Black Camp: By Hook or Crook, They Learn How to Breathe

By Greer Marshall
Staff Writer

“Caring for myself is not self-indulgence, it is self-preservation, and that is an act of political warfare.” — Audre Lorde

In 1984, Alex Haley bought 157 acres in Clinton, Tennessee, to create a retreat for writers. When he died in 1992, the Children’s Defense Fund purchased the property and made it a place to train child advocates. In 1999, Maya Angelou, Toni Morrison, and others gathered to dedicate the Langston Hughes Library, a barn redesigned by Maya Lin. Decades later, political strategist Jessica Byrd began building something else there: Black Camp, a sanctuary for campaign-weary organizers who, in her words, forgot how to breathe.

“The job I signed up for at eighteen was not the job I was doing by 2020,” she said. Every week during the second Abrams campaign in Georgia, she trained field staff on what to do if a shooter entered their office. “Lock the door. Turn off the lights. Stay quiet.” She was teaching organizers how to survive, not how to organize. By election night in 2020, she was sleeping in a bunker.

That summer, twenty-five million people held signs that read “Defend Black Lives.” People moved when they saw something worth moving for. But movements collapse when the people holding them up burn out.

After fifteen years of campaign work, her body gave out.

“I really experienced a level of physical burnout that I didn’t even know existed,” she said. “I wanted to quit, and I was searching for a way out of the work. I really was.”

How do Black leaders survive the work of democracy? What if the next great act of organizing is not protest or policy, but rest?

What was happening to Jessica was happening everywhere. Across the country, trust in public leadership was collapsing. During pandemics, school shootings, and environmental disasters, people didn’t know who to believe. Jessica kept thinking: leaders were suffering, and so were their families and communities. If democracy needs leaders worth trusting, those leaders need a way to survive the work.

Organizers everywhere were balancing emotional labor, mutual aid, and grief while trying to keep movements alive. They needed a new way to learn and rest.

That’s when a friend from the Children’s Defense Fund told her about the Alex Haley Farm. Would she consider bringing her training there?

She said, “Let me think about it.”

“If we want the best and the brightest, we need to create the conditions for the best and the brightest to show up.”

On Haley’s farm, Black Camp begins at the green gates. A team waits with tea and hand massages. There is always a healer on site, because Jessica plans to get into it. She will ask, What is your assignment? Why are you tired? How did you get this far out of alignment?

“Most people say, ‘I had no idea what was happening. I just trusted you,’” Jessica said. “Then it hits them. ‘I didn’t know I wasn’t breathing. I didn’t realize how much stress I was carrying until I got to the fresh air.’”

Jessica does not call herself a teacher. She calls herself the chief camp counselor. At Black Camp, you are not attending panels or taking notes on someone else’s PowerPoint. The classroom is a multi-sensory space, designed for intense discussions with provocative questions, not talking points. The rest of the time, people are reading in the library or talking to someone in their cohort for hours.

“This is school,” Jessica insists, “not meetings.”

Jessica knows what happens when leaders break. She also knows what happens when they don’t.

Every session offers context on U.S. history, Black history, and Black culture. By the time people leave Black Camp, they don’t take souvenirs; they take new practices. They are rearranging staff schedules, reconsidering strategies, and asking new questions. Rest is not an escape. Rest is a strategy. Recovery is not a break from work; it is the work.

The people who come aren’t always who you’d expect. Some are elected leaders. Others are the woman who runs a coffee shop that doubles as a community center and the man who keeps the city’s oldest Black theater alive. If you serve others, if your community depends on you, you are doing leadership work.

Jessica was trained a certain way as a child. “You don’t go into rooms alone. When you get to a table, you widen that table,” she said.

Camp is meant to multiply. It’s more than the farm in Tennessee. “Camp is really an idea,” Jessica said. “It’s a container that says anywhere we want to be in community we can create sacred and safe space for one another.” The question she keeps asking is simple: How can we create camp everywhere?

Five years later, organizers across the country are still doing the same impossible work. They’re running voter registration drives while helping people pay electric bills. They’re strategizing policy while trying to hold their own lives together. The job Jessica walked away from in 2020 hasn’t gotten easier. If anything, it’s gotten harder.

Everywhere, movements are thinning under relentless pressure. Between crises and elections, the demands never stop. America asks people to keep fighting for democracy but rarely pauses to care for the ones defending it. Black Camp exists in that pause.

Back on the farm, in the evenings after sessions end, people sit under the stars talking their shit about what it means to lead without losing themselves. Some laugh. Some cry. Some sit in silence. What binds them is breath. It’s the simple fact that they are still here.

When Jessica walks the land at night, she sometimes thinks about Alex Haley’s dream for this place. She sees herself in that lineage now, not as a writer but as a caretaker of Black stories.

At Black Camp, before anyone picks it up again, by hook or crook, they relearn how to breathe.

Jessica Byrd, a nationally recognized political strategist and founder of Black Camp, has been named to the TIME 100 Next list for her work in empowering transformative Black leaders. She blends strategy, optimism, and deep community care to redefine leadership

Black Camp is a hub for intergenerational learning, civic healing, and culture-making. Part training ground, part gathering space, The Farm and the tour together offer a blueprint for what’s possible when joy, strategy, and community power come together. The Black Camp is a traveling portal.