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

by Patrisse Cullors

Freedom, by definition, is people realizing that they are their own leaders. DIANE NASH

collective of New Yorkers including Thenjiwe McHarris and Daniel Maree launched the Million Hoodies Movement to push for dignity and justice for us;

in Chicago, Black Youth Project 100, a Queer Black Feminist organization of 18 to 35 year olds, dedicated itself to leadership development.

We decide, for that first march, to go to Beverly Hills, to Rodeo Drive, where the wealthiest and mostly white people shop and socialize. All the other marches had been in Black communities, but Black communities know what the crisis is. We want to say before those who do not think about it what it means to live your whole life under surveillance, your life as the bull’s-eye.

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.

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.

Asset forfeiture

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 congeal upon a dead planet if we win there is no telling AUDRE LORDE

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?

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.

We have already learned from people in Palestine to douse our eyes with milk, not water, when attacked with tear gas.

This is from 2014

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.

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 there 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.

Living in patriarchy means that the default inclination is to center men and their voices, not women and their work.

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.

She is one of us and her name is Sandra Bland and we come to know her because on July 10, 2015, she was pulled over for a nonsense traffic violation by a state trooper, Brian Encinia.

Immediately, the African American Policy Forum, led by the great civil rights attorney Kimberlé Crenshaw, began using #SayHerName to acknowledge the numbers of Black women who were victims of state violence.

These few names are only part of a long, terrible list, but, like the horrific history of lynching in this country, when the story is told, women are often left out of it even as we are lynched, too. And some of the women are pregnant at the time of the lynching. Some have their unborn babies cut out of their wombs.

If I die in police custody, know that they killed me. If I die in police custody, show up at the jail, make noise, protest, tell my mother. If I die in police custody, tell the entire world: I wanted to live.

I didn’t fall in love. I rose in it. TONI MORRISON

If you hear the dogs, keep going. If you see the torches in the woods, keep going. If there’s shouting after you, keep going. Don’t ever stop. Keep going. If you want a taste of freedom, keep going. HARRIET TUBMAN

Marijuana is the first point of contact so many young people have with police, contact that often sends them spiraling deeper into the claws of the prison industrial complex.

As soon as he is inaugurated, Trump not only removes any vestige of the nods toward human rights that Obama had erected, but he says very specifically that he will have zero tolerance for we who are demanding police and law enforcement accountability, that his administration will be “a law and order administration … [and end the] dangerous anti-police atmosphere in America.”

As of this writing, three of the organizers from Ferguson, DeAndre Joshua, Darren Seals and Edward Crawford, have all been found shot dead in their cars. The cars of two of the young men, DeAndre and Darren, were burned, which destroyed forensic evidence, and Edward’s death was ruled a suicide—even as he had just started a new job and had secured a new apartment, hardly the action of someone looking to die.

I know that it was organizers who pulled us out of chattel slavery and Jim Crow, and it is organizers who are pulling us out of their twenty-first-century progeny, including racist and deadly policing practices. And I know that if we do what we are called to do, curate events and conversations that lead to actions that lead to decisions about how we should and would live, we will win.