Join us for celebrate::undoing the plot as Crucian and African diasporic culture bearers guide us in acts of remembrance and refusal

won't you celebrate with me

what i have shaped into

a kind of life? i had no model.

born in babylon

both nonwhite and woman

what did i see to be except myself?

i made it up

here on this bridge between

starshine and clay,

my one hand holding tight

my other hand; come celebrate

with me that everyday

something has tried to kill me

and has failed.

-Lucille Clifton

celebrate::undoing the plot is an intimate, multi-day, Black feminist gathering for unleashing the power of African diasporic cultural memory, survival traditions, and fugitive practice to guide, strengthen, sustain, and transform our lives, families, communities, institutions, and movements.

We are rooting in the African principles of Sankofa, Ubuntu, and Sawubona.

We’re engaging fugitivity and marronage as our methodology.

We're seeding a network across geographies, borders, and waters where we take collective action and practice Black feminist fugitive lifeways rooted in spirit, land, care, protection, beauty, body, and study.

​This is an invitation only gathering of Black feminist leaders, cultural workers, practitioners, griots, organizers, educators, medicine people, spiritual leaders, scholars, artists, movement workers, land stewards, writers, facilitators, healers, doulas, memory keepers, and freedom dreamers.

​This gathering is a descendant of the 1981 Women’s Writers Symposium which gathered U.S. mainland and Caribbean feminists including Audre Lorde, Dr. Gloria Joseph, Toni Cade Bambara, and others, to foster solidarity, creative expression, and collective action.

Alongside local elders, musicians, and culture bearers, Queer Black Troublemaker and Black Feminist Love Evangelist, Alexis Pauline Gumbs will lead a ceremonial talk on her book, Survival is a Promise: The Eternal Life of Audre Lorde, reminding us of the lineages we are a part of and the love that sustains our existence.

​We will practice diasporic Black feminist fugitive lifeways rooted in spirit, land, care, protection, beauty, body, and study. We will anchor what we practice during the gathering back into our ecosystems, families, communities, institutions, lands and movements across the Americas, the Greater Caribbean, and ultimately beyond.

​The Black Mecca Project understands that our living and surviving as free and liberated people has always required culturally rooted ways of caring for each other and all our kin. We’re remembering, re-seeding, and strengthening:

• ​diasporic kinship which sparks solidarity and movement building across geographies

• ​a living, healing praxis of Black feminist fugitivity so that we return to our communities with a deeper imagination, analysis, commitment, and practice of survival

• ​ancient and modern systems for sharing power, knowledge, support, resources, and healing across geographies

• ​our collective power to take shared actions towards sustaining Black and Indigenous life and dignity through land and food sovereignty, reproductive and climate justice, reparations and wealth redistribution, and the reshaping of our movements towards sustainability