When They Call You a Terrorist

by Patrisse Khan-Cullors

  I can’t breathe.

  We can’t breathe.

  Mr. “GGG” testifies about the deputy who forcibly searched a prisoner’s buttocks with a flashlight, placing the flashlight half an inch into the prisoner’s rectum, which caused extensive enough injury that the man bled and bled. But he didn’t complain because the last prisoner who did was taken away and attacked by several other guards, the screams, a haunting that refuses to be calmed or set aside. It returns and returns.

  Aaaaaaaahhhhhh!!!!!!!!

  Nooooooooooooooo!!!!!!!

  PLLLLLLLLLEEEEEAAAAASSSSE!!!!

  Fingers, hands, collarbones, jaws and ribs were broken.

  Eyes were popped out of sockets.

  Arms and shoulders were regularly dislocated.

  Prisoners who were already rendered unconscious continued to be assaulted. In most every case the prisoner was reported by independent observers as not resisting. Many were handcuffed from the moment the attack was initiated.

  One man was stripped naked and locked in a cell with other prisoners who were encouraged to rape him, which they did.

  Male guards participated in torture. Female guards participated in torture. Everyone knew what was happening. Medical staff knew what was happening. The sheriff knew what was happening.

  And it is reading this that makes me finally understand, in a way I had not before, what had been done to my brother. My Monte. My best friend. Stripped. Beaten. Starved. Forced to drink water from a toilet. What else. And what fucking else?

  Monte’s testimony is not in those pages, those stories of survivors. But my brother is a survivor. My whole family is. I begin to flashback and suddenly it is 1999 and I am watching my mother desperately trying to find my brother. My mother is calling and calling. No one is helping her. I am a kid. I want someone to help my mother. I want someone to help my brother. I want someone to help me. But no one does. No one.

  Please, I can hear my mother say as though it’s happening again, Please, I am looking for my son. His name is Monte Cullors, she says to anyone who will listen, but no one will listen.

  In my cottage in the Village in 2011 I begin to cry as Mark Anthony and Ray circle around me in support. What is happening? they want to know.

  I shake my head in overwhelm and point to the screen and then I reach for the phone and call my mother.

  Mom? Mom? Are you there with Monte? I ask.

  Yes, she says.

  Can he hear me too? And she must have signaled him to pick up another extension.

  They’re suing the LA County Jail, I say. For torturing prisoners, I say.

  My mother and Monte are silent.

  And then after several seconds, maybe as long as half a minute, my mom says, Thank God.

  And then after an even longer pause, Monte says, slowly and ever so quietly but ever so resolutely, Finally.

  * * *

  Immediately I know I want to tell the world what has happened, and I say to Mark Anthony and Ray, I have to do an art piece. And almost as immediately, I go to work.

  I pull together four friends who are exquisite performers, blow up pages of the complaint to 8 by 11 feet. I call my mother and ask:

  Do you have the documentation of the phone calls you made to the jail?

  I sure do, she says. I kept everything, she says.

  I get the documentation and audiotape her written record and I get the audio of the sheriff and under-sheriff being questioned by the commission that is pulled together after the report is released. I buy caution tape, and then approach a local art space that has often allowed us to do political performance work. I call the work Stained, and when audiences walk in, they see on the walls testimonies:

  1. Deputies beat Mr. KK so violently that he suffered a fractured jaw, and required eye surgery and stitches in his ear. The incident began after deputies searched all the cells on Mr. KK’s row, and Mr. KK noticed that some of his property was missing, including items he had just purchased from the commissary. After asking to speak with a sergeant about the missing property, Mr. KK reported that a deputy shoved him hard against a wall, slapped his ear, punched his face several times, and threw him to the ground. With Mr. KK on the ground, the deputy kicked him roughly ten times in the face, jaw, and back of his head, causing a large pool of Mr. KK’s blood to form on the floor. The deputy then kicked Mr. KK’s ear three times, an experience Mr. KK described as more painful than when he was hit by a car.

  2. A Men’s Central Jail deputy attacked inmate Mr. JJ after Mr. JJ had said the deputy “didn’t have a date since high school.” The deputy slammed Mr. JJ to the ground, and, with another deputy, searched Mr. JJ’s property and threw his belongings in the toilet. The deputy stomped on Mr. JJ’s hand with his boot, shattering his knuckle, and the deputies kicked Mr. JJ’s body. The deputies used a Taser on Mr. JJ, who suffers from epilepsy, and shot pepper spray into his face. Mr. JJ suffered extensive bruises, and required surgery on the shattered knuckle in his hand.

  3. Deputies punched inmate Juan Pablo Reyes over and over again in the ribs, back, mouth, and eyes, breaking his eye socket and leaving his body badly bruised. When Reyes fell to the ground, deputies kicked him with their steel-toed boots, ignoring his cries. They did not stop there. The deputies ordered him to strip. They then forced him to walk naked up and down the hallway of a housing module, in full view of other inmates. One deputy yelled “Gay boy walking.” As he walked, Reyes cried. The deputies laughed. They then placed him in a cell with inmates who beat and sexually assaulted him. The deputies ignored Mr. Reyes’s repeated pleas to be taken out of the cell.

  Caution tape separates the audience members from the four performers who are each standing alone, as if in solitary confinement. They wear white t-shirts, grey sweats and black Converse sneakers and each uses their body in a different way to demonstrate the impact of being caged.

  One brother does burpees until he collapses.

  One woman laughs until she starts crying and then starts laughing again and she loops like that for the entire show.

  One person paces in circles and refuses to stop.

  The final performer jumps and jumps, trying desperately to reach a sky they cannot see.

  The audience hears the audio recorded for the performance: They hear the dates and notes my mother kept and took of the dozens of calls she made in search of her son. They hear the dates and notes about the dozens of times she was rebuffed. They hear the time she finally gets through to the jail psychiatrist she was referred to by the watch commander. The psychiatrist takes the call but tells my mother nothing about Monte, who at this point we do not know has been diagnosed as having schizoaffective disorder. Instead, the psychiatrist takes the time to admonish my mother: You’re rude, she says, to have called here so many times! What’s wrong with you?

  The audience hears the questioning of the sheriff and under-sheriff by the commission: What kind of jail were you running, Sheriff Baca, that allowed deputies to feel so safe in their behavior that they often beat prisoners in full view of civilians, including ACLU lawyers and representatives and chaplains?

  The show will tour for two years, but by the second show my homegirl from the Strategy Center, Francesca, will say to me, You have to do more. You can do more. She nurtures me and my growth and my vision with the love and support of a midwife. And I want not one more person to know what Monte or any of the prisoners in that report knew. I want no family to ever feel what we’ve felt. As the program tours, we begin to envision and create the infrastructure for a campaign: The Coalition to End Sheriff Violence. Launched in September 2012, our initial goal is to establish and ensure civilian oversight of the sheriff’s department.

  But as the organizing work grows, Mark Anthony and I know we need a fully realized organization in order to support it. And I am scared to do this, of course. But I also know I am not 17-year-old Patrisse who first came to the Strategy Center, the one organization I have been a part of for all of these years, the organization that I’
ve volunteered for, at that point, all of my adult life. And while I am committed to always remaining a member of the Center, I know it is time to leave my proverbial home, and take into the world all the lessons it has given me, including how to launch, execute and win campaigns by building power among those the world considers powerless.

  We had stopped the fines associated with truancy in Los Angeles despite having to do it with parents and students who were both poor and criminalized and publicly shamed. If we could do that, then we could stop the sheriff’s office with moms and dads and sisters, brothers, cousins and friends whose loved ones had been disappeared. Whose loved ones had been beaten. Whose loved ones had been tortured.

  We call our organization Dignity and Power Now.

  And in 2016 we establish the first civilian oversight board of the LA County Sheriff’s Department.

  11

  BLACK LIVES MATTER

  This was a teenager just trying to get home.

  SYBRINA FULTON

  It is July 13, 2013, and I have stepped away from monitoring events at the trial of the man who killed Trayvon Martin, 17, a year and a half before.

  I had learned about Trayvon one day while I was at the Strategy Center in 2012 and going through Facebook. I came across a small article from a local paper. Was it Sanford’s? I read that a white man—that’s how the killer was identified and self-identified until we raised the issue of race—had killed a Black boy and was not going to be charged.

  I start cursing. I am outraged. In what fucking world does this make sense? I put a call out: Have people heard about 17-year-old Trayvon Martin? I have loved so many young men who look just like this boy. I feel immediate grief, and as my friends begin to respond, they, too, are grief stricken. We meet at my home. We circle up. A multiracial group of roughly 15 people dedicated to ending white supremacy and creating a world in which all of our children can thrive. We process. We talk about what we’ve seen and experienced in our lives. We cry.

  At some point Al Sharpton hears about what happened to Trayvon and a huge rally is held in New York. An arrest is demanded. And at first it seems ignored. But the demand is elevated in Florida by a group of brilliant and brave young organizers, the Dream Defenders, led by Umi Agnew. They occupy the governor’s office, bringing direct action back into the fore for our generation. They use social media to amplify their voices, and they inspire a nation of organizers, including me, as I am working in LA to build out Dignity and Power Now. After weeks of protest, the killer is arrested and the world begins to know the extent to which he is a sick and deranged man, a man whose violence was known, a man who had had police called on him. A man who was not called a terrorist or put on a national database despite, before he murdered Trayvon, having committed actual violence.

  Before the killer’s trial begins, there are several things that we know:

  In July 2005, he was arrested for “resisting an officer with violence.” According to Jonathan Capehart, reporting for The Washington Post, the man who was allowed to carry a gun and become a neighborhood watch volunteer “got into a scuffle with cops who were questioning a friend for alleged underage drinking.” The Post continued: “The charges were reduced and then waived after he entered an alcohol education program.”

  In August 2005, the killer’s fiancée sought and received a restraining order against him because of his alleged violence against her.

  Over an eight-year period, the killer made more than 45 unsubstantiated calls to the Sanford, Florida, police department about people he termed as “suspicious black males.”

  The killer’s cousin had accused him of molesting her before the case made national news—meaning before any attention-seeking could have been her motive—and reported to the police, “I know George. And I know that he does not like black people.” She pleaded for anonymity, and she continued: “He would start something. He’s a very confrontational person. It’s in his blood. Let’s just say that. I don’t want this poor kid and his family to just be overlooked.” She begged police to ask around, to find out what kind of man this was.

  All of this was in the record before Reverend Sharpton’s rally.

  Before the demand that he be arrested. Before the Dream Defenders occupied the governor’s office.

  Before Black Lives Matter.

  But on July 13, 2013, I am traveling to Susanville, California, to visit an 18-year-old young man named Richie whom I have known and cherished since he was 14 years old. Richie has been sentenced to a decade in prison for a robbery in which no one was physically harmed. What kind of time will Trayvon’s killer get?

  We have driven fully half a day to be here, to be with Richie, whom I met when Mark Anthony, Jason and I worked as youth counselors at Cleveland. We initiated various forms of restorative justice programming in the school, and Richie stood out, even among a cohort of young people who were all standouts. He was part of a group of Black boys at the high school who couldn’t stay out of trouble—we were told. But we believed punishment was the wrong interrupter for them.

  Suspensions, for example, did little to move young people to wholeness or better performance. And they were used for even the most minor of offenses—being “disrespectful” was a common cause. Black children were far more at risk, suspended at nearly four times the rate of white students despite similar behavior patterns. Black children taught by white teachers were particularly at risk for suspension, the data showed again and again. (Although the reverse was not true. Black teachers did not move to suspend white children at higher rates.)

  Nearly seven million kids in the nation, some as young as four, were suspended in 2011 and 2012, when we were at Cleveland. Still, suspensions, for as widely as they were used, were a failure. All they did, as the data indicated, was alienate young people from school, teachers and often their peers. And they, like other punitive measures, did not address the external life and social factors that impacted children, including food and housing insecurity and police harassment or having lost a parent or close family member to mass incarceration.

  But our job, in any case, was to interrupt that trouble and we were determined to do it in a way that elevated the humanity of the students. For a year our small team sat in circle with the young men. We talked about racism and homophobia. We talked about classism and sexism. We pulled apart concepts of addiction, and not so much addiction as in drugs but as in all of the behaviors that can compel a person to behave in ways that are detrimental. Our vision was to interrupt the process that had led the young men to see themselves outside of their own dreams.

  Richie was the intellectual and the artist in the crew. He was the first one to publicly declare that he was a feminist, to say he wanted to be a Black man unlike his father, whose definition of manhood was prescribed by a limited Judeo-Christian ethos: make money, marry, have a child, rule your home, die. Richie eventually became the editor of the school newspaper and for the Valentine’s Day edition one year, he supported a young woman writer who, like many of the students, had been reading Eve Ensler and wanted to proclaim V-Day as a day to celebrate and honor vaginas.

  She wrote about how sacred they were, about how they must no longer be the site of male assault. Richie commissioned art to accompany the story and when the paper came out, he made it front-page news, along with a huge picture of a vulva. The school administration went wild, confiscating all the copies of the paper, threatening Richie with suspension. He stood his ground. He said it was their responsibility to talk about sexual assault, their duty to force people to think about women’s sexual organs differently. He said women were powerful and ought to be honored as such.

  His position would garner global attention. Richie was called for interviews from as far away as India. Eventually the school backed down from their censure of and threats against him. The experience changed him and by the time he was 18, he had moved out of his parents’ home, wanting desperately to break away from the silence of his mother and the harsh boundaries of his father. And
after staying with me and Mark Anthony for a time, and then with other friends, he found a small apartment in Reseda, not far from Cleveland, and got a job with the LA Unified School District, working with students not so different than the student he had once been. Life was going well.

  Until one day it wasn’t.

  Without warning, the district cut his hours. And that was that. They didn’t fire him, but they didn’t give him a steady schedule or allow him to earn a living wage. And because his schedule was erratic, it was hard for him to find anything else. Richie, a six-foot-five, young Black man who was living on his own and who had tattoos, and who was good enough to be hired but not good enough to really include and provide a career path for—and yet not bad enough to fire, was left in limbo and desperate. And his rent was due.

  Later, after he was arrested, he said to me that when he felt desperate, when he didn’t have the money to pay his rent, the voice he heard in his head was the one he was raised with: Men don’t ask for help. Men make it happen.

  You had already done so much for me, he said to me in the LA County Jail visitor’s room. I didn’t want to appear weak, he said. I know that’s stupid, he said, but it’s how I felt.

  I told him he could always ask me for help. He said, I don’t know what I was thinking. I guess I figured if I didn’t hurt anyone, if I just got the money, it would get me through and no one would have to know, he said. I know that sounds crazy. I didn’t want to hurt anyone. I just needed to pay the rent.

  And in fact no one was physically hurt, although I’m sure they were terrified. But Richie was still handed down a sentence of ten years. Like Monte, who also never hurt anyone, was handed a sentence of eight years. When I think about them as I write these words, I don’t only think about all the killer cops, the cops who lied, the cops who never got charged or when they were got acquitted. I also think about men like Brock Turner, the Stanford star swimmer, who raped a woman and got six months. Six months because the judge said Turner couldn’t make it in prison, that prison wasn’t for him.