Sonja Branch-Wilson: Wake up before we lose everything

Published 10:54 pm Saturday, July 26, 2025

The image of that unforgettable scene in Spike Lee’s School Daze, where the college student stands on campus, hands cupped around his mouth, and yells “WAKE UUUUPPPP!” keeps running through my head.

You see it too? Good. This is my plea to us as a people: Wake Up! The ancestors are screaming for us to rise, to open our eyes, to act, but too many of us are distracted with pods stuffed in our ears, and we drown out their cries. Some have even chosen to plug their ears with proverbial cotton to avoid hearing the “noise” of injustice all around us. I get it, life is busy. We’re juggling careers, families, bills, and endless to-do lists. But while we’re rushing from one obligation to the next, the systems around us are quietly moving the chess pieces; redlining our neighborhoods, gutting our schools, dumping garbage in our backyards.

With limited to no formal education, our ancestors understood that freedom wasn’t given, but it was fought for with blood, boldness, heart, and conviction. They verbalized their truths with raw passion because they understood: their survival and freedom depended on it.

Yet here we sit, proudly demanding others to “put some respect on our names” and our 2, 3, 4, or 5 degrees while refusing to:

• Hold a protest sign.
• Sign up to speak at a public meeting.
• Send a simple email to federal, state, and local officials in opposition to injustice.

We weren’t always like this!

Our ancestors did not have the luxury of tuning out the world or allowing distractions to overshadow the cause. They were too busy fighting to survive by marching, strategizing, and building in the face of unspeakable odds. This includes my mother, who was trained by prominent Civil Rights leaders during the movement. She and her fellow classmates would protest every weekend in downtown Petersburg while attending the then-Virginia State College in the 1960s, shuttering businesses in the city. In the Southern states, our ancestors faced water hoses, dogs, billy clubs, fists, nooses, and being spat on.

Yet, they banded together, while racial fury rained down on them. But we sit still. Eyes open. Complacent. Here we are, beneficiaries of our ancestors’ blood, toil, and tears, watching federal, state, and local governments do whatever they please to us; getting “chin checked” and sent to the back of the relay line, waiting for someone else to run the race for us. Seriously, how did we become an action-less people? We dishonor our ancestors every time we choose silence over resistance, the very ones whose shoulders we stand on. Every time we look away because “it doesn’t affect me right now.” 

Every time we let corporations, developers, and politicians erase Black spaces and desecrate sacred Black land without a fight, we lose a piece of their legacy.

Cumberland is a warning 

Take Cumberland County as a warning. This Freedmen-built community was forged with faith and struggle, by formerly enslaved families and those just one generation removed from slavery. Between 1865 and 1910, they established 16 Black churches that are still active today, and they built six Tuskegee-Rosenwald Schools, including Pine Grove, to provide Black children with opportunities to learn dignity and self-determination in a hostile world.

They braided their faith like a tight knot, holding each other up in a world designed to keep them down. They supported one another because they knew no one else would. And yet, here we are, in 2025, fighting to prevent a mega-landfill from burying our legacy in trash. Here’s a sobering truth: Black communities account for 79% of landfill placements in the South, a deliberate environmental injustice.

If we don’t fight back, our sacred cultural heritage stands to be desecrated by a proposed mega-landfill, a 1,200-acre mountain of trash, looming over a community where:

• Nearly 30% of residents are Black.
• Over 1,800 people rely on private wells, vulnerable to toxic landfill leachate.
• Rural roads and historic lands risk destruction from 150 diesel truck trips per day.

This isn’t progress! 

This is a plan to bury us—literally and figuratively. So what are we doing? Sitting? Waiting? Complaining on social media while doing nothing in real life? We’ve got to wake up before our churches, schools, wells, and memories are buried under someone else’s garbage. “We are the ones we’ve been waiting for.” —June Jordan

Call out injustice wherever you see it. Defend the land, the people, and the legacy. Email your opposition now to: Greenridgecomments@cumberlandcounty.virginia.gov. Pack the July 28th meeting – be present, aware, and ready to fight. The ancestors are screaming! The land is speaking! It’s time to stop waiting for someone else to save us! It’s time to wake up!

Sonja Branch-Wilson is a nonprofit leader, educator, and preservation advocate serving as President of the AMMD Pine Grove Project. She holds a prestigious distinction as a member of the inaugural cohort of Preservation Virginia’s African American Fellows Program. She is also the founder of Threads and Truth, a consulting and storytelling brand committed to weaving together the rich narratives of Black history, heritage, and cultural preservation. She can be reached at ammdpinegroveproject@gmail.com.