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

by Patrisse Cullors

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. ASSATA SHAKUR

write to keep in contact with our ancestors and to spread truth to people. SONIA SANCHEZ

There was a petition that was drafted and circulated all the way to the White House. It said we were terrorists. We, who in response to the killing of that child, said Black Lives Matter. The document gained traction during the first week of July 2016 after a week of protests against the back-to-back police killings of Alton Sterling in Baton Rouge and Philando Castile in Minneapolis.

We will remember that Nelson Mandela remained on the FBI’s list of terrorists until 2008.

The fact that more white people have always used and sold drugs than Black and Brown people and yet when we close our eyes and think of a drug seller or user the face most of us see is Black or Brown tells you what you need to know if you cannot readily imagine how someone can be doing no harm and yet be harassed by police. Literally breathing while Black became cause for arrest—or worse.

We—me, Alicia Garza and Opal Tometi—the three women who founded Black Lives Matter, are called terrorists.

We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be … black, but by getting the public to associate the … blacks with heroin … and then criminalizing [them] heavily, we could disrupt [their] communities … Did we know we were lying? Of course we did. JOHN EHRLICHMAN, RICHARD M. NIXON’S NATIONAL DOMESTIC POLICY CHIEF, ON THE ADMINISTRATION’S POSITION ON BLACK PEOPLE

But having attended schools with both Black and white girls, one thing I learned quickly is that while we can behave in the same or very similar ways, we are almost never punished similarly. In fact, in white schools, I witnessed an extraordinary amount of drug use compared to what my friends in my neighborhood schools experienced. And yet my friends were the ones policed.

My neighborhood friends went to schools where no mass or even singular shootings occurred, but where police in full Kevlar patrolled the hallways, often with drug-sniffing dogs, the very same kind that they turned on children in the South who demanded an end to segregation.

Monique Morris’s reporting will tell us about the 12-year-old girl from Detroit who is threatened with both expulsion and criminal charges for writing the word “Hi” on her locker door; and the one in Orlando who is also threatened with expulsion from her private school if she doesn’t stop wearing her hair natural. Twelve.

If prisons are supposed to make society more safe, why do I feel so much fear and hurt? 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.

Forget American factory workers. Prisoners are cheaper than even offshoring jobs to eight-year-old children in distant lands. License plates are being made in prisons along with 50 percent of all American flags, but the real money in this period of prison expansion in the 80s, 90s and early 2000s is made by Victoria’s Secret, Whole Foods, AT&T and Starbucks.

Our fight is against real, and not imaginary, hardships … poverty and lack of human dignity.… The lack of human dignity experienced by Africans is the direct result of the policy of white supremacy. White supremacy implies black inferiority. Legislation designed to preserve white supremacy entrenches this notion.…

Nelson Mandela's I am prepared to die speech

And worse than the cars, most frightening of all, were the helicopters overhead. At all hours of day and night they hovered above us, shone lights into the midnight, circling and surveilling, vultures looking for the best next prey.

And the gang statutes were written so broadly that even members of Congress, under their definition, could have been arrested. The ACLU would document that, Gang injunctions make otherwise legal, everyday activities—such as riding the bus with a friend or picking a spouse up from work late at night—illegal for people they target.

The paradox of education is precisely this—that as one begins to become conscious one begins to examine the society in which he is being educated. JAMES A. BALDWIN

Now I realize my mother’s way of coping is to minimize things, both the good and the bad, but especially the bad. It’s how she manages trauma.

Naomi, we who love her and are Queer, whether we are out or not, will learn in the harshest of ways that this is what it means to be young and Queer: You can do nothing wrong whatsoever, you can just be alive and yourself, and that is enough to have the whole of your life smashed to the ground and swept away. And all you can do is watch.

In the quest to create “safe schools,” students have become demoralized and criminalized. The presence of metal detectors, surveillance cameras, drug-sniffing dogs, harsh ticketing policies, and prison-inspired architecture has created a generation of students, usually poor and of color, who are always under surveillance and always under suspicion. These modes of controlling spaces and the youth within them normalize expectations of criminality, often fulfilled when everyday violations of school rules lead to ticketing, suspension, or worse, court summons and eventual incarceration—a direct path into the criminal justice system.

The GI Bill was notoriously unhelpful to Black veterans, indeed having been forged in such a way as to uphold Jim Crow. And while some gains were made in a post–legal segregation society, it was never a tool men like my father could usefully wield.

Jim Crow left no questions or confusion. But now that race isn’t written into the law, she says, look for the codes. Look for the coded language everywhere, she says. They rewrote the laws, but they didn’t rewrite white supremacy.

but I am sure that the binary that makes a person either good or bad is a dangerously false one for the widest majority of people. I am beginning to see how more than a single truth can live at the same time and in the same person.

If he matters to me at all then he has to matter to me at every moment.

In California there are more than 4,800 barriers to re-entry, from jobs, housing and food bans, to school financial aid bans and the list goes on. You can have a two-year sentence but it doesn’t mean you’re not doing life.

What kind of society uses medicine as a weapon, keeps it from people needing to heal, all the while continuing to develop the drugs America’s prisons use to execute people?

The cheaper alternative to medicating Monte is strapping him down in five-point restraints in a room by himself. Reduces the cost of not only the medication itself, but guards and likely food.

It’s the faith that sent four Black students, on February 1, 1960, Joseph McNeil, Franklin McCain, David Richmond and Ezell Blair, to sit down at a “whites-only” lunch counter at a Woolworth’s in Greensboro, North Carolina, and refuse to move, risking bodily harm and their very lives. It’s the faith that allowed Robert Parris Moses to keep pushing for voting rights in the deep South in 1965 despite only being able to register one Black man that first summer in Amite County, Mississippi.

From my neighborhood in LA to the Bay Area to Brooklyn, Black and Brown people have been moved out as young white people build exciting new lives standing on the bones of ours. The drug war as ethnic cleansing.

We have navigated this situation with no police involvement. And that night, before I drift off to sleep laying next to Mark Anthony, I think: this is what community control looks like. This is what the love of Black men looks like. This is what our Black yesterday once looked like. And I think: If we are to survive, this is what our future must look like.

The war on drugs has done an incredible job of demonizing the people we need and love the most, of making someone’s use of drugs solely a matter of personal responsibility and weakness. There is rarely discussion about the trauma that often drives chaotic drug use and addiction. And there is no discussion about the fact that fully 75 percent of the people who use drugs never develop addiction.

At the time the drug war was launched, Black people stood, worldwide, atop a moral mountain. America—the world—knew it owed us for centuries of slavery and Jim Crow. And instead of doubling down on how to repair the harm, it made us the harm.

This is what it is like every day. Harm to white people, especially resourced white people, and the behaviors they engage in as a result, is framed sympathetically. Harm to us, more widespread, more embedded, more permanent, is framed as our own doing.

I think about the numbers of Black women who suffer abuse at the hands of their husbands and lovers because calling the cops is a worse option than getting your ass kicked. In the Black/people of color Queer community, it’s even worse.

Every defeat, every heartbreak, every loss, contains its own seed, its own lesson on how to improve. MALCOLM X

it will not be until 2011 when I read a report issued by the ACLU of Southern California that I fully understand what was done to my brother there. This is to say that Abu Ghraib was first practiced on this soil, in this America. And before the attack on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. Before the second Gulf War. The skills to torture people were honed in this nation on people who were not terrorists. They were the victims of terrorism.

the ACLU of Southern California. They have filed an 86-page complaint against the LA County Sheriff’s department for torture. Seventy of the 86 pages are testimonies from survivors and those who were witnesses to torture. The report, which includes prisoners’ testimony and that of jailhouse chaplains who could not be silent, reveals that under the watch of Sheriff Lee Baca, torture in the LA County Jail was, for at least two decades, pervasive, gruesome, systemic and routine.

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.

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 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?

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.

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.

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?

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.

Police, the literal progeny of slave catchers, meant harm to our community, and the race or class of any one officer, nor the good heart of an officer, could change that.

No isolated acts of decency could wholly change an organization that became an institution that was created not to protect but to catch, control and kill us.

The idea of abolition instead of reform

They treat my home the way they treat the jail cells my brother was locked in, a place where the police—guards—can remove you for any reason or no reason at all, at any hour, and tear up your belongings, with or without cause, take shit or leave it. And there’s nothing you can say as pieces of your life are scattered or destroyed by what can only be experienced as a violent human tornado.

Later when I hear others dismissing our voices, our protest for equity, by saying All Lives Matter or Blue Lives Matter, I will wonder how many white Americans are dragged out of their beds in the middle of the night because they might fit a vague description offered up by God knows who. How many skinny, short, blond men were rounded up when Dylann Roof massacred people in prayer? How many brown-haired white men were snatched out of bed when Bundy was killing women for sport? How many gawky white teens were stopped and frisked after Columbine or any of the mass shootings that have occurred in this nation, the immeasurably wide margin of them by young, white men?

How is this different from tactics used by the SS, the KGB, the Tonton Macoutes? And who is the real criminal, the real terrorist, and how will they be held accountable? To this day, the stench of these questions lingers, the stench of rotting meat unaddressed, unanswered.