Watch this video of Inmates Rising

The testimonies from these inmates in San Francisco as part of the One Billion Rising movement are kinda moving.

I was skeptical about One Billion too, yet, I also understand that art and activism helps to sustain morale and engagement in social movements. This also reminds me a story in the late Derrick Bell’s Gospel Choirs where he and his fictional alter ego, Geneva Crenshaw, imagine a similar act of art in expression of activism and social change, where hundreds of women flooded a Harlem street and did the electric slide in unison for civil rights.

Art is change.

h/t Eesha

SYREETA MCFADDEN is a Brooklyn based writer, photographer and adjunct professor of English. Her writing has appeared in the New York Times, The Guardian, BuzzFeed, The Huffington Post, Religion Dispatches and Storyscape Journal. She is the managing editor of the online literary magazine, Union Station, and a co-curator of Poets in Unexpected Places. You can follow her on Twitter @reetamac.

Syreeta McFadden is a contributing opinion writer for The Guardian US and an editor of Union Station Magazine.

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