A
Life Well Lived in a Liberated State of Mind
Jean Wiley—Activist, Journalist, Educator and Mother ,
Grandmother & Great Grandmother
June 11, 1942-December 9, 2019
“I’m most notably a mother to you; but I’m also a lot
else: sister, aunt, niece, cousin,
friend, lover, colleague. Still the most
defining thing about me is this: I’m a
SNCC woman come to maturity and womanhood in SNCC, in the fire of the southern
freedom struggle bathed in the warm waters of collective and mutual trust and
respect—a committed and unrepentant progressive and activist.”
With a wine glass perched next to her, cigarette a
constant and pen poised to document the movement, Jean Wiley lived on her own
terms in a “liberated state of mind.” Born June 11, 1942 in Baltimore, Maryland a town forged in the
steel of Bethlehem, riffing with the sound tracks from jazz joints that lit up
the streets and where the bounty of blue crabs seemed endless, she grew up in a
deeply segregated city knowing the Racemen and women of the day. For her, and so
many others, “ No Negroes” signs w; but ere
walls surrounding public spaces from
movie theaters to libararies. She
navigated the curves and right turns of oppression and cancelled the racists
screams of “You can’t” into the hallejuha’s
and Black Power of “We will. We can.”
Her parents Elizabeth Thelma Holly Boyer Wiley and
Joseph Alphonsus Wiley were born in Baltimore where Black working class people ascended
out of the Great Depression and made a way out of the seemingly “impossible” of
life. Her mother worked in a school
cafeteria and her father was a house painter. They worked diligently and did
not allow racism to deter them, so that Jean would be among the growing numbers
of Black first-generation college students. According to Morgan State Professor
Harold B. Chinn, Jean was the best debater with whom he ever worked for she was
poised, smart and formulated excellent arguments.
In 1963, she was arrested in Baltimore for
sitting in. Students from Howard University announced that they would be
descending en masse in protest of those
arrested. Mayor Theodore McKeldin
thought, "Oh, we're not having this. Clear all the jails out. Just get them
out. Forget procedure, just get them out of there." Without hesitation,
they were released with the mayor agreeing to desegregate the theaters.
Her radicalism evolved as an undergraduate
at Morgan State and graduate student at Michigan State on a Woodrow Wilson
Fellowship. It also evolved thru sitting
in and being jailed in Baltimore into her teaching days as an English teacher at
HBCU Tuskegee Institute where the bookstore staff tried to shut down her
request to order Ralph Ellison’s novel Invisible Man. She remained undeterred when her
women students boycotted her class, after she decided to wear her hair natural. They felt it was unprofessional of her not to
adhere to the standards set by the very white folk oppressing them. Jean went
on to become a committed and unrepentant progressive activist with the Student
Non-Violent Coordinating Committee. She went on to serve as the media relations
coordinator for SNCC and as a Pan Africanist, spent time in Tanzania
challenging and elevating the discourse
surrounding the uncertain future of Black Power and Pan Africanism.
As noted in an interview conducted by
Civil Rights Veteran Bruce Hartford for the SNCC Legacy Project, “During her
work for SNCC, Wiley dispensed news across its southern projects. She covered
voter registration tests in Sunflower County, demonstrations in Jackson, and
boycotts in Americus, GA, and sometimes found herself under arrest along the
way. Ruby Sales, her former student, kept her eyes on Wiley, who came to Fort
Deposit in Lowndes County, Alabama to report on a SNCC demonstration in August
1965. She looked up to her and trusted that she would know what to do when a
white mob wielding guns and baseball bats surrounded them. One man in the mob
approached Wiley and threatened her life. She backed away, facing the mob,
feeling if they shot her, “she didn’t want her parents or her family to think
that she had been shot running.” In the summer of 1965, she
headed SNCC’s national communications during Julian Bond’s campaign for the Georgia
State Legislature.
Along with Geri Augusto, Charlie Cobb,
Belvie Rooks, Courtland Cox and Jimmy Garrett, in 1969, she conceptualized and
taught at the Center for Black Education in Washington, DC, a partnership with
Drum and Spear Bookstore and Press. Their approach to Black education broke
from just confining learning to academic institutions and connected the campus
to the community. The work centered on, as Cobb explained it, “How you use your education for the Black
community.” Ella Baker who in 1960 organized the founding
conference for SNCC, Fannie Lou Hamer one of the most powerful voices of the
voting rights movement, her deeply cherished friend and SNCC strategist Ralph
Featherstone and Tanzanian President Julius Nyerere continued to forge her
vision of liberation while the music of The Freedom Singers, Miriam Makeba, Bill Withers and the Mighty Sparrow fueled her
spirit and supported her in staying the course of struggle. Playing her guitar also served as a balm for
her soul. The ongoing formation of her life was in part a result of being a
veracious reader whose library included the works of iconic African American
writer James Baldwin, Mozambican freedom fighter Amilcar Cabral, Swiss psychiatrist
Carl Jung, Chicago poet Elmira Stuckey and South African author Doris Lessing.
In 1971, she moved to California where her
fierce activism and pen lead her deeper into her work as a journalist. She was
one of four women, three of whom were Black, who covered the Angela Davis
Trial. Jean wrote and provided extensive written and on-air
commentary about the prison abolitionist movement of that era including the
Soledad Brothers and Ruchelle McGee who remains the longest incarcerated person
in the world.
Hearing the call of motherhood in 1975,
she gave birth to her son Cabral Stuckey Wiley.
In the early 80s, she and Cabral moved to Grenada where Cabral lamented,
“Only my mother would move to a country with no television at all.” Their hopes of finding a country where people
lived in the daily practice of Black leadership and liberation were crushed
when the move shifted into turbulence in 1983 as the US intervened and
orchestrated the killing of Prime Minster Maurice Bishop. Her passion for social justice also resulted
in Cabral accompanying their dear family friends’ anti-apartheid activist and
author Belvie Rooks and actor and anti-apartheid activist Danny Glover on a transformative
trip to South Africa in 2001. That trip
and meeting President Nelson Mandela are one of Cabral’s forever heartbeats, as
he witnessed Black leadership in one of the most dynamic liberated countries in
the world.
The landscape
of Jean’s life was broad and rich. Along
with her unwavering press for equal rights and the liberation of her people, “Jean
was very demanding about food: the
potato chips had to be Utz and no other; the crabs for the crab cakes had to
come from the Chesapeake Bay and nowhere else; and Yaka Mien (a Cajun/Creole/Chinese
type of beef noodle soup) was a must!” according to her sister Lois Wiley.
Along with her feature articles appearing
in Essence, her commentaries and
investigative reports aired on WHUR, KPFA and KQED. She also provided coverage of Mandela’s 1990
visit to Oakland and was active in the anti-apartheid movement. In 2010, her “Letter to My Adolescent Son” was
published in Hands on the Freedom Plow: Personal Accounts by Women in
SNCC. As the founder of Collage
Literary Studio, she also served as an editor and literary consultant for groundbreaking
projects at the Institute of the Black World. Environmental justice activist and
architect Carl Anthony recalls, “Her comments were critical to the structural
stages of his book The Earth, The City and The Hidden Narrative of Race.”
Jean also served on the staff for the
National Center for Law and Economic Justice which provides legal
representation, support and advice to people living in poverty. She also
taught at the University of the District of Columbia and University of
California at Berkeley. Her world also being
a devoted grandmother and great grandmother, cherishing those relationships
with her granddaughter Breijanee Wiley, and great granddaughters Shariyah and Narii
Harris.
The Race men and women of her youth and
spirit of SNCC anchored her at every turn of her adult life and the foundation
of her legacy lies therein, including her work with the Bay Area Veterans of
the Civil Rights Movement. Standing alongside the road of her
legacy are her extensive family including twin sisters Joyce Dyson and Lois
Wiley, a host of nieces and nephews, granddaughter Breijanee, two great
grandchildren, her goddaughter author and scholar Dr. Noliwe Rooks, scores of
friends, movement comrades, young people to whom she was an auntie and mentor
and most especially her son Cabral who devoted the past four years of his life to
surrounding his mother with compassionate care in their home in Oakland,
California. Her niece Shiree Dyson also was
an integral part of her support system throughout Jean’s long battles against
cancer. Her niece Ayisha Dyson and nephews Malcolm Wiley, Keith Dyson and Toure
Dyson kept the circle of her life turning.
In spirit Jean joins other ancestors, including her
friend New York Times journalist C. Gerald Fraser, as they gaze out of
the mosaic windows of the Ancestral Cathedral on to the streets of
Baltimore, Johannesburg and Oakland watching as young people lift their visions
standing on the shoulders of ancestors and raising their voices to crush white
supremacy and the patriarchy, and build liberated intersectional communities.
Her life will be honored in early 2020 with
celebrations in Oakland and Washington, DC.
Sources:
*“Letter to My Adolescent Son,” Hands on the
Freedom Plow: Personal Accounts by Women in SNCC edited by edited by Faith S. Holsaert, Martha
Prescod Norman Noonan, Judy Richardson, Betty Garman Robinson, Jean Smith
Young, Dorothy M. Zellner, University of Illinois Press, 2010.
Note from Ann Chinn where her father Professor Harold
B. Chinn documents Jean’s role as a fierce debater.
The SNCC Digital Archive – Interview with Jean Wiley
by Bruce Hartford
The Daphne Muse Correspondence Collection: Documenting
Black Life and Culture across the Diaspora 1958 to the Present
