Last night, April 4, 2026, was a night. I am still feeling it. What a gift to be honored by those in whose legacy I stand, on the 58th anniversary of the assassination of Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. in Atlanta, GA. I am grateful. Below is the full text of my acceptance speech, most but not all I was able to read.
I begin by honoring the ancestors, those named and unnamed, those whose blood and breath made this movement possible, those who never received an award, who never saw the victory, but who kept walking anyway. I am because they were.
To receive this honor from SCLC/W.O.M.E.N., an organization that has stood for decades at the intersection of justice and the dignity of women and families — is not lost on me. You have kept the flame when others looked away. In 1979, when I was 10-years old, Dr. Evelyn Gibson Lowery founded SCLC/W.O.M.E.N because women’s contributions to the movement had been systematically erased. She built remembrance into the bones of this work. I am honored to stand in that lineage tonight.
I am also because of two people who found each other in this city in Atlanta members of SNCC’s Atlanta Project, Michael Simmons and Dr. Gwendolyn Zoharah Simmons. My (divorced) parents brought me into a fraught world shaped by their lifelong commitment to freedom and justice, and I carry that inheritance.
My turtle twin brother, my steadfast supporter in myriad ways, my beloved Tyree Cinque Simmons, professionally known as DJ Drama, arrived here as a freshman at Clark Atlanta University in 1996 and never left.
I am grateful that my sister-in-love Dr. Clarice Wimberly, niece-in-love Bianca Wimberly, friends Angela Hill and Keisa Calloway are here to witness this with me.
My wife, Sheila Alexander-Reid, is in Washington, D.C., also receiving an award tonight because of course she is. Sheila, I love you. This one’s ours.
And I have to acknowledge the man who nominated me, my dear friend and dharma brother, Jonathan Crowley.
I am a Black feminist lesbian Buddhist. I am a survivor of childhood sexual violence and adult sexual violence. And I have spent more than three decades saying what many movements still struggle to say plainly: we cannot build liberation on the silence of the violated.
NO! The Rape Documentary. love WITH accountability. These are not side projects. They are the center. They are what drum majors for justice are called to protect, the most vulnerable among us, the ones told to wait, to be quiet, to let the “bigger issues” go first.
There are no bigger issues than the bodies of those who have been sexually harmed. Women. Girls. Boys. Trans people, who are being legislated out of existence, out of safety, out of life itself. Those violated by the very men the movement canonized. All those told to wait, to be quiet, to let the “bigger issues” go first.
We cannot look away from Gaza, from Sudan, from Congo, from Haiti, from Myanmar, from Dalits across South Asia — from the communities, the families, all those the powerful in tandem with the news cycle would have us forget. In Iran, a nation our own President has vowed to bomb back to the stone ages, as though destruction is a foreign policy. On the streets of this country, where immigrants are being terrorized, where Black and Brown people are still being killed with impunity. Justice cannot be parceled out. It cannot be strategic in its compassion. We are called to a love that does not look away.
The Buddhist traditions that ground my life and my teaching speak of mettā, lovingkindness and uppekkhā, equanimity. Not the equanimity of detachment. Not the lovingkindness of comfort. But the fierce, steady, open-eyed love that can hold all of this, the grief, the rage, the beauty, the possibility, without collapsing.
That is what this movement has always asked of us.
That is what the ancestors modeled.
That is what I am committed to, for as long as I have breath.
Thank you, sclc/W.O.M.E.N. I receive this honor on behalf of every survivor who was told their story didn’t matter. It matters. You matter.
Asé.
Music from video reel:
As I Travel by Donald Vega featuring: Luisito Quintero, Lewis Nash, John Patitucci
