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

by Patrisse Cullors

Did anyone in law enforcement ever say about one of our kids, “Jail would destroy him, so let’s find another way to help.”

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?

Years later a friend, a veteran organizer, will ask me about security for the march, how we ensured our protection. She will weep when she hears my answer: we didn’t think about that. That is how they will disrupt the narrative, the work, she says. That is what J. Edgar Hoover and the FBI planned when he created the Counterintelligence Program. That one generation would be dead, jailed or too traumatized to be able to pass on what is needed to make us safe.

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.

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.

All the money put in to suppress a community. We’d need far less to ensure it thrived.

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.