But in the meetings we have in the Village, our focus is how to get across the message of building power and ensuring healing that we want to bring. In my home, we, mostly women, talk about what we deserve. We say we deserve another knowing, the knowing that comes when you assume your life will be long, will be vibrant, will be healthy. We deserve to imagine a world without prisons and punishment, a world where they are not needed, a world rooted in mutuality. We deserve to at least aim for that.
We agree that there is something that happens inside of a person, a people, a community when you think you will not live, that the people around you will not live. We talk about how you develop an attitude, one that dismisses hope, that discards dreams.
We deserve, we say, what so many others take for granted: decent food, food beyond the 7-Elevens and Taco Bells that populated the neighborhood that brought me forth. We deserve healthy, organic and whole food that nourishes the body and the brain, that allows for both the full course of energy and the full rest of sleep at the end of a day well-lived and balanced with service, love and dreaming. We deserve to know life without the threat of heart attacks at 50, or strokes or diabetes and blindness because the food we have access to and can afford is a loaded gun.
And shelter. We deserve that too. Not the shelter that’s lined with asbestos in the walls, or walls that are too thin to keep out the cold. Not the shelter with pipes that pour lead-based water onto our skin, down our throats in Flint, in North Dakota, in New York, in Mississippi. In places that never make the news. We deserve the kind of shelter our hard work demands, homes that are safe and non-toxic and well-lit and warm. And a shelter that is not a cage, whether that cage is a prison or its free-world equivalent. A shelter where our gifts are watered, where they have the space to grow, a greenhouse for all that we pull from our dreaming and are allowed to plant.
We deserve to be our own gardeners and deserve to have gardeners. Mentors and teachers who bring the sunlight, the rain, the whispered voices above the seedling that say, Grow, baby, grow.
We deserve love. Thick, full-bodied and healthy. Love.
And we take that message to the people in Beverly Hills, on Rodeo Drive, the idea that, in this place and in this time, when hate and the harshest version of living dominate, when even the worst assaults are blamed on the victims, when bullying has become ever present, limitless, we have come to say that we can be more than the worst of the hate. We say that this is what we mean when we say Black Lives Matter.
And with a bullhorn in my hand, wearing my black tank top and purple skirt, which is my uniform these days, and with the ever-present helicopters hovering over us, I say that they, those who come for brunch, have to confront the police presence today but that this is our everyday. I say that we were not born to bury our children, we were born to love and nurture them just like they were, and, because of this, finally we had to acknowledge that in fact this is what we had been forced to do and we had been forced to do it for too long, for centuries too long. We say that those children, now our dead, now our Ancestors, are calling to us, Trayvon is calling to us and asking that we remember so that we at last make the change that deserves to be made, that has to be made. I ask the people who are lunching, perhaps spending more on a single lunch than many of us spend to feed our families for an entire week, to remember the dead and to remember that once they were alive and that their lives mattered. They mattered then and they matter now.
And then I ask the people there on Rodeo Drive in Beverly Hills to please just stop for a moment, to hold space for Trayvon Martin, to hold space for his parents left in grief and an unspeakable pain. And when I do that it seems like the police are going to pounce; they move in closer and closer and I am scared. But I ask again for a moment of remembrance for Trayvon, and as far as I can tell, every single person within reach of my voice, and all of them white as far as I can see, puts down their champagne glass and their silver fork and stops checking their phone or having their conversation and then every last one of them bows their head.
* * *
For months, the conversations continue, mostly, although not exclusively, with women. Many of us are Queer, some are Trans. We commit to guiding principles:
• Ending all violence against Black bodies
• Acknowledging, respecting and celebrating difference(s)
• Seeing ourselves as part of the Global Black family and remaining aware that there are different ways we are impacted or privileged as Black folk who exist in different parts of the world
• Honoring the leadership and engagement of our Trans and gender non-conforming comrades
• Being self-reflective about and dismantling cisgender privilege and uplifting Black Trans folk, especially Black Transwomen, who continue to be disproportionately impacted by Trans-antagonistic violence
• Asserting the fact that Black Lives Matter, all Black lives, regardless of actual or perceived sexual identity, gender identity, gender expression, economic status, ability, disability, religious beliefs or disbeliefs, immigration status or location
• Ensuring that the Black Lives Matter network is a Black women–affirming space free from sexism, misogyny, and male-centeredness
• Practicing empathy and engaging comrades with the intent to learn about and connect with their contexts
• Fostering a Trans- and Queer-affirming network. And when we gather, we do so with the intention of freeing ourselves from the tight grip of heteronormative thinking or, rather, the belief that all in the world are heterosexual unless s/he or they disclose otherwise.
• Fostering an intergenerational and communal network free from ageism. We believe that all people, regardless of age, show up with the capacity to lead and learn.
• Embodying and practicing justice, liberation and peace in our engagements with others.
In our separate locations, we continue to meet, to think through how to infuse art and culture in our work, youth organizing, meetings and other logistics. We begin a list of local demands and add to the evolving national demands, which begin, not surprisingly, with slashing police budgets and investing in what actually keeps communities safe: jobs, good schools, green spaces. In every demand and in the faces of the people I meet in the streets, in the work, I see my mother and my brothers, my father and my sister. I am clear, we are clear, that the only plan for us, for Black people living in the United States—en masse, if not individually—is all tied up to the architecture of punishment and containment. We are resolute in our call to dismantle it.
We are firm in our conviction that our lives matter by virtue of our birth, and by virtue of the service we have offered to people, systems and structures that did not love, respect or honor us. And while we are cultivating this idea in our respective meetings and our respective teams, we, Alicia, Opal and I, do not want to control it. We want it to spread like wildfire.
* * *
But if our goal is to change the culture, to even get people to believe in and speak the words Black Lives Matter, that first year is one of fits and starts. We are able to talk about the horrifics as they roll out with regularity. We hashtag names again and again.
Renisha McBride, a 19-year-old girl, was in a car accident on November 2, 2013. Dazed and in pain, she knocked on the door of Theodore Wafer of Dearborn, Michigan. He answered her cry for help with the business end of a shotgun, killing this hurt and unarmed young woman without a thought.
John Crawford, a 22-year-old father, picked up a toy gun in the toy section of a Walmart in Beavercreek, Ohio, two days before Michael Brown was killed. He was shot and killed by an off-duty police officer who was not indicted.
There was the stunning public murder of Eric Garner on July 17, 2014, in New York City, and there was his haunting callout: I can’t breathe, I can’t breathe.
These moments, in particular Mr. Garner’s murder because it was videoed by bystanders and went viral, animate our pain and rage and resolve but we still are speaking of the killings in individu
al terms. Each its own horrific, not yet seen as part of a movement that says Black Lives Do Not Matter.
It is a year and four days after Trayvon’s killer was acquitted and Black Lives Matter was born, and we are still hard at work trying to get people to see that as much as there is a progressive movement for justice, there are those working just as hard for the opposite outcome, an outcome where only the fewest of lives matter at all.
We know that if we can get the nation to see, say and understand that Black Lives Matter, then every life would stand a chance. Black people are the only humans in this nation ever legally designated, after all, as not human. Which is not to erase any group’s harm or ongoing pain, in particular the genocide carried out against First Nation peoples. But it is to say that there is something quite basic that has to be addressed in the culture, in the hearts and minds of people who have benefited from, and were raised up on, the notion that Black people are not fully human.
And if few were willing to accept this before—the American Movement Against Black Lives—August 9, 2014, changed that.
In Ferguson, Missouri, on that date, an 18-year-old boy named Michael Brown was chased by a police officer, Darren Wilson. We don’t know why. Later, reports would accuse Mike Brown of a scuffle at a convenience store, but whatever truth there may or may not have been to that story, what is true is that that scuffle was not known when Wilson, like Trayvon Martin’s killer, gave chase. Wilson would claim that, upon confronting the teenager, who was headed to college in a matter of weeks, he felt that his life was in danger. But Mike Brown was unarmed and autopsy reports confirm that not only was he shot in the hand and chest—presumably enough to stop him if he was charging at Wilson, which witnesses dispute—but also he was shot in the top of his head. Twice.
Mike Brown’s body was left in the hot Missouri sun for four and a half hours following his murder.
Mike Brown, who in so many ways reminds me of Monte. Size, color, age when the police came for him to kill him: these all read as my brother. These stories read as unique, as shocking to so many in this country, but to the people I know, these are the public assaults—when they are not outright executions—of our family, of the people who loved and nurtured us. I know it could always have been my brother left there on a street for hours, not only killed by a cop, but dishonored by a force of them.
Because what the autopsy did not reveal is that Darren Wilson’s actions were part of a long chain of abuses visited upon the mostly Black, under-resourced and poor people who were and are the 21,000 residents of the city of Ferguson, a community in which the poverty rate is double that of nearby St. Louis. Law enforcement had, for decades, been able to do anything they wanted to do because who would speak up for a bunch of poor Black people? Who cared?
So horrifically were Black people treated that The Atlantic would run a 6,000-word report, following the Department of Justice’s report on the ongoing abuses in Ferguson, in which journalist Conor Friedersdorf would write that,
For years, Ferguson’s police force has meted out brutality, violated civil rights, and helped Ferguson officials to leech off the black community as shamelessly as would mafia bosses.
Cops were pushed, required, not only to stop people—read: Black people—for the most minor incidents not related to public safety but also to issue as many citations as possible. It became a game—who could issue the most? Each citation carried a fine, and those fines made up the municipal budget. And there was no chance of fighting this economic warfare—because doing so could also lead to a person’s arrest and jailing. The police chief sat over the municipal court.
In one case, a Black woman (almost all the cases involve Black people) ended up jailed over a first-time parking infraction. She was issued two citations that carried hundreds in fines and fees. She was poor and at times homeless, which caused her to miss court dates, which caused her to be arrested and spend time in jail. She tried to make partial payments, but without the ability to work out a payment plan, she was subject to arrest. Eventually the court relented and let her make payments, although seven years after the parking infraction, she is still in debt to the city of Ferguson for more than $500.
Friedersdorf reported another case that was cited in the DOJ report of a young Black man who lost his job after an arrest. In that case, the reporter shared that:
In the summer of 2012, a 32-year-old African-American man sat in his car cooling off after playing basketball in a Ferguson public park. An officer pulled up behind the man’s car … and demanded the man’s Social Security number and identification. Without any cause, the officer accused the man of being a pedophile, referring to the presence of children in the park, and ordered the man out of his car for a pat-down, although the officer had no reason to believe the man was armed. The officer also asked to search the man’s car.
The man objected, citing his constitutional rights. In response, the officer arrested the man, reportedly at gunpoint, charging him with eight violations of Ferguson’s municipal code. One charge, Making a False Declaration, was for initially providing the short form of his first name (e.g., “Mike” instead of “Michael”), and an address which, although legitimate, was different from the one on his driver’s license. Another charge was for not wearing a seat belt, even though he was seated in a parked car.
At the moment Jim Crow’s back was broken, American politicians found myriad other ways—all legislated, all considered legal—to ensure that the terrorism that had always been the primary experience of Black people living in the United States continued. And for a long time it continued with the broad silence of the people most harmed, which is to say, us. We did not rise up in numbers as we were written off as thugs, crack hos, welfare queens.
We used those terms ourselves! Our politicians and preachers used those terms! If slavery and Jim Crow made public spectacle of our torture—people beaten, whipped, lynched and dismembered for all to see—the last part of the twentieth century and start of the twenty-first century silenced us with false promises that if we just shut the fuck up and did what we were told, maybe we’d be Oprah or Puffy or LeBron, or, dare we say it, Barack Obama, when the truth was that the overwhelming majority of us spent a good portion of our time battling white supremacy, whether we knew it or not.
Because in Ferguson, like in cities across America, not only could the police extort Black people through the citation process for minor infractions, they also had at their disposal the huge unwieldy set of laws that made up what is known as asset forfeiture, a three-billion-dollar industry invented as part of the architecture of the drug war.
Asset forfeiture allowed law enforcement to seize property simply if they said that they suspected someone of being involved with the drug trade. They needed no proof or indictment even to seize cash, cars and homes, and police across the nation routinely did, leaving the burden of evidence on the person who was robbed. The victim had to prove that they had never done anything, something almost impossible to do. But even when they managed to fight and win their case, the legal barriers to reclaiming property were and are extraordinary, leaving the police, who were free to keep 80 percent of what they seized, to go on buying sprees. And what did they purchase most often? Military equipment. Another way of saying this is that the police in Ferguson stole from the residents and then used that money to buy the tanks, tear gas and machine guns that on August 9 would be turned against those very same residents.
And the images that first come out stun us; in particular, one.
There is a young Black girl and she is standing in front of a tank. A tank!
And in her hands she is holding a sign.
It reads simply this: Black Lives Matter.
We are a generation called to action.
14
#SAYHERNAME
We have chosen each other
and the edge of each other’s battles
the war is the same
if we lose someday
women’s blood will congea
l
upon a dead planet
if we win
there is no telling
AUDRE LORDE
We know we have to go to Ferguson. We have to go in solidarity. Alicia and Opal and I are talking, along with Darnell Moore, the professor and master communicator, about how we can be in service. Darnell will help build out the Black Lives Matter network, but that will come later and Ferguson is burning now.
I reach out to organizers we know in St. Louis and the reaction about our coming is mixed. They are literally in the middle of a war zone. Some tell us come right away, but others are clear: only come if you are a lawyer, a youth organizer, versed in policy, can provide medical and other healing support or are a journalist. The activists on the ground, mothers and fathers, the family members, friends of Mike Brown, his community, are being called looters and thugs in the mainstream media. I call and text organizers from around the country and update them, and then, in conversation with Darnell, he suggests and we agree: let’s pull together a Freedom Ride to Ferguson. We plan it for Labor Day weekend, two weeks away.
We set up a criteria-driven Facebook invite, and regional leads coordinate the vans and busses that will head from Northern and Southern California, Texas, New York and beyond to Ferguson. Monica Dennis in Brooklyn. Logan Cotton in Texas. There are so many people who go without payment or sleep to ensure our people in Ferguson get what they need in terms of support. We host a national call to lay out the idea and the logistics. Hundreds join.
We raise $50,000, primarily through CrowdRise, to offset the cost of busses and to pay for food for people once we arrive. We are in constant touch with the 15 to 20 people in Ferguson and the St. Louis area with whom we work most closely, but no one more so than one sister, Cheraaz Gorman, who has been on the ground since day one. She is our guiding light for the work in Ferguson.
A week before Labor Day weekend Darnell; Tamara, Darnell’s cousin who is a logistics magician; Tanya, my friend from high school; Coerce, a friend of Darnell’s and an organizer originally from St. Louis but who has been living in LA; and I fly to St. Louis. We rent a car and drive to Ferguson, which is like driving into an occupied zone. Law enforcement from multiple municipalities is there. The National Guard is there. There are tanks on street corners. Even Los Angeles with its constant cop drive-bys and helicopters does not prepare me for this. My God, I think. All the money put in to suppress a community. We’d need far less to ensure it thrived. Where are the politicians who are doing that? I breathe deeply, intentionally, we all do, as we get in the car and head to meet with local organizers in advance of the Ride.
When They Call You a Terrorist Page 16