Rest is Revolution

Hoorayyyy! It's Black history month! But I'm here to remind you that your favorite Black heroes were human...and that's good news for us all.

Hello my friends. First things first, happy Black history month to one and all. I’m making this entire post free because I believe this message is important. I spent pretty much all of January traveling and researching for upcoming Black history/Black travel stories that I’m writing for various media publications, and there was one theme that kept coming up as I explored the places where people like Harriet Tubman and Frederick Douglass lived during the later years of their lives: they were only human. In recent years it hasn’t felt right to me the way American society glorifies some of our Black heroes, turning them almost into mythical characters who did absolutely nothing but fight for the Cause (*insert whatever capital C, cause). It’s in all of our imagery too. Close your eyes and picture Dr. Martin Luther King. Did you see him in a suit at a podium in Washington, D.C.? Or maybe in a suit with linked arms leading a march somewhere? Yea…he was a lot more than the 2024 white America’s favorite civil rights leader (and a lot more militant too but that’s a story for another day).

So for my newsletter, where I save my best ideas, I thought, how can I bring the humanity of these people to the forefront? How can I make my readers understand that the courage they showed is not unattainable for regular human beings like us? By showing them on vacation of course! Yes, your heroic faves took vacations, just like us! I have a feeling some of you may be shocked that people like Dr. King, Malcolm X and Maya Angelou went on vacation, but I can assure you they did. Most importantly, they understood the transformative power of travel, especially for African Americans. So sit back and enjoy a glimpse of their favorite places that made them feel the most seen for their humanity and brought peace to their souls.

Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. - Jamaica

“In Jamaica I feel like a human being!” Dr. King famously said these words while making a speech in Jamaica in 1965 at the University of the West Indies. Though that was clearly a work trip, King and his wife, Coretta Scott King, visited the island several times and most of his books were written there. He seemed enamored by the islands multi-national population, stating “And over and over again I was impressed by one thing. Here you have people from many national backgrounds: Chinese, Indians, so-called Negroes, and you can just go down the line, Europeans, and people from many, many nations. Do you know they all live there and they have a motto in Jamaica, ‘Out of many people, one people.’ And they say, ‘Here in Jamaica we are not Chinese, we are not Japanese, we are not Indians, we are not Negroes, we are not Englishmen, we are not Canadians. But we are all one big family of Jamaicans.’ One day, here in America, I hope that we will see this and we will become one big family of Americans.” In 1967, the couple visited Jamaica again while on vacation and some images from that trip were featured in an issue of Ebony magazine. See them here.

James Baldwin - Istanbul, Turkey

James Baldwin is known for immigrating to Paris then eventually the south of France to escape the racism and homophobia in the United States. There he felt free to be himself and express himself creatively, gifting us with some of the most important literary works in a century. Less people know that he felt the same way about Istanbul, about which he said: “Turkey saved my life!” He lived there on and off for ten years and penned six works, including the anthology The Fire Next Time. More here.

Malcolm X and Maya Angelou - Ghana

I have to admit, it was hard to find confirmation that Malcolm X actually took a vacation (although if you’ve seen the movie “One Night in Miami”, you can make the case that that evening was a pseudo-vacation), but I loved this photo of Malcolm and Maya in Accra, Ghana too much to not share it. Also, in a 1964 interview with Bernice Bass, Malcolm said this about travel: “I’ve done a lot of traveling and, I think overall, travel does broaden one’s soul. If anything at all, that’s probably the most important of what’s happened to me during the past five or six months.” Read the interview transcript here.

Dorothy West - Martha’s Vineyard

Often known as the youngest member of the Harlem Renaissance (folks like Langston Hughes and Zora Neale Hurston referred to her as “the kid”), author and editor Dorothy West loved her family’s vacation cottage in Martha’s Vineyard so much that she made it her residence in 1947. One of her most famous novels, The Wedding, which explores themes of classism and colorism, is set on the island and was produced as a television series by the one and only Oprah. Ms. West’s Oak Bluffs’ home is now a stop on the Martha’s Vineyard African American Heritage Trail. Read more about Black history and culture in Martha’s Vineyard in my feature story for Coastal Living here.

Muhammed Ali - Egypt

Considering the fact that Muhammed Ali was pretty much a global celebrity the moment he hit the boxing world, I can imagine that it was hard for him to take a vacation. That said, his career afforded him the opportunity to travel quite often, and as many of us of African descent aspire to do, he took his first trip to the Motherland in 1964. On that trip he visited Ghana, Nigeria, and Egypt and when he visited the Pyramids in Cairo, he gave the black power salute while shouting in Arabic “God is great.” He returned to Egypt in 1986 as a Goodwill Ambassador to help spread the message of Islam as a religion of peace.

Now, I hope you take a cue from some of our Black history faves and lean into rest this month…ESPECIALLY if you happen to be Black. If intentional rest is new to you, please feel free to borrow my excuse for getting out of anything I don’t want to do for the remainder of February: “I can’t. It’s Black history month.”

xo