But in the car, a reprieve: We turn on the local popular radio station and in between playing Hip Hop, we hear them talking about Mike Brown. Talking about him with love. We’re shocked. When we have heard our own local popular radio stations talk about us, it’s always been with disdain. Could it be that we matter?
We’re struck by, and discuss, the stark difference, too, between Ferguson and Sanford, Florida. Trayvon Martin was killed in a gated community, a place where people do not have the same familial relationships with one another, a place intended to separate people, section them off. Which is not to say that people were not outraged about Trayvon, but not until outsiders raised the issue first, elevated the pain his parents, his friends were meant to be left to deal with alone.
But here in Ferguson, Mike Brown was part of the fabric of a community not sectioned off by gates. He was known here. Here, he was loved. We see people out in the streets, in small groups, in larger ones, sometimes by themselves. They are wearing Mike Brown t-shirts. They are hosting small protests or teach-ins. One person holds a Prosecute Darren Wilson sign. There is graffiti on walls that reads simply and boldly: We Love Mike Brown.
We drive by slowly, we nod at the organizers. We offer our respect.
Cheraaz is waiting for us at the local HBCU, Harris Stowe University, where she’s set up a meeting with the president, who says we can use the school on Labor Day weekend as a central meeting ground for the Riders. We’re thrilled and grateful and leave our meeting to identify hotels for people to stay in, and then we do meet-and-greets with local organizers along with members of the Dream Defenders and Black Youth Project 100 (BYP100). It’s the first time I meet Umi Agnew and Charlene Carruthers, who started BYP100 to galvanize young organizers, 18 to 35, and build power using a Queer, feminist lens. I feel like I am meeting long-lost family. After two days, we feel like we have the lay of the land. We fly home to finish organizing the Riders.
And then two days before the Ride, the president of Harris Stowe is a ghost. I call and call and cannot reach him. Finally a colleague of his responds to me. I don’t know what you’re talking about or what happened in that meeting. But our campus is closed Labor Day weekend. You cannot come here, she says. She is not rude but she is definitive.
I call Cheraaz and tell her I will figure something out and while I sit there in a panic, my telephone rings.
Hello, a voice I do not know says, Is this Patrisse Cullors?
Yes, I say.
My name is Reverend Starsky D. Wilson. I’m the pastor at St. John’s United Church of Christ in North St. Louis. I heard you are looking for a central place to host the Riders. You can use my church.
I pause. And then: Many of us are Queer, are Trans, are gender non-conforming.
Reverend Starsky does not pause. All of you are welcome at my church, he says.
* * *
With quickness, we switch it up: through text, through Facebook, on Twitter. We send out a press release and hold a final call with nearly 600 organizers from all over the United States. Thenjiwe and Maurice, who will go on to found Blackbird Communications with Merv, another organizer, have been working on the ground tirelessly with the main local group, Organization for Black Struggle. We tell people about the pastor in North St. Louis who is giving us a home. I tell them about his spirit, his shine, his love.
Busses and vans leave on the Thursday before Labor Day. Fourteen hours for folks coming from New York, 38 hours for Californians. A team arrives from Toronto. There’s a van organized by Black Transwomen who live in Ohio. Aaryn Lang, Wripley Bennett and Cherno Biko. They risk their lives driving through the heartland, away from their designated safety zones, to come to support the people of Ferguson, to pay respects, to help. Later, they will tell us we did little to ensure their visibility, to lift up the fact that our work is being advanced by an extraordinary number of Transwomen and men. The most criminalized people on the planet are Black Transwomen who cannot pass. We resolve, as a movement, to ensure that that never happens again. After Ferguson, when we speak of ourselves, we always lead with this, that not only are we unapologetically Black, a term coined by BYP100, but we are also Queer- and Trans-led and non-patriarchal. We work with Lourdes Ashley Hunter, who is the national director for the Trans Women of Color Collective. We also work with Elle Hearnes, who is now the executive director of the Marsha P. Johnson Institute. Black Lives Matter is pushed to follow the leadership of Black Transwomen. Sometimes we fail and sometimes we succeed. After Ferguson, we affirm that we must always have an evolving political framework, that Black people are evolving so our work—and each of us—must be evolving, too.
But we, our dynamic group of 600 organizers, lawyers, policy experts, youth organizers and healers, arrive at Reverend Starsky’s on Friday night. For the first time, I lay my eyes on Opal Tometi, whom I’ve only spoken to over the phone; we embrace. But it’s anticlimactic in a way. We are clear that we are in a war zone and that there is work to do.
Darnell and I take the stage and welcome everyone. We review our guidelines about how to be with one another, how to protect and keep one another safe. And in the basement of Pastor Starsky’s church we break bread, then head to our hotels and Airbnbs and prepare to head to Ferguson the next morning. The protests in Ferguson are around the clock and by 10:00 A.M. our people—including Black journalists like Brittney Cooper, Akiba Solomon and Jamilah Lemieux—are out there with them, standing shoulder to shoulder against the tanks, the machine guns. We have already learned from people in Palestine to douse our eyes with milk, not water, when attacked with tear gas.
On Saturday evening, there are breakout protests everywhere and some of our people go to them. They head, with local organizers, to the police station and begin their own occupation—although ours, unlike law enforcement’s—is an unarmed occupation. It is a call for justice: Darren Wilson has still not been arrested, let alone charged, with Mike Brown’s murder. It will be months before we find out that in fact, he won’t be.
For those who do not go to the police station, we determine to create a space of respite for the community, and Cheraaz gets the word out. We reconvene at the church and community members begin to show up early that evening. The people of Ferguson have been on the street and under military assault for four weeks at this point. They have been demonized in the media. They—we all—need a space to speak, to be heard, to breathe. Mostly women are the people who come together that night. Among those gathered are Johnetta Elzie, Ashley Yates, Brittney Ferrell and Alexis Templeton. But Larry Fellows is there as well. All are primary organizers of the protests.
In the church there is the collective sense of overwhelm, of all the deaths and injustices that have led up to that August 9. In that room in that church we talk about CeCe McDonald, a Bi Black Transwoman who was sent to prison for defending herself after a man slammed her in the face with a drink at a bar. Cece ran out to get away from the man; he chased her and she fought back, stabbing him with a pair of scissors she had in her bag. He died and she was sent to prison, convicted of manslaughter. Like Marissa Alexander, sent to prison for firing her gun into the air to warn off her abusive husband—whom she’d gotten a restraining order against. No one was harmed, but in the same state that let Trayvon Martin’s killer go, Marissa was sent to prison. She had no right to stand her ground. We talk about Trayvon and some of us talk about our little brothers. Some women talk about their lovers and remember Oscar Grant. Some talk about their fathers and remember Eric Garner. And Monte, Monte, he is with me in that room. Is with me in that city.
And then one by one the women talk about their own experiences, which mirror ones that we all have known: poverty, abusive relationships, communities under siege. I am reminded why I will forever insist that in our work we must always make space to confront trauma and to consider strategies for resistance. At some point, sisters begin to talk about how unseen they have felt, how the media has focused on men but it has been them, the sisters, who were there. They were ther
e in overwhelming numbers—just as they were during the Civil Rights Movement. Women, all women, Trans-women, are roughly 80 percent of the people who are standing down the face of terror in Ferguson, saying We are the caretakers of this community. It is women who are out there, often with their children, calling for an end to police violence, saying We have a right to raise our children without fear. But it’s not women’s courage that is showcased in the media. One sister says, when the police move in, we do not run. We stay. And for this, we deserve recognition.
Their words will live with us, will live in us as Ferguson begins to unfold and as national attention begins to really focus on what Alicia, Opal and I have started. The first time there is coverage of Black Lives Matter in a way that is positive is on Melissa Harris-Perry’s show. She does not invite us. It isn’t intentional, I’m certain of that, and about a year later, she does. But in this early moment, and despite the overwhelming knowledge of people on the ground who are talking about what Alicia, Opal and I have done—and despite it being part of the historical record that it is always women who do the work, even as men get the praise—it takes a long time for us to occur to most reporters in the mainstream. Living in patriarchy means that the default inclination is to center men and their voices, not women and their work.
That fact seems ever more exacerbated in our day and age, when presence on Twitter, when the number of followers one has, can supplant the everyday unheralded work of those who, by virtue of that work, may not have time to tweet constantly or sharpen and hone their personal brand so that it is an easily sellable commodity. Like the women who organized, strategized, marched, cooked, typed up and did the work to ensure the Civil Rights Movement, women whose names go unspoken, unknown. So too did this dynamic unfold as the nation began to realize that we were a movement.
Opal, Alicia and I never wanted or needed to be the center of anything. We were purposeful about decentralizing our role in the work. But neither did we want nor deserve to be erased. I could tell you it was painful to watch the story of Black Lives Matter told without us, but the truth is that it was enraging.
I talk about it, our erasure, with Black women journalists, including Akiba Solomon of Colorlines magazine, who tells our mutual friend—and my co-author—asha bandele. asha has worked with and for Essence magazine for almost 15 years.
Tell me the whole story, asha says to me one day in late 2014. Tell me what people are not hearing.
She takes down my thoughts, my memories, my history and turns them into a brief essay for my approval.
Two months later Essence features a cover that for the first time in its history has no image, only the words BLACK LIVES MATTER. In it are my words. This is the first time that Alicia, Opal and I have our story told in a national publication—and it should be no surprise that it is a magazine dedicated to lifting up Black women.
I tell people what happened, who gave us space, who thought our work mattered, over and over. I tell people over and over how we need a sacred circle in order to do our work. Beyond lovers and BFFs, we need people who just love and support us without asking for anything in return except that we keep going. Alicia and Opal have each been held by their own circles of love and support, and when I set about this journey, and to this very day, I have been held by three veteran organizers and writers: asha, dream hampton and Rosa Clemente. They provide advice, make connections and often just listen when I need to talk something through. And I name them here because just as I would not be erased on their watch, neither will they be erased on mine.
* * *
On Sunday morning Reverend Starsky holds service, and many of us join all the usual members of the congregation. The service is a special one, dedicated to Black Lives Matter and the Movement. The choir opens up with a song: “We Need You to Survive.” And Reverend Starsky gives a sermon that was written in the heavens as much as it was written here. He calls us all to action, says we stand with and for one another, for our community. And at the end of the sermon, when congregants are typically asked to come forward and commit to Jesus in their lives, Reverend Starsky gives us our mandate. He asks everyone, the entirety of his church, to come forward and commit to the Movement.
After that we fan out into the streets, some people back to protests, some to the neighborhood of the prosecutor, Bob McCullough, where we pass out flyers and talk to his community. Tell him to indict Darren Wilson, the killer cop.
On our final day in Ferguson, and in response to the community, we host a discussion on patriarchy in the Movement. Darnell pulls it together. He knows that even as a Gay, feminist Black man, he will be granted more space than he has earned, he says. We speak with organizers from the area who have gathered there and talk about what it means to step back, what it means to be an ally.
Meanwhile, Mark Anthony, Prentis Hemphill and Adaku Utah have converted the basement of the church to a healing justice space, and people who have been protesting for weeks walk into a room lit low with candles where a crew of healers is at the ready to provide massage, acupuncture and talk therapy. There is an art station where people can paint and draw what they cannot name or speak. There is an altar for people who have passed. There are pillows for people to rest on. We refuse to allow anyone or anything to make us less than wholly human. And in the fullness of our humanity, we need this, too, along with protests, and the deep discussions and policy pushes and theory, a place to rest, to renew. A place to restore.
And before we take our leave, we offer one more piece, a chant I shout at the top of my lungs from another woman this nation meant to erase but who would not be erased, Assata Shakur. In the center of the room, I shout for the first time publicly these words as loudly as I can, with people echoing them after each line:
IT IS OUR DUTY TO FIGHT FOR OUR FREEDOM!
IT IS OUR DUTY TO WIN!
WE MUST LOVE EACH OTHER AND SUPPORT EACH OTHER!
WE HAVE NOTHING TO LOSE BUT OUR CHAINS!
* * *
The work grows exponentially. In the December following Mike Brown’s murder, Alicia, Opal and I meet together in South Central LA, to begin talking about building out a network. People want to form their own chapters of BLM, take the work on locally. On our last day in St. Louis, we’d broken out into regional groups to see what people wanted to do and could do. But we also had people gather by areas of expertise: lawyers, journalists and healers met to coordinate how they wanted to serve. People hosted events in their cities to talk about Ferguson, what really happened. Coverage of who we were shifted to our messaging, not the imposed messaging filtered through mainstream media. We come together that first year on calls at least twice a month—hundreds of people—to talk about next steps, the most immediate of which is getting Darren Wilson indicted.
Yet as the work grows and people lose any hesitancy in saying that our lives matter and there are even folks in other countries looking to be part of what is becoming known broadly as the Black Lives Matter Movement, maintaining my closest relationship proves more of a challenge.
All my life, as a witness to my mother’s life, I’d known love to be expressed as labor. My mother was not a cuddler, not a woman who demonstrated lots of emotion. After she and Alton broke up and until I was well into high school, I did not see my mother with a man, did not see her date. I suppose I thought she was asexual.
And while I am far more emotional than she, far more, in this regard, like my father Gabriel’s family, like my mother who worked around the clock to do everything she could to ensure her family, I do, too. This is to say that Mark Anthony and I, despite our true and genuine love and respect for one another, begin to feel far more like friends than lovers, than husband and wife.
For six months I ask him to go to couples’ counseling with me and for six months he says he will, but he never does. The romance and physical intimacy, once so much a part of our lives, fades, becomes a song associated with another time and place. I’m sure it doesn’t help that we are also living with the anxiety that
takes hold when a person is waiting for the next crisis to unfold. The whole world began to feel like a city under siege and when I think about it now, I think about how what we learned in that time was how to work together, but not how to love together. It is hard to be intimate with one person when you’re being intimate with the world.
We never fight, Mark Anthony and I; fighting is not our way with one another and I wonder later if maybe it would have helped. Did I feel that while Mark Anthony would always fight alongside me, it was also true that he wouldn’t fight for me, wouldn’t fight to keep me in his life as a wife and lover? I think I did. I suspected—perhaps I had always suspected—that I loved him and wanted him more than he did me.
I take him to dinner one night at a favorite restaurant of ours, a Korean barbeque place near our home.
We’re not working, I say.
I know, he says.
I love you, Mark Anthony, I say.
I love you, too, he says.
But we have to do our relationship another way, we agree.
After that, mostly silence. Silence and so much sadness. I am so very sad. We are transitioning, and while it is needed, it is painful. But we refuse to dis-acknowledge the role we’d played in each other’s histories and development. We refuse to pretend we are not still connected, as family. We know it just has to be family in a new way.
When They Call You a Terrorist Page 17