Turn Up For Freedom: Notes for All the Tough Girls* Awakening to Their Collective Power

E Morales-Williams

A powerful guidebook for healing and resistance for young girls and gender-expansive youth of color on how to unite, heal, protect, and lead their communities.

Turn Up For Freedom helps youth leaders hone their skills to build personal, emotional, and collective freedom. It centers youth leadership through principled positions, such as being a healer, a protector, a scholar-activist, a community organizer, and being radically joyful, in order to build personal emotional and collective freedom. Through memoir, story telling, and political education, E Morales-Williams grounds these principles in the material experiences of working-class youth and reflects on the possibilities and challenges in practicing them as a collective in under-resourced communities. 

These were the principles of leadership and lessons learned from a Black and Brown girls and gender expansive youth-collective called TUFF Girls (Turning Up for Freedom), based in North Philadelphia. Morales-Williams carefully guides young readers through the challenging issues that confront their lives, helping to identify the traumatic impact that structural violence has on Black and Brown communities, restoring traditions of healing and collective care, and recentering leadership in community as an abolitionist and decolonizing practice. Turn Up For Freedom calls on young people to unite, heal, protect, and lead.

PRODUCT DETAILS

Authors: E Morales-Williams
Publisher: Common Notions
ISBN: 9781942173830
Published: September 2023
Format: Paperback
Size: 8 x 5
Page count: 240
Subjects: Youth / Abolition / Feminism

About THE AUTHOR

E Morales-Williams is a Black queer nonbinary organizer originally from East Harlem and the Bronx, and has been based in Philadelphia for the past fifteen years. They write as a veteran youth worker, a former Social Studies teacher at an alternative HS, an abolitionist, and as a survivor of sexual assault and police violence. They have facilitated and directed a range of programming in the Bronx, Harlem, and Binghamton, NY; Ghana, West Africa; and North Philadelphia, PA within community centers, middle and high schools, and university campuses such as Temple University, where they taught for six years in their College of Education and was awarded in 2012 for her teaching. The focus of their programming has ranged from Black history, community organizing, urban agriculture, and healing justice. Youth leadership development and decolonizing futures has been a consistent through line of their work.

PRAISE

“In Turn Up for Freedom, E Morales-Williams offers a deeply generous roadmap to healing, wholeness and leadership for young Black girls and femmes and those who love and provide guidance for them. Some parts memoir, other parts anecdote and political toolkit, but all parts love—this book leaves its readers with the confidence and the preparation to both understand and take on a world that is designed to render them defenseless. It is a gift.” —Tarana Burke, founder and Chief Vision Officer of me too. International and author of Unbound: My Story of Liberation and the Birth of the Me Too Movement

“At the heart of Turn Up for Freedom is the power of Black and Brown working-class girls—cis and trans—to organize for individual and collective freedom. E Morales-Williams writes, ‘their injustices are the least understood,’ underscoring structural violence, racism, patriarchy, and transphobia. Grounded in the organizing experiences of TUFF Girls, an intergenerational group in North Philadelphia, the book presents principles and tools that guide the work of awakening collective power. Black and Brown girls emerge as powerful and central participants in the movement for social justice. Turn Up for Freedom is empowering, insightful, and necessary.” —Iris Morales, activist and community organizer, educator, and author of Revisiting Herstories: The Young Lords Party

“Amid U.S. educational policy assaults seeking to blacklist global histories of liberation struggles across race, sexuality, and gender, E Mari Morales Williams delivers urgent, insurgent wisdom borne from years of inspired collective study and practice with the youth they served. An intimate testimony, insightful syllabi, and interactive guidebook centering Black girls and gender-expansive youth, Turn Up for Freedom is the revitalizing platform to carry its primary audience over the threshold between understanding the unfair and unfinished world they inherit and incubating a renewed vocabulary of resistance necessary to incite mass revolution in their lifetimes. A magnificent and most-needed blueprint for intersectional, healing-centered, joy-filled youth organizing.” —Christopher R. Rogers, PhD, National Steering Committee, Black Lives Matter At School and coeditor of How We Stay Free: Notes on a Black Uprising 

“E Morales-William's consistent commitment to support young people to imagine and practice their freedom dreams through healing justice work is a tremendous and pivotal gift to young people and all abolitionists fighting systems that destroy our humanity, from the constant attacks on Black girls' identities and existences. Turn Up for Freedom shines a light on the journey to fight for our liberation—from the womb, to the playground, the classroom, and all of the spaces that are battlegrounds for survival, to Say Our Names, and protect our autonomy! E has dedicated years in holding space in fellowship as part of the collect work and struggle to transform our communities— first by transforming ourselves, with each other. E sheds light on the courage lessons and experiences, and beautiful legacies of Black queer folks doing the work to center, organize, and defend, Black girls overlooked by our society. With Turn Up for Freedom, they make beautiful investments in Black cis, trans, and queer girls, femmes, and nonbinary communities to see themselves in the future, beautifully protected, defended, healed, and ready to stand in their beauty and dignity, unapologetically. Much of my own development as a Black, queer, femme, education justice organizer has been poured into by E! Turn Up for Freedom allows their words and wisdom to pour into the hearts and minds of young people in Philadelphia and everywhere. This book is a gift to our community! Ashe!” —Saudia Durrant, senior campaign strategist at the Advancement Project

“What a powerful demonstration of Morales-Williams’ commitment to Black and Brown girls, femmes, and gender expansive youth.  Tracing the evolution of T.U.F.F. Girls creates a platform for deep political learning and persistent activism while simultaneously showing the path to humanism through compassion and love.  This is a testament to all that we are now and will become in our connection as beings who strive for liberation and joy—for all.” —Clarice Bailey, PhD, cofounder, Girls Justice League

“Turn Up for Freedom is a love letter and principled offering to Black girls and gender-expansive youth around the globe. E Morales shares possibility models, engagement strategies, and social justice analyses born from struggle, experience, and community care. They remind us that getting free comes from within, grows in community, and healing together is our human right.” —Joanne N. Smith, President of Girls for Gender Equity

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Foreword by SynClaire Arthur
Introduction: Five Principles of Leadership

Chapter 1, Healer
Chapter 2, Protector  
Chapter 3, Scholar Activist
Chapter 4, Community Organizer
Chapter 5, Turnt Up for Freedom/Radical Joy 
Conclusion 

Appendix
History of TUFF Girls
Glossary
For the adult who bought this book for their young person 
Acknowledgements