But it was made for Richie? For Monte? For my father? My God. Is that not reason enough to shut it down?
But on this hot July day in 2013, Richie is thick in the first year of that sentence and we, his wife, Taina, his best friend Haewon and I, are sitting in a prison visiting room in Susanville that is like most California prison visiting rooms, sterile and windowless, with tables that have the legs cut down to three inches off the ground, so no playing footsies. There are the requisite vending machines against a wall where we can buy overpriced food that ensures lucrative contracts for white-owned companies and salty, sugary, processed food items that are loaded guns for we who have no real choice but to eat them.
And on this day in Susanville we are talking about a million things, although eventually everything will come back to what is unfolding in Central Florida and Trayvon Martin’s killer: Will he walk?
For as much as we are there in California for and with Richie, together, loving each other and laughing as much as is possible, we are also in Florida and our hearts are full with the Fulton and Martin family and we are afraid. We do not speak of our fear about the decision that looms, knowing that our children so rarely receive justice in this nation. We speak about hope because after all, what else? At some point I recall thinking, My God. The world knows that, against a 911 operator’s orders, this man chased down and killed 17-year-old Trayvon Martin.
And Trayvon Martin, a Black boy who was just walking home. Walking with a can of Arizona Iced Tea and a pack of Skittles he’d bought for his little brother. Walking and speaking on his cell to his friend Rachel, a girl who was bullied and a girl he protected. Walking and wearing a hoodie like teenagers everywhere wear hoodies. Walking and at once set upon by a large, white-presenting man who decided that because the boy was Black and because he wore a hoodie like most teens, he was a threat.
We learn that the man was ordered by a police dispatcher to stop.
We learn that the man chased the boy, who was running errands for his little brother, who was talking to his friend, his friend who was bullied.
We learn that the man pulled the trigger on this unarmed child who weighed what, 50, 75 pounds less than the man with the gun?
We learn that the man believed he had a right to do what he did. A right to stand ground that wasn’t being challenged by a boy carrying iced tea and Skittles. He believed that his assumed rights superseded this child’s right to walk home to his own house to bring his little brother a treat.
And we are scared that a jury of this man’s peers would agree.
We are scared because of the work and time it took even to get the man arrested.
We are scared because Trayvon’s beautiful life and terrible death is meant to be erased; the reporting of it made no front-page news, no Dateline, no Anderson Cooper. The story on my Facebook feed was a tiny blog post, a post not connected with mainstream media. A white man is questioned and then released after he shoots and kills an unarmed Black boy who was walking home. And in that instant I was filled with rage and confusion. Was this 2012 or 1955?
We could be talking about Emmett Till. This is who I think about throughout the course of the trial and the weeks and months leading up to it. I think of Emmett Till and his family and also my nephew, Chase, Monte’s son, who is 14 the year Trayvon is killed. Will he be shot down and killed for walking while Black, and will his murder matter so little it doesn’t even make the news and no one will be held accountable?
I grew up in a neighborhood that was impoverished and in pain and bore all the modern-day outcomes of communities left without resources and yet supplied with tools of violence. But when someone in my neighborhood committed a crime, let alone murder, all of us were held accountable, my God. Metal detectors, searchlights and constant police presence, full-scale sweeps of kids just walking home from school—all justified by politicians and others who said they represented our needs. Where were these representatives when white guys shot us down?
Were it not for the brave and determined young people who formed the Dream Defenders joining forces with the brave and heartbroken parents of Trayvon, Sybrina Fulton and Tracey Martin, and had there not been sit-ins, protests, occupations, and Al Sharpton, this boy’s name would be on no one’s tongue, save for his family and the friends who loved him.
Because of all this, we know and we are afraid, but still, in that prison in Susanville on July 13, 2013, in the state that would give a desperate Black boy who physically harmed no one ten years but a rapist six months, we hold on to hope.
Because what else?
Seven hours after it begins, the visit with Richie ends, and we head back to the motel we are staying at in the small town. Of the just under 20,000 residents, nearly half, 46 percent, live in one of the town’s two prisons.
Susanville, incorporated in 1860, was named for the child of the man who laid claim to founding it at a time when founding something was a euphemism for manifest destiny and homesteading and all the blood and death both of these wrought. “Founding,” a term like the phrase “collateral damage,” the use of which was ratcheted up in the 90s so they didn’t have to say dead Iraqi children.
But the point is that we are an 11-hour drive from Los Angeles because Susanville is deep in Northern California, farther up than the Bay Area and at the border of Nevada, near Reno. And it’s entirely unlike the vibrancy and wealth generally associated with our state and its outsize imagery of glittery Beverly Hills and shiny Silicon Valley. If you saw a picture of it, West Virginia would likely come to mind before California would.
But Susanville is actually more reflective of the average California town than anything that is marketed to tourists. And it looks like American towns across the rest of the country: small and working class, except here the demographics report an extraordinary diversity—if, that is, diversity is distorted, like a horror-house mirror or a story from The Twilight Zone. In Susanville, there is almost no one who is Black and free at the same time, although a cursory reading of census reports could have you believing it’s a racial Kumbaya.
Once a place where loggers and miners worked, today Susanville’s singular growth industry is prisons; roughly half of all the adults who live here work at one of the two facilities. Of course those numbers intensify wildly if you count the work done, the labor extracted, from the prisoners who are shipped here predominantly from LA County, from the Bay.
Being here, looking at the storefronts, the people, it feels like we are trapped in a black-and-white photograph from the deep South in the 1950s, and the images of hard rural living come stuttering back as if to taunt us that freedom has never arrived and won’t. All you can feel are the walls and the bars, the gun towers and barbed wire, which is only offset by all the military. The random appearance of soldiers who are based near Susanville. The sense of impending war. The American flags in every size you can imagine. What must it be like to live hoping for and invested in war and crime because without them the people of Susanville must believe that the world would collapse?
On the way back to the motel we stop at a small store to buy microwavables. There are no restaurants we want to eat in, plus this is cheaper. We buy pre-made chicken sandwiches or something like that. We are trying to be healthy. The motel has a microwave. We eat and we get on my laptop. Eating and waiting for the verdict to come in. I go on my Facebook page because that’s where everyone is updating what’s happening. I am nervous but Facebook keeps me connected.
And then it happens.
I start seeing the timelines update. The killer is acquitted of the first charge. And then he is acquitted of all of them. Every. Single. One. Of. Them. I go into shock. I lose my breath. My heart drops to my stomach. I am stunned and for a moment cannot move. When I begin to move I go into denial.
No! This is impossible. Wait a minute. Hold on. This doesn’t make sense.
But as soon as I deny it I know that it is true, and I am overcome with embarrassment and shame. How could this have happened? Wh
y couldn’t we make this not happen? And then I start crying. And I feel wrong about crying. My tears make me want to hide. I feel like I have to be the particular kind of strong Black people are always asked to be. The impossible strong. The strong where there’s no space to think about your own vulnerability. The space to cry.
I look around the room, this small motel room, and I look at the two women I have traveled here with. In my role as a counselor at Cleveland, I played such a particular role for them. Haewon, a junior when Richie entered their high school as a ninth grader, embraced him as her little brother. I held them both close to me, mentored them both, trained them to be organizers for justice in our communities, organizers against the prison industrial complex, organizers for human rights.
And Taina, Taina, who fell in love with Richie months before he was arrested, committed to him, which made me commit to her. When they decided to marry after learning of his sentence, I was the one to marry them. I had become ordained in 2004, primarily because I was determined to marry Queer people despite what was then marriage inequity in California and the nation. As time moved forward and marriage equity took hold, my ordination and desire to marry people expanded to include all those who for different reasons were prevented from legally being families. Including prisoners and their wives. I officiated Taina and Richie’s service, their exchange of vows inside of jail, and there has not been a weekend in all the years that they’ve been together when she has missed seeing him.
So even though I am not so much older than they are, whether Richie or Taina or Haewon or even Trayvon, I am old enough to feel responsible. I have become my big brother Paul. I feel the weight of being with two Black women who are younger than me in this prison town, and I wonder, if it came down to it, would I be able to protect them, protect us? Do I have any power to ensure that they will live long—that their Black lives will be full and healthy?
I cannot stop myself from crying. As much as I want to. I weep hard. We all do. And then I get angry. Once again my world is defined by cognitive dissonance: to be in this town where this little boy, literally this 18-year-old boy, who had hurt no one, would be locked up for ten years and this white-presenting man could kill us and go home.
And then my friend Alicia writes a Facebook post. Alicia, who I’d known for seven years at this point, who I’d met at a political gathering in Rhode Island where at the end of the day our goal was to dance until we couldn’t dance anymore. She and I danced with one another all night long and began a friendship that holds us together to this very day. But she writes these words in the wake of the acquittal:
btw stop saying that we are not surprised. that’s a damn shame in itself. I continue to be surprised at how little Black lives matter. And I will continue that. stop giving up on black life. black people, I will NEVER give up on us. NEVER.
And then I respond. I wrote back with a hashtag:
#BlackLivesMatter
Alicia and I brainstorm over the course of the next few days. We know we want to develop something. We know we want whatever we create to have global reach. Alicia reaches out to her friend Opal Tometi, a dedicated organizer who is running Black Alliance for Just Immigration, based in Brooklyn, New York. Opal is a master communicator and develops all the initial digital components we need to even get people to feel comfortable saying the words Black Lives Matter, for even among those closest to us, there are many who feel the words will be viewed as separatist, that they will isolate us. Opal pulls together the architecture for our first website and Twitter accounts, our Facebook and Tumblr. We are determined to take public this basic concept: That our lives mean something. That Black Lives Matter.
After a few days I return to Facebook and I begin to post.
I write that we are going to begin organizing.
I write: I hope it impacts more than we can ever imagine.
12
RAID
Most middle-class whites have no idea what it feels like to be subjected to police who are routinely suspicious, rude, belligerent, and brutal.
DR. BENJAMIN SPOCK
We lived in a tiny oasis village nation island in the center of the city that was called St. Elmo’s, a Technicolor vision of love come to life under the Black and gentle hands of a man, an artist named Rozzell, and his nephew Roderick. In 1969 they saw an abandoned street and cracked concrete and convinced their local councilman, a Black man named Tom Bradley who would later become mayor, to envision a world with them, to believe that there could be a place where life could be lived in peace and in courage, in the full embrace of light and of human possibility, and a world where mighty redwoods could replace weeds, where gardens could be planted, which they were, gardens that survive to this day, along with the redwood that marks the start of the Village as testimony that despite war and despite conflict and despite hate and despair, there could be another way forward, there could be another way to dream, another way to coexist and if we wanted to walk on rainbows we needed only paint the concrete and embrace our own imaginations, which is what happened, and we walked on them, the rainbows, and we told the story of ourselves in murals that called out to whoever passed by we were here, we were fucking here and we were dreaming and supporting and believing and everything beautiful really was possible because we were possible and we were a safe harbor and telling you this now, writing it all down, does not begin to edge toward explaining what was taken from me when the raids made it impossible for us—for me—to live in the one place I found I could live—and live all the way—simply because we, because I, believed and demanded that police stop killing Black people.
* * *
The police helicopters sound closer than usual, and I speculate that this summer afternoon in 2013 they are coming into our Village, St. Elmo’s, a collective of cottages in mid-city LA where artists and organizers of color have lived and taught art to the community since the 1960s.
I tell JT, my friend and an artist who is visiting my home with his six-year-old daughter, that on top of the Black Lives Matter work, Dignity and Power Now has been pushing and demanding that the local sheriff’s department be held accountable, making us very unpopular with law enforcement. Dignity and Power Now is part, now, of the larger Black Lives Matter network.
We were raided a few months ago, I tell JT. It was the first time police had ever entered our Village.
Our Village, where we have our own ecology, green succulents and cacti, and a Chinaberry tree proud in the center. This is my home, the first place where I have felt wholly safe, the place where I have felt whole. Mark Anthony and I moved here after living in the Canyon.
We rent out two cottages in the Village. Two cottages we have used to heal Monte. Cottages where we have organized. Our cottages where we have grieved. Where we have made love and been love. But the Village as a whole has been a meeting ground for hope, and now the helicopters we’ve been hearing since early in the day sound overhead.
In June 2013 Trayvon Martin’s killer has not yet been acquitted and Alicia, Opal and I have not yet come together to form Black Lives Matter or shape it into a national and then international network.
There is nothing actually called Black Lives Matter yet, but there have been protests across the nation. There have been sit-ins. There has been the fight just to get the killer arrested. There has not been silence. Not in Florida or Oakland. Not in Chicago or New York and not in LA, where I live and have fought for the right to simply live since I was 16 years old.
JT, his daughter Nia Imani and I feel like small prey beneath a hawk. We still ourselves in a corner of the cottage. The helicopters seem like the loudest things we’ve ever heard. We speculate: Are they even monitoring anyone or is this just another reminder to us that we are a people under siege? Another story that does not get told when they tell the story of California is the story of occupation, of what it means for so many of us who are Black or Latinx to live unable to escape the constant monitoring by police, the idea that your very existence, the brown of your s
kin, is enough to get you snatched up, enough to get you killed.
We’ve always known this but in 2012 and 2013 we were able to use to social media to animate a national conversation. But make no mistake.
We knew it when Oscar Grant was killed in Oakland, sitting still and compliant on the floor of the Fruitvale BART station.
We knew it when Amadou Diallo was killed. Forty-one bullets. Some through the bottom of his feet.
We knew it when Sean Bell was shot and killed getting into a car after his own bachelor party in New York.
We knew it when we read about Clifford Glover, a boy of ten living in Queens, New York, in April 1973. Little Clifford was shot by police while simply walking with his stepfather down a street in their South Jamaica, Queens, neighborhood. The killer cop, Thomas Shea, who was acquitted, simply offered as his defense that he didn’t see anything except the child’s color.
Ida B. Wells knew it when she risked her life to expose the killers of Black men, women and children by white lynch mobs that were populated by, and often led by and protected by, Southern law enforcement.
The Deacons of Defense knew it when they organized themselves to protect people from the tyranny of white vigilantes and police in 1964 in Jonesboro, Louisiana, and then founded their first chapter in Bogalusa, Louisiana, on February 21, 1965, the day Malcolm X was assassinated.
And the Black Panthers knew it when Huey Newton and Bobby Seale, with two guns slung over their arms, organized in the name of self-defense against the Oakland Police Department in October 1966.
We were and are their progeny, called to pick up a torch no generation wants to or can ignore.
When They Call You a Terrorist Page 14