We Who Believe in Freedom Must Rest

The following is a verbal report presented to the members of the Ella Jo Baker Intentional Community Cooperative (EJBICC), during their 2025 Annual Meeting1. EJBICC is believed to be the only cooperative named for Baker, an organizer of the Young Negroes' Co-operative League, headquartered in Harlem NYC in the 1930s. The YNCL was the first Black urban national co-op federation in the US, and the first Black federation in the US run by people under 352.

Dear Beloved Community3,
I hope this letter finds you well and well-rested.

First, much debt is owed to [my partner], Nicole, for her patience and support over the last 10 months. I also want to thank [EJBICC member] Yael and [American University law] Professor Ross for their thought partnership, honest feedback, and unwavering belief in EJBICC. And I want to extend deep gratitude to [EJBICC member] K’La for her patience, flexibility, collaboration, and vision in bringing this year’s Annual Meeting to fruition!

Today’s Annual Meeting is only possible because 25 years ago, the Ella Jo Baker Intentional Community Cooperative, Inc. was legally established4 and co-founded by Black feminist activists. Our mission is to provide safe, decent, and affordable housing - as well as sanctuary and respite - for social justice-minded and activist-oriented individuals and families of modest financial means in Washington, DC.

We were purposefully named after Ella Jo Baker. 

Baker was a skilled grassroots organizer. Most importantly, she ceaselessly encouraged ordinary people to look to themselves to generate solutions to society’s most pressing problems, but this fact is often forgotten. What is often remembered, however, is her cry that “we who believe in freedom cannot rest.” She made this declaration after three civil rights workers were killed while organizing Black folks in the summer of 1964 in Mississippi. She, like many others, was grief-stricken and tired of the continual and violent systematic disregard for Black life (and of the lives of our allies).

Our Black feminist activist co-founders took Baker’s cry seriously, got organized, and fought diligently to expand access to housing that is safe, decent, and affordable for all in the nation’s capital. Their bold and daring act has helped to sustain life-supporting options for Black and other minoritized5 peoples in DC. Like Baker, they were tired of the horrible conditions Black people lived in and under. Their decades-long organizing manifested in the creation of EJBICC and here we are. 

Therefore, as member-owners and residents of EJBICC, it makes sense that we employ sweat equity, EJBICC’s term for collective labor, participation, and engagement, to protect and live our mission and to protect and live our lives. Our sweat equity is what offsets the difference between what it would cost us and what we pay, literally and figuratively, to live in the Columbia Heights neighborhood of Northwest Washington, DC. However, in the years since our founding, differing beliefs about sweat equity and what we need to do individually and collectively to maintain EJBICC have surfaced.  As a participant in this ongoing discussion, I would like to share insights that I’ve gleaned from the book Rest is Resistance: A Manifesto, by Tricia Hersey.

Hersey’s Rest is Resistance argues that the descendants of enslaved people in the United States have been programmed to believe that our worth depends on our productivity, efficiency, and ability to grind. Grinding, or “grind culture,” flows from the belief that we, particularly Black USians6, must always and only work hard to achieve success in order to enjoy life. Throughout Rest is Resistance, Hersey uses personal stories and historical events to support her arguments and challenges the anti-Black, sexist, ableist7, white supremacist, and capitalist logics that animate grind culture. 

The literal forced labor of grinding pushes us to the point where we are disconnected not only from our bodies, but from our minds, our spirits, and each other. With this in mind, Rest is Resistance clarifies that we do not rest to give more of our bodies, minds, and spirits to capitalism. We rest to give ourselves back to ourselves and to our beloved families and communities. EJBICC, our activism and organizing must include rest if we are to enjoy the fruits of our labor. In other words, if we want to live and enjoy the housing and intentional community that our co-founders, four of whom are Black women, fought to establish and that we collectively maintain, we must rest. 

Both Baker and Hersey teach us that we cannot look to capitalism, nor grinding, nor sweaty equity (a term I use to describe over-laboring dressed up as activism and justice) to solve the systemic problems that adversely impact us. Instead, EJBICC, we must protect our piece of peace and look to ourselves - to our bodies, our minds, and our spirits for true sanctuary and social justice. And this starts with rest.

For us, this means we don’t need to send or respond to one more email or join one more committee nor check off one more item on our “to-do list” (on page 83 Hersey actually encourages us to create a  “Not-To-Do-List”). According to Hersey, “Rest is somatic work – connecting your body and mind” and is “anything that slows you down enough to connect with your body and your mind.” These definitions of rest remind me of Baker’s approach to grassroots organizing. In Baker’s approach, Black liberation is “bigger than a hamburger” (the body) and is about building a shared understanding (the mind) of the systems that harm Black people and often suffocate Black life. Grassroots activism and organizing are slow work, but they are also work that build us up and instead of tearing us down. Exhaustion is an invented byproduct of capitalism and is our body, mind, and spirits’ way of communicating to us that we have been used up by grind culture and capitalism. 

Whether we are academics or activists, or both, rest is our birthright, not sweaty equity.

Rest is Resistance, like EJBICC, reminds us that pausing, resting, and reflecting before taking action can help ensure that our actions (and the words we speak) are grounded in, and driven by, our principles and values.

Rest is Resistance, like EJBICC, shapes what counts as Black resistance, intellectual labor, living in intentional community, and explicitly articulates what happens when Black feminist activists (and those oriented toward Black feminism and or activism) offer counter-theorizations of life. 

Rest is Resistance, like EJBICC, helps to expose the anti-Black, sexist/male chauvinist, ableist, capitalist, imperialist systems that are operating even if they aren’t legible and apparent. 

With this in mind, let us continue to discuss our differing beliefs about sweat equity, but let us do so after we rest, for the stakes are too high if we don’t. 

EJBICC exists not because others saw us as needing safe, decent, and affordable housing, nor an intentional community for activists and organizers to call home. It was the exact opposite. Our community exists because we decided that we matter and then we fought to create an enclave for us, by us, and to be specifically enjoyed by us. Hersey, through her personal witnessing and story-sharing, helped me see this and she maintains that “Survival is not the end goal for liberation. We must thrive. We must rest.” This is my call for us to collectively seek rest and respite irrespective of what society suggests and oppressive systems demand so that we can do more than survive. So that we can thrive!

Reading Rest is Resistance elucidated what I need to do individually and what I would like us to do collectively to maintain EJBICC: rest. 

Sweaty equity is rooted in a scarcity mindset. Hersey rightly links the scarcity mindset to grind culture and white supremacist capitalism. I want to be clear, as an intentional community of activists and organizers we must not rest on our laurels, but we must REST. It is counterintuitive for us to be so sleepy, so tired, and so exhausted that we, like the civil rights activists who were murdered in 1964 and inspired Baker’s immortal words, die under the influence of the very ideologies and anti-Black regimes we refuse (or claim we refuse). 

REST! 

Rest when a fellow member-owner makes a decision or a statement you don’t agree with. 

Rest before you send a group email. 

Rest before attending a committee or meeting, and rest before deciding not to attend. 

Rest before paying your dues and rest again before you pay your carrying charges8. 

Rest before and after you invite someone to apply to EJBICC, and rest before and after you interview someone to join the waiting list. 

Rest, rest, rest!

When we don’t rest we can’t dream and develop new visions. And in the words of historian Robin D.G. Kelley: “Without new visions we don’t know what to build, only what to knock down. We not only end up confused, rudderless, and cynical, but we forget that making a revolution is not a series of clever maneuvers and tactics but a process that can and must transform us.” 

We were purposefully named after Ella Jo Baker. 

Both Baker and Hersey teach us that Black people should not have to die to rest in peace. So, let’s add rest to our Black freedom and liberation activism and organizing, as well as to our social transformation work, inside and outside of EJBICC, because we who believe in freedom MUST rest and that’s how we are alert when freedom is won.

Restfully yours,

Jessica A. Rucker 
EJBICC’s Outgoing President
January 25, 2025
 

Header image: Ella Jo Baker Intentional Community Cooperative members. Photo © leigh h. mosley.

• 1

  When the Ella Jo Baker Intentional Community Cooperative was formed in DC 21 years ago, it used the line from Ella’s Song, by the much loved DC-based acapella group Sweet Honey in the Rock, as its theme: “We who believe in freedom cannot rest.”

• 2

  This, according to Jessica Gordon-Nembhard, author of the recently re-issued 2014 classic Collective Courage: A History of African American Economic Thought and Practice.

• 3

  A reference to Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.‘s global vision for a world free of hunger, all oppression and domination by the wealthy. Read more here, scroll down to “The Beloved Community.”

• 4

  EJBICC was formed on paper as a DC Cooperative Association before the cooperative intentional community became a living and breathing people-powered organization in 2003.

• 5

  We like this definition of this term. See also “I Am Not Your Minority” analysis, and note these University of Oregon’s Diversity Action Plan definitions and their highlighting of power relationships.

• 6

  A non-ethnocentric way to refer to citizens of the U.S., which is a small fraction of the continent of “America.”

• 7

  A non-sensitive way of viewing the world that denies the existence, strength and worthiness of people with physical, mental and other differences.

• 8

  The individual member-owner’s share of the total cost of the cooperative’s “mortgage” and operating costs – the cost of “carrying the expenses to run the community.”