The University of Arizona Press
October 7, 2025
We Gon’ Be Alright: Resistance and Healing in Black Movement Spaces, 2012–2021 by Stephanie M. Crumpton is a profound exploration of Black activism and organizing during a pivotal decade in American history. Rev. Dr. Stephanie M. Crumpton explores the practices of care, reflection, and creativity that Black activists employed to heal and resist amidst the sociopolitical turbulence from the Obama era through the first Trump presidency. This period, marked by the myth of a “post-racial” America, saw a resurgence in racial violence and hate crimes, culminating in the 2021 Capitol insurrection. Against this backdrop, Crumpton captures the resilience and ingenuity of Black movement workers as they navigated these challenges.
Drawing on oral histories and personal narratives, Crumpton provides an intimate look at the lived experiences of thirty-seven full-time community organizers. These activists and organizers share their strategies for maintaining an ethic of care that sustains them while fighting against both external oppression and internal community struggles. The book highlights how contemporary Black resisters have leveraged a growing understanding of trauma and healing to enhance their activism. This blend of historical knowledge and modern therapeutic practices has equipped them with a broader array of tools to support their communities.
Today, Crumpton answers five questions about her work.
What inspired you to write this book?
The seeds for this work were planted in 2014. That was the year that Eric Garner and Michael Brown were murdered, and I saw Black activists and organizers respond to their deaths as a call to action. They locked-in and then began to burnout. When I noticed what was happening, I started asking them about how they were struggling because I wanted to figure out how the church could step up and support them. As time passed, because I started this project in 2014 and didn’t finish interviews until 2021, I learned there was a better question: what do the front lines of Black movement work have to teach us about resistance and healing? Eric Garner and Michael Brown died horribly in separate police-involved events about a month into my first semester of teaching at a small seminary in Pennsylvania. Videos of Garner gasping out, “I can’t breathe” and Brown’s bleeding body on Canfield Drive in Ferguson were everywhere. Several of my students were on the front lines of protests, and they brought the anguish, fatigue, determination and questions about this gruesome violence that they were dealing with to the classroom. Many felt very much unsupported by churches that talked about justice but weren’t active in the streets. They brought me to the work that became this book. I wrote We Gon’ Be Alright to capture Black activists’ and organizers’ stories because I believe they have something to teach us about what it looks like to attend to ourselves while we address what continues to harm us.
Your title, “We Gon’ Be Alright” conveys a message of hope. What led you to choose this as the title for your work?
I wish I had some deep answer about hope to this question, but the truth is that I borrowed the title from Kendrick Lamar’s song of the same title. It’s on his 2015 release, To Pimp a Butterfly. The year before it came out, we’d been bombarded by footage of Brown and Garner, and then after that: Freddie Gray, Sandra Bland, the nine people killed in prayer service at Emmanuel AME Church in Charleston by a self-proclaimed white supremacist, and so many more. We were in the middle of Black deaths going viral across social media, and then here comes Kendrick Lamar with this squeaky voice talking about “We Gon’ Be Alright.” There is a part in the refrain where he repeats the word, “alright.” The sound of his voice is so tight and sharp that it almost sounds like a bark. It feels like he’s forcing the word “alright” out into the air. Growing up in the Black church, I learned to look a dead thing in the face and then proclaim something contrary to (perhaps in spite of) what I saw. Maybe that’s what I latched onto in the song, because Kendrick isn’t denying what was going on in those days. He sees, and then (based on the fact that we’ve been here before) barks out the word “alright.” When I look at Black activists and organizers as they stay committed to fighting injustice, they personify this same determination, and Kendrick captures it sonically when he snaps out the word “alright.” What I appreciate the most is that his message comes from his place alongside communities that know suffering, but that also know more. We know suffering, perseverance, and determination. We also know what we want, which is to be whole, free and well. We lean in, face reality, and say “alright” in that way that proclaims that this thing is not over. We find the wherewithal to do this even while we are forced to grieve death. If there’s hope, it’s in the wherewithal that gets summoned every time we dare to proclaim that we are indeed going to be alright.
You talk about the importance of healing through persistent communal practices of care, reflection, and creativity. Can you share one of the oral histories or narratives from your book that exemplifies these kinds of practices?
One activist, who stays in the streets as a serious agitator, tells the story of how critical rest and being in the care of her community is to her well-being. She talks about how periodically an elder from the community will call her and send her money with a note that this is just for her to take care of herself. Not to spend on others, but just for her. She talked about being mothered well by her birth mother, and the communal mothering that others do to keep her on track as she does such deep work with and on behalf of others. Perhaps the most tender part of her story, for me at least, was her sharing about how a friend will call her and sing her name. The friend is a professional vocalist. She’ll answer the phone and, at some point in the conversation, the friend will begin to sing her name back to her. Now, I can’t speak to all of what that did for her. What I can say is that I observe in that act of sister-friending a moment of someone gathering her—calling her back from the places where her energy has been dispersed. There is something powerful about when someone who loves you, and that you love back, calls you by your name. But to sing it—to call your name in rhythm. There’s something there, and those are the kinds of moments that matter when you’re doing work against people and structures that want to dehumanize you. I learned that it’s not always the big things, like restorative justice circles and abolition trainings (which are vital), but also the little practices like singing someone’s name back to them that bring us in and closer to one another.
The book is written through a lens of “womanist practical theology.” Can you unpack that concept for us just a bit for folks who might not be familiar with it?
The best way to say it is that the book looks at the challenge of fighting injustice and being well in mind, body, and spirit through lenses that are informed by how the many ways that Black women decipher challenges in our communities and then move to address them. In the words of Alice Walker, who first published womanism as a term, I am “dedicated to the wholeness” of Black people. I want to, as she would say, “know more and in greater depth” how Black communities define ourselves for ourselves according to what we believe is most important and to then move to make it real. In this project Womanism looks like using my awareness of how race, class, gender, sexuality, citizenship, and carceral status become identifying markers used to justify violence, structural oppression, and other forms of collective harm. It also looks like taking a deep dive into the inner lives of Black communities to examine how we manage to build barriers against what assaults us, to hold one another in dignity even in times of conflict, to refuse to give up or in, and all the while practice the futures we want. It is sacred work.
What are you working on next?
There is so much more that we can learn from Black activists and organizers. I’m thinking about what it might look like for these stories and others that didn’t make it into the book to make their way out into community theater. The power of these stories is that they let us see what it looks like to turn so many things on their heads so that we can come to different conclusions. I’d like to learn about the theater models that invite the audience to take an active role in storytelling by joining the experience to create alternative outcomes. I want to see if we can take stories that are so filled with healing wisdom, truth, and a bit of humor as guides for helping us all envision something different: viable futures where we all have what we need to thrive—not just survive. What would it be like to bring that directly into communities to practice the worlds we want to know?
A scholar, teacher, and ordained minister, Rev. Dr. Stephanie M. Crumpton is an associate professor of practical theology at McCormick Theological Seminary, where she is also the director of the Trauma Healing Initiative. She leads THI’s mission to cultivate a prepared community of learners and educators who take their knowledge, experience, and practical skills for trauma-informed and healing-centered restoration into communities dealing with the impact of trauma. THI is funded by a $1 million Pathways for Tomorrow Initiative grant from the Lilly Endowment Incorporated.
