When They Call You a Terrorist: A Black Lives Matter Memoir

by Patrisse Cullors

In 1986 when I am three years old, Ronald Reagan reenergizes the drug war that was started in 1971 by Richard Nixon by further militarizing the police in our communities, which swells the number of Black and Latinx men who are incarcerated. Between 1982 and 2000, the number of people locked up in the state of California grows by 500 percent. And it will be nearly a quarter of a century before my home state is forced, under consent decree, to reduce the number of people it’s locked up, signaling, we hope, the end of what will eventually be called the civil rights crisis of our time. A generation of human beings, Black women, Black children and Black men, including my father and eventually my brother, who are viewed as having no other meaningful role in our nation except as prisoners.