Black History Month Day 3: Resistance is the story

Some mornings, the fatigue settles in before the coffee has time to work.

Not the physical kind. The deeper weariness that comes from knowing that telling the truth, again and again, will cost something. That resisting what is wrong will never be efficient, tidy, or rewarded on a reasonable timeline.

Black History Month reminds us of this truth without flinching.

Resistance is exhausting. That’s the point.

The Montgomery Bus Boycott lasted 381 days. Not a symbolic weekend. Not a viral moment. More than a year of walking instead of riding, organizing carpools under threat, losing jobs, being harassed, being watched. It was sustained largely by Black women whose names history often forgets, but whose labor history rests upon.

Black history shows us that resistance is not a moment. It is a long, grinding act of courage carried out by ordinary people who would have preferred peace but refused surrender.

The civil rights movement is often reduced to a handful of speeches and photographs. But it was daily risk. Daily sacrifice. Daily decisions made under threat. It was mothers sending children to schools that hated them. It was workers showing up knowing they might be fired. It was people marching because silence felt heavier than fear.

When protest today is criticized as disruptive, the language is familiar. It is the same language used every time power feels challenged.

Disruption is how systems change.

Comfort is how they survive.

Black history teaches us that justice does not arrive quietly, politely, or on the terms of those who benefit from delay.

Black history is often framed as suffering. That framing is incomplete.

The other half of the story is resistance.

Every gain came from people who refused inevitability. People who organized when organizing was dangerous. Who spoke when silence would have been safer. Who kept going when exhaustion whispered that nothing would change.

There has never been a moment when Black Americans were simply handed justice. It was demanded. And every demand was met with backlash.

That pattern has not ended.

When people protest police violence, they are told to be quieter. When they demand fair access to the ballot, they are accused of wrongdoing. When they ask for honest history, they are told it is divisive.

Resistance is inconvenient by design.

Black history teaches us that discomfort is not a failure of activism. It is often the evidence that it is working.

If justice makes you uneasy, it is worth asking why. Not defensively, but honestly. Unease can be an invitation. Fatigue can be a signal. Exhaustion does not mean stop. It means this work has weight.

And weight, when carried together, can move history.

Mindful activism asks us to stay awake without becoming hardened, to tell the truth without losing our humanity, and to remember that how we show up matters just as much as what we oppose. Thank you for being here and for walking this path with me.

Julie Bolejack, MBA

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