This Friday (5/29/2026), Join CMB-Newark for A Documentary Screening and Discussion
On May 29th, 2026 at 7 PM at The Newark Museum of Art, Community Movement Builders – Newark, in collaboration with Express Newark’s Community Media Center and the Newark Black Film Festival, is hosting a Film Screening of TCB: The Toni Cade Bambara School of Organizing.
Following the documentary screening, we will have a discussion featuring Louis Massiah (film director), Jasmine Mans (poet & author), Dr. Antoinette Ellis Williams (artist-poet-scholar), and Joy Lindsay (organizer & scholar)!
Full Toni Cade Bambara quote on "making the revolution irresistible"
One of the most well-known and widely circulated quotes of organizer, author, professor, and documentary film-maker Toni Cade Bambara is her comment about the need to “make revolution irresistible.” What does not get as much attention is the full context of the quote.
In a February 8th, 1982 interview with Kay (Bonetti) Callison, Bambara explains that the task and agenda of an artists is always determined but the community one belongs to. She goes on to explain what the role of the artist is in Cuba, Kenya, and for a African/Black person living in the United States. While there are some commonalities, Bambara argues that the particular conditions of a place, at a particular time or historical, determine what the role of the artist is. Bambara says of herself that, “As a cultural worker who belongs to an oppressed people, my job is to make revolution irresistible.”
Bambara’s understanding of the role of the artists is not abstract or idealistic. It is class conscious and grounded in history and the material conditions of a particular place.
As you listen to the full version of the famous Toni Cade Bambara quote below, we invite you to consider and think deeply about what the conditions of your block, street, ward, city, and state are. We invite you to consider what these conditions might require of you and your work—especially if you are an artist. As the Newark Chapter of Community Movement Builders, we aim to transform Newark into a solidarity city which sustainably serves the people and communities that make up each and every ward. If that’s something you would like to be a part of in a more direct way, we invite you to join us!
But more than anything, we invite you to hear Toni Cade Bambara’s words and consider what (more) you can do to help EVERYONE in Newark move forward. Enjoy!
“The task of the artist is always determined by the status and process and agenda of the community that artist serves.
If you’re an artist who identifies with or springs from, who is serviced by or drafted by say a bourgeois capitalist class, then that’s the kind of writing you do. And your job is to maintain [the] status quo, to celebrate exploitation, or to guise it in some lovely romantic way. That’s your job.
If you’re a writer in Cuba, in postrevolutionary Cuba, your job is to celebrate the triumph of the national will. If you’re a writer coming out of Kenya, the post independent era in Kenya, your job is really to critique the failure of class struggle in Kenya and to tell the truth and to try to envision, to share a vision of what that society should be like if they’re going to really liberate itself.
As a cultural worker who belongs to an oppressed people, my job is to make revolution irresistible. And one of the ways I attempt to do that is by celebrating those victories within the Black community. I think the mere fact that we’re still breathing is a cause for celebration. And to critique reactionary behavior within the community. And to keep certain kinds of calls out there: the children, our responsibility to children, our responsibility to maintain certain continuity from the past.
But I think any artist, your job is determined by the community you identify with. But in this country we’re not encouraged and equipped at any particular time to view things that way. And so the art work or the art practice that sells that capitalist ideology is considered art, and anything that deviates from that then is considered “political,” “propagandist,” “polemical,” or “didactic,” “strange,” “weird,” “subersive,” or “ugly.””
Toni Cade Bambara, 1982
