Celebrating the Life of Robert Allen
October 2, 2024
Remarks by Janet Carter, ex wife and dear friend
I first met Robert when he was on the Board of the Oakland Men’s Project, a group in Oakland working with men to educate young men and boys about violence against women.
I couldn’t believe my eyes, or my heart. Here was this gorgeous, dimpled, well-read, smart, accomplished, empathetic, introspective man with acute intuitive intellect, who was a social justice warrior with a sense of humor and adventure, and one of only a few men in the country dedicating himself to ending violence against women, which was also my job then at Futures without Violence.
One thing led to another, and we were married in 1995.
Robert gave the world so much. And he gave his friends, family, and community even more than that. He approached the world with a healthy dose of curiosity, and a deep desire to make sense out of it all without regard to existing racist or sexist narratives. He put his own spin on everything and because of that, was ready for anything.
People often asked Robert what motivated him to devote his life to fighting injustice through his research and writing of the stories of unsung heroes, ordinary people doing extraordinary things.
He would talk about growing up in the segregated south in Atlanta and how he didn’t remember seeing a white person until he was 8 and didn’t realize there was a whole other world outside of the segregated Black community.
But at age 13, he was profoundly impacted by the pictures of Emmett Till’s body.
It was then he realized that white people could be dangerous, and that they could be dangerous to him as well, since he was Emmett’s age.
He also saw how the story of Emmett’s brutal murder began to change things. One mother with the courage to show what happened to her son was changing the existing narrative.
Robert learned the power of individual and collective resistance to injustice in 1967 when he became a draft resister. He thought the Vietnam war was racist and imperialist, with working class men of color being told to kill other people of color. Robert decided that he wasn’t going even if it meant jail.
But Robert didn’t just resist the draft so that HE didn’t end up going, he was also worried about all the other young men who he believed were being sent to their death. So he wrote a pamphlet expressing how the war was racist, and passed it out in front of the induction center, urging others not to go.
He would always remember this anti-war period as when he realized the world could be changed through resistance to injustice, and how powerful people coming together to resist oppression could be in bringing about change.
His writing for publication started the day Malcolm X was assassinated. Sitting in front of Malcolm at the theater where he was speaking, Robert witnessed the horror of the assassination first hand. Not knowing how to handle the shock of seeing someone he admired assassinated before his eyes, he wrote a description of the horror of witnessing Malcolm’s assassination from a few feet away.
He offered the piece to the Village Voice in New York where he lived at the time. They turned it down saying no one was interested in Malcom X. So he took it to the Guardian. They published it and hired him on the spot as their first and only Black journalist.
As a journalist, he traveled to Vietnam and captured stories of the Vietnamese people fighting in the resistance. Then he traveled across the U.S. telling their stories, racking up a healthy FBI file as he did so.
Robert believed that the fabric necessary for social change could be weaved through the stories of unsung heroes resisting injustice, and that it is these stories that could challenge false historical narratives.
And his work has proven this to be true.
As most of you know by now, he devoted his life to finding people like the Black sailors at Port Chicago whose resistance literally paved the way toward the desegregation of the military, and to telling their stories in a way that would change the racist narrative supporting the segregation of the military.
When I got the call from the Secretary of the Navy Carlos Del Toro a week after Robert died, saying he and President Biden were going to exonerate all the Port Chicago men of the charges against them because they were so moved by Robert’s book, I was deeply saddened that Robert was not there to see this happen.
But then I realized, Robert’s deep faith that justice would eventually prevail because of the bravery of the Port Chicago sailors fueled his lifelong passion for working toward that day. He would only care that the survivor’s families lived to see that day. Robert’s work was never about himself.
Robert loved his community of students and ex-students. He believed that together they could challenge injustice through sharing their stories. Teaching and mentoring were his way of playing it forward, and honoring his own mentors along the way.
I want to end by reading a poem written for Robert by Alice Walker in 1982:
These days I think of Robert
Folding his child’s tiny shirts
Consuming TV dinners, saying “a kind of processed flavor”
Rushing off each morning to school – then to the office,
The supermarket, the inevitable meeting: writing
Speaking, marching against oppression, hunger,
Ignorance
And in between having a love affair
With tiny wildflowers and gigantic rocks
Surely the earth can be saved for Robert.
I know if Robert were here, and I think he is, he would turn that poem into one for his students – saying to all of you, through their stories of truth and resistance, surely, the earth can be saved for them.