The Material Conditions of Our Ideas

I step into the embrace of St. Stephen’s Park, and for a moment, it feels as if time has folded in on itself. The earth beneath my feet is thick with memory, ancient yet steady. This park, the birthplace of Alabama’s first government, and one of my favorites to walk, stands like an old tree with roots tangled deep in the soil of a long-lost world. If I listen closely, I can almost hear the voices of those who once stood here, their ideas still clinging to the air, refusing to fade.

It’s a strange thing, standing on a site of history. We tend to imagine the past as something distant, something contained in books, museums, or the neat plaques that dot landscapes like this one. But St. Stephen’s is not just a scenic patch of land. It is a battleground of memory, a place where power was negotiated, where the weight of geography, resources, and ambition intertwined to shape what would become the state of Alabama.

And yet, beneath that official story, beneath the grand narratives of settlement and governance, lies another history, one that the soil does not easily surrender. The same land that fed the dreams of settlers also sustained the brutal reality of slavery. The same soil that grew crops for commerce bore witness to human suffering.

We like to believe that ideas shape the world. That revolutions are born from noble thoughts, that democracy is the result of grand philosophical awakenings. But as I walk the trails of this park, I am reminded of a harder truth: Ideas do not appear in a vacuum. They are not lightning bolts of inspiration that strike brilliant minds. They are shaped, sometimes violently, by material reality.

This is the foundation of materialism, a philosophy that insists our thoughts, beliefs, and ideologies do not hover above the world, detached from experience. They are products of land, labor, and the struggle for power. Karl Marx put it plainly: “It is not the consciousness of men that determines their existence, but their social existence that determines their consciousness.”

Standing here, that idea is unavoidable. The settlers who built Alabama were not just driven by democratic ideals. They were shaped by the land they sought to claim, the labor they sought to control, the wealth they sought to accumulate. Democracy and exclusion were not contradictions to them; they were two sides of the same coin, forged in the fires of necessity.

We tell ourselves that history moves forward, that the past stays where it belongs. But history has a way of asserting itself, even when we try to forget. The economy of this place was once built on human bondage. That economy, in turn, created laws, social structures, and beliefs to justify its existence. And though the laws have changed, the echoes of that past are still with us, whispering through economic disparities, through housing policies, through the political systems that have been slow to shake off their origins.

That thought leads me to something else, something that has been circling my mind lately: Black History Month.

We often talk about Black history as a series of triumphs, stories of resilience, innovation, and progress. And it is that. But if we stop at celebration, we miss something essential. Black history is also a lesson in how oppression creates its own resistance. How the same material conditions that sought to break a people also forged the ideas that would challenge power itself.

Take Harriet Tubman. Her name has been polished into a symbol of bravery, but history often scrubs away the rawness of her story. Tubman was not just a conductor on the Underground Railroad; she was a woman who understood that freedom was not theoretical. It was tangible. It was something that had to be taken, again and again. Her resistance was not an intellectual exercise, it was survival, made real in the physical act of leading people through swamps and forests, past dogs and slave catchers, toward the unknown.

Or think of Martin Luther King Jr. Today, his image is softened, confined to a single speech. I Have a Dream. But King was not just a dreamer. He was a radical. He called out the “Three Evils of Society”: capitalism, racism, and militarism. His ideas did not emerge from the quiet of a study; they were formed in the streets of Montgomery, in the brutal realities of segregation, in the economic struggles of Black workers fighting for something more than a symbolic victory.

The Civil Rights Movement was never just about changing laws, it was about changing the material conditions of Black life. Access to jobs, to land, to power. Because without that, the idea of equality remains just that, an idea, floating above a reality that refuses to bend.

As I walk, I feel the weight of history pressing against the present. We like to think that the greed, the exploitation, the hunger for power that defined the past are relics. But they persist, shapeshifting into new forms.

Antonio Gramsci once wrote, “The old world is dying, and the new world struggles to be born: now is the time of monsters.” The monsters of today are not mythical creatures; they are systems that refuse to let go, ideologies that disguise themselves as common sense, institutions that pretend to be neutral while quietly upholding the past.

And yet, history also teaches us something else, something that lingers even in the bleakest of moments.

Ideas, once born, do not die easily.

The ideas of freedom, justice, and equality are not passing trends. They persist. They evolve. They shape the world, just as the world shapes them. And while power has always tried to contain them, through force, through co-optation, through historical amnesia, it has never truly succeeded.

Black History Month is not just about looking backward. It is a reminder that history is still unfolding. That the struggles of today are shaping the ideas of tomorrow. That justice is not just a moral argument, it is a material one. It is about land. About labor. About power.

As I drive home, I think about this evergreen land, about the stories, about the ghosts of old ideas and the seeds of new ones. The past does not stay buried. And neither do the ideas it leaves behind.