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

by Patrisse Cullors

The human beings legislated as not human beings who watched their names, their languages, their Goddesses and Gods, the arc of their dances and beats of their songs, the majesty of their dreams, their very families snatched up and stolen, disassembled and discarded, and despite this built language and honored God and created movement and upheld love. What could they be but stardust, these people who refused to die, who refused to accept the idea that their lives did not matter, that their children’s lives did not matter?

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. At the end of that week, on July 7, in Dallas, Texas, a sniper opened fire during a Black Lives Matter protest that was populated with mothers and fathers who brought their children along to proclaim: We have a right to live.

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

Literally breathing while Black became cause for arrest—or worse. I carry the memory of living under that terror—the terror of knowing that I, or any member of my family, could be killed with impunity—in my blood, my bones, in every step I take. And yet I was called a terrorist. The members of our movement are called terrorists. We—me, Alicia Garza and Opal Tometi—the three women who founded Black Lives Matter, are called terrorists. We, the people. We are not terrorists. I am not a terrorist. I am Patrisse Marie Khan-Cullors Brignac. I am a survivor. I am stardust.

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

It’s from behind that gate that I watch the police roll up on my brothers and their friends, not one of whom is over the age of 14 and all of whom are doing absolutely nothing but talking. They throw them up on the wall. They make them pull their shirts up. They make them turn out their pockets. They roughly touch my brothers’ bodies, even their privates, while from behind the gate, I watch, frozen. I cannot cry or scream. I cannot breathe and I cannot hear anything. Not the siren that would have been accompanying the swirl of red lights, not the screeching at the boys: Get on the fucking wall! Later, I will be angry with myself: Why didn’t I help them? And later, neither Paul nor Monte will say a word about what happened to them. They will not cry or cuss. They will not make loud although empty threats. They will not discuss it with me, who was a witness, or my mother, who was not. They will not be outraged. They will not say they do not deserve such treatment. Because by the time they hit puberty, neither will my brothers have expected that things could be another way. They will be silent in the way we often hear of the silence of rape victims. They will be worried, maybe, that no one will believe them. Worried that there’s nothing that can be done to fix things, make things better. Whatever goes through their minds after being half stripped in public and having their childhoods flung to the ground and ground into the concrete, we will never speak of this incident or the...

Later, when I am sent out of my neighborhood, to Millikan, an all-white middle school in wealthy and beautiful Sherman Oaks, I will make friends with a white girl who, as it turns out, has a brother who is the local drug seller. He literally has garbage bags filled with weed. Garbage bags. But that surprises me less than the fact that not only has he never been arrested, he’s never even feared arrest. When he tells me that, I try to let it sink in, living without fear of the police. But it never does sink in.

Later, when we are home together, she will not ask me how I am feeling or get righteously angry. She will not rub my wrists where the handcuffs pinched them or hold me or tell me she loves me. This is not a judgment of her. My mother is a manager, figuring out how to get herself and her four children through the day alive. That this has happened, but that she and her kids are all at home and, relatively speaking, safe, is a victory for my mother. It is enough. And for all of my childhood, this is just the way it is.

And for me, too, it started the year I turned twelve. That was the year that I learned that being Black and poor defined me more than being bright and hopeful and ready. I had been so ready to learn. So willing. Twelve, the moment our grades and engagement as students seem to matter less than how we can be proven to be criminals, people to be arrested. Twelve, and childhood already gone. Twelve, and being who we are can cost us our lives. It cost Tamir Rice his life. He was a child of twelve. And the cop who shot him took under two seconds, literally, to determine that Tamir should die. Tamir Rice. Twelve. Twelve, and out of time.

As I grow older I will come to question 12-step programs, see their failures, all the ways they do not reduce the harms of addiction by making their harms accrue to the individual, alone. They do not account for all the external factors that exacerbate chaotic drug use, send people into hell. The person who only has alcohol or crack at their fingertips almost never does as well as the person who has those things but also a range of other supports, including the general sense that their life matters. But what is consistent in this moment—and all the moments that will follow that I am in 12-step rooms—is that I will learn there is something radical and beautiful and deeply transformational in bearing witness to public accountability, accountability before a community gathered for the sake of wholeness.

Prisoners are valuable. They not only work for pennies for the corporate brands our people love so much, but they also provide jobs for mostly poor white people, replacing the jobs lost in rural communities. Poor white people who are chosen to be guards. They run the motels in prison towns where families have to stay when they make 11-hour drives into rural corners of the state. They deliver the microwave food we have to buy from the prison vending machines.

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. And these are just a few. Stock in private prisons and companies attached to prisons represents the largest growth industry in the American market as the millennium lurches toward its barbed-wire close.

he has schizoaffective disorder. But they do not tell us this. We learn it later, much later. After he is in prison. Way after. Like we will learn later that the sheriffs at the LA County Jail were the ones who beat him for his illness. They beat him and they kept water from him and they tied him down, four-point hold, and they drugged him nearly out of existence. There are drugs to take when a person is having a psychotic break. Those drugs can bring the person back into a good or total semblance of themselves. This was not what they did to my brother. They drugged Monte to incapacitate him, to incapacitate his humanity. To leave him with no dignity.

On the day my mother finds Monte and visits him in the LA County Jail through the glass that separates mother and son, he is barely able to hold himself up. He is drooling on himself. He is unable to speak a single full sentence coherently. But he is able to raise his hand to the glass, where my mother, shaking, meets it on the other side. I love you, my child, my baby, my son. I love you so much.

There are more people with mental health disorders in prison than in all of the psychiatric hospitals in the United States added up. In 2015, the Washington Post reported that, American prisons and jails housed an estimated 356,268 [people] with severe mental illness.… [a] figure [that] is more than 10 times the number of mentally ill patients in state psychiatric hospitals [in 2012, the last year for reliable data]—about 35,000 people.

I call an ambulance and do a mini-intake over the phone but they will not come to help when they hear his background. He is a felon, they say. You have to call the police. I beg. Please help us. This isn’t a criminal matter. They refuse. They disconnect the line.

depression is the predictable outcome when people are forced to deny their humanity.

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.… [Indeed], some school buildings become indistinguishable from prisons, police presence in them has continued to increase, with an unequal impact on lower income schools with predominantly black and Latino student populations.

He says he never did find a way to learn how to love himself. We sit with that for a time. What it means to not have the ability to love yourself. How do you honor something you do not love?

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.

Before we enter the room they nonchalantly tell me pieces of my brother’s story: We thought he was on PCP or something, one says. He’s mentally ill, I respond, and wonder why cops never seem to think that Black people can have mental illness. He’s huge! one exclaims. Massive! They had to use rubber bullets on him, one says, casually, like he’s not talking about my family, a man I share DNA with. Like it’s a motherfucking video game to them. We had to tase him too, the other cop offers, like tasing doesn’t kill people, like it couldn’t have killed my brother.

I will learn later that my brother had been driving and had gotten into a fender bender with another driver, a white woman, who promptly called the police. My brother was in an episode and although he never touched the woman or did anything more than yell, although his mental illness was as clear as the fact that he was Black, he was shot with rubber bullets and tased. And then he was charged with terrorism. Literally.

Two days later Monte is transferred to Twin Towers as a high-power alert prisoner, which means he is classified as a threat to officers. To hear this is complete cognitive fucking dissonance: my brother has never hurt another living being, let alone a cop. But he has been stripped, beaten and starved, kicked and humiliated by cops. So they get to call him the threat. They get to call him the harm. They get to charge him with terrorism.

Incarcerated as a high-power alert prisoner, Monte is kept in his cell 23 hours a day in solitary confinement, a condition that has long been proven to instigate mental illness in those who previously had been mentally stable. In my brother’s case, he deteriorates quickly, predictably, horribly and without a single doctor on that staff to assert the Oath: first do no harm. When I go to Twin Towers for the first time to visit my brother, he makes the plea again. I don’t feel well, Trisse. Can I please have my meds? They giving me Advil but I need my meds. Please Trisse. Please.

I wonder if heart meds are withheld from people, cancer meds, an asthma pump? We know Hep C treatments are. And naloxone, which can reverse an OD, has been. We certainly know meds that would slow the onset of AIDS have been kept out of reach of certain groups of people. What kind of society uses medicine as a weapon, keeps it from people needing to ...

And then I get it. 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.

I want to warn you: your brother is in really bad condition. It’s very alarming. Her affect is flat. I don’t know what to think. What do you mean, I ask? He’s on a gurney, she says. She pauses. He is strapped down, she continues. Restrained, she says.

The cops almost shrug and move to roll Monte and his gurney back out of the courtroom. And as they do, Monte yells one last thing, dragging a simple, one-syllable word out for what felt like a full minute. For what felt like a final, desperate prayer: MOM!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

we won a fight against the school district for fining parents $250 each time their child was late to school—even if they were late because the lines to get through the metal detectors were unconscionably long.

Monte flashes back to his first time in County Jail, when he was beaten and starved, and before we can stop him, he is in the bathroom where he starts drinking from the toilet. A toilet, during part of his time in LA County Jail, was all he had to drink from. Monte is having a complete flashback, a PTSD-induced flashback.

Consider: In the wake of Katrina, there were two Getty images that Yahoo News ran two days after the storm hit. In the first photo, two white residents waded through the water with food. Beneath their picture, the caption read: “Two residents wade through chest-deep water after finding bread and soda from a local grocery store after Hurricane Katrina came through the area in New Orleans, Louisiana.” Right after it, they ran an image of a Black boy also wading through the water with food. The caption read, “A young man walks through chest-deep flood water after looting a grocery store in New Orleans on Tuesday, Aug. 30, 2005.”

This is the definition used by the Center of Victims of Torture. In a sentence, torture is terrorism.

I’m going through my email when I notice one from 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.

The scope of the report is staggering. The sheer number of individuals who were kicked in the testicles, set upon and beaten by several deputies at once, individuals who were tased for no apparent reason other than the entertainment of guards, who had bones broken by guards wielding flashlights and other everyday tools that became instruments of extreme violence in America’s largest jail, is breathtaking enough. But other elements of the torture almost break me as I read the words of a civilian who testified about a wheelchair-bound prisoner whom deputies pulled off his bed, kicked and kneed in his ribs, back and neck and then shot with pepper spray in his face. I begin to hyperventilate and remember my brother on his knees drinking out of the toilet. My God. I can’t breathe.

Mr. “GGG” testifies about the deputy who forcibly searched a prisoner’s buttocks with a flashlight, placing the flashlight half an inch into the prisoner’s rectum, which caused extensive enough injury that the man bled and bled. But he didn’t complain because the last prisoner who did was taken away and attacked by several other guards, the screams, a haunting that refuses to be calmed or set aside. It returns and returns. Aaaaaaaahhhhhh!!!!!!!! Nooooooooooooooo!!!!!!! PLLLLLLLLLEEEEEAAAAASSSSE!!!! Fingers, hands, collarbones, jaws and ribs were broken. Eyes were popped out of sockets. Arms and shoulders were regularly dislocated. Prisoners who were already rendered unconscious continued to be assaulted. In most every case the prisoner was reported by independent observers as not resisting. Many were handcuffed from the moment the attack was initiated. One man was stripped naked and locked in a cell with other prisoners who were encouraged to rape him, which they did. Male guards participated in torture. Female guards participated in torture. Everyone knew what was happening. Medical staff knew what was happening. The sheriff knew what was happening. And it is reading this that makes me finally understand, in a way I had not before, what had been done to my brother. My Monte. My best friend. Stripped. Beaten. Starved. Forced to drink water from a toilet. What else.

They’re suing the LA County Jail, I say. For torturing prisoners, I say. My mother and Monte are silent. And then after several seconds, maybe as long as half a minute, my mom says, Thank God. And then after an even longer pause, Monte says, slowly and ever so quietly but ever so resolutely, Finally.

A man who was not called a terrorist or put on a national database despite, before he murdered Trayvon, having committed actual violence. Before the killer’s trial begins, there are several things that we know: In July 2005, he was arrested for “resisting an officer with violence.” According to Jonathan Capehart, reporting for The Washington Post, the man who was allowed to carry a gun and become a neighborhood watch volunteer “got into a scuffle with cops who were questioning a friend for alleged underage drinking.” The Post continued: “The charges were reduced and then waived after he entered an alcohol education program.” In August 2005, the killer’s fiancée sought and received a restraining order against him because of his alleged violence against her. Over an eight-year period, the killer made more than 45 unsubstantiated calls to the Sanford, Florida, police department about people he termed as “suspicious black males.” The killer’s cousin had accused him of molesting her before the case made national news—meaning before any attention-seeking could have been her motive—and reported to the police, “I know George. And I know that he does not like black people.” She pleaded for anonymity, and she continued: “He would start something. He’s a very confrontational person. It’s in his blood. Let’s just say that. I don’t want this poor kid and his family to just be overlooked.” She begged police to ask around, to find out what kind of man this was.

What kind of time will Trayvon’s killer get?

Richie was still handed down a sentence of ten years. Like Monte, who also never hurt anyone, was handed a sentence of eight years. When I think about them as I write these words, I don’t only think about all the killer cops, the cops who lied, the cops who never got charged or when they were got acquitted. I also think about men like Brock Turner, the Stanford star swimmer, who raped a woman and got six months. Six months because the judge said Turner couldn’t make it in prison, that prison wasn’t for him. But it was made for Richie? For Monte? For my father? My God.

At some point I recall thinking, My God. The world knows that, against a 911 operator’s orders, this man chased down and killed 17-year-old Trayvon Martin.

And Trayvon Martin, a Black boy who was just walking home. Walking with a can of Arizona Iced Tea and a pack of Skittles he’d bought for his little brother. Walking and speaking on his cell to his friend Rachel, a girl who was bullied and a girl he protected. Walking and wearing a hoodie like teenagers everywhere wear hoodies. Walking and at once set upon by a large, white-presenting man who decided that because the boy was Black and because he wore a hoodie like most teens, he was a threat. We learn that the man was ordered by a police dispatcher to stop. We learn that the man chased the boy, who was running errands for his little brother, who was talking to his friend, his friend who was bullied. We learn that the man pulled the trigger on this unarmed child who weighed what, 50, 75 pounds less than the man with the gun? We learn that the man believed he had a right to do what he did. A right to stand ground that wasn’t being challenged by a boy carrying iced tea and Skittles. He believed that his assumed rights superseded this child’s right to walk home to his own house to bring his little brother a treat.

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? We could be talking about Emmett Till. This is who I think about throughout the course of the trial and the weeks and months leading up to it. I think of Emmett Till and his family and also my nephew, Chase, Monte’s son, who is 14 the year Trayvon is killed. Will he be shot down and killed for walking while Black, and will his murder matter so little it doesn’t even make the news and no one will be held accountable?

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. No! This is impossible. Wait a minute. Hold on. This doesn’t make sense.

But she writes these words in the wake of the acquittal: btw stop saying that we are not surprised. that’s a damn shame in itself. I continue to be surprised at how little Black lives matter. And I will continue that. stop giving up on black life. black people, I will NEVER give up on us. NEVER. And then I respond. I wrote back with a hashtag: #BlackLivesMatter Alicia and I brainstorm over the course of the next few days. We know we want to develop something.

We are determined to take public this basic concept: That our lives mean something. That Black Lives Matter. After a few days I return to Facebook and I begin to post. I write that we are going to begin organizing. I write: I hope it impacts more than we can ever imagine.

Outside my door, there are at least a dozen police in full riot gear. I am a single woman, unarmed and five feet two. Every single one of the people standing before me, their faces disguised by helmets, their bodies shielded in Kevlar, has a weapon trained on me or on my home. A Latinx officer is the one who engages me. Someone tried to shoot up the station, he begins. We think they may be hiding in one of the Village cottages. No one is here, I say. Why are you shaking then? he pushes, aggressive but not nasty. Because your shotguns are pointed at me. Because all these guns are pointed at my home, I say, and gesture with my eyes not with my arms, another lesson from Know Your Rights. I reassert, There’s no one here you’re looking for.

Ten, maybe a dozen, cops force us at gunpoint—and by we, I mean also six-year-old Nia Imani—into the courtyard in front of our cottage while the others swarm past us and enter my home like angry hornets or a sudden airborne plague. They are in my home for hours. Detectives join them at some point and begin taking pictures of everything outside and, from what we can tell, inside my home. We have not been given a search warrant and we cannot protest. We are being held at gunpoint the entire time and are mostly blocked from watching what they do inside my home, what they take, what they leave. 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. After three hours or four, without another word to us, they finally leave. After that, I move out.

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? What the hell is going on?

in the midst of that dreaming, you are yanked out of bed by armed men dressed in riot gear, who possess no warrant, who have snuck into your bedroom through an unlocked back door. Their only reasoning is that you “fit the description.”

And then I ask the people there on Rodeo Drive in Beverly Hills to please just stop for a moment, to hold space for Trayvon Martin, to hold space for his parents left in grief and an unspeakable pain. And when I do that it seems like the police are going to pounce; they move in closer and closer and I am scared. But I ask again for a moment of remembrance for Trayvon, and as far as I can tell, every single person within reach of my voice, and all of them white as far as I can see, puts down their champagne glass and their silver fork and stops checking their phone or having their conversation and then every last one of them bows their head.