Carla

Honoring others who are bereaved

Recognizing other precious lives lost in our beloved community recently, and holding their loved ones in our circle of care.

Drawing by Akenna, using IBS Paint app via iPad

Julia Jean Arrieta
Gloria “Ayi” C. Cariaga
Lynn Cohn
Sara Cohn
Gabriel Cornier-Bridgeforth (aka Coach Gabe)
Turner Cooper
Sheryl Donaldson
Jack Duncan
Ismael “Bandolero” Duran
Na’imah El-Amin
Al Hulett
Ragaie Kamel
Ronald Keil
Gerhard Loewenberg
Nancy Lynn Lukey
Edward Mapp
Antonio Nieves Martinez
Steven Brion-Meisels
Robert Parris Moses
Pam Murphy
Hank Navarro
Moshood Oredola
Andy Jesus Pizana
Jason Victor Pizana
Mayzar “Mike” Pour-Khorshid Jr.
Mayzar “Mike” Pour-Khorshid Sr.
Joseph J. “Joe” Rasmussen
Margot A. Rubin
Samir Saha
Dean Salisbury
Priscilla Algava Snow
Prasad Srikakulam
Rajani Srikakulam
Sunny Sundquist
Rick Swalwell
Victorious Swift
Sharon Washington
Katherine “Koko” Elinor Knight Wilcox