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

by Patrisse Cullors

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. Indeed, the day after Sandra Bland was found hanged in jail, in Alabama, 18-year-old Kindra Chapman was found hanging in her cell. She’d been in there for 90 minutes, held on the charge that she’d stolen a cell phone. But there were more, so many: Tanisha Anderson, a 37-year-old woman struggling with mental health issues, died after Cleveland police slammed her head into the pavement outside of her family’s home. Miriam Carey, a 34-year-old dental hygienist who made a wrong turn near the White House and was fatally shot by federal law enforcement officers in 2013. While her baby was in the car. Shelly Hilliard, a 19-year-old Black Transwoman from Detroit who is threatened with being thrown in a men’s jail for smoking marijuana unless she turns over her dealer. She does, but the cops reveal to the sellers who informed on them and Shelly is killed, cut into pieces and the pieces of her precious body, set afire. Rekia Boyd, a 22-year-old woman living in Chicago, was hanging out with her friends in the park when she was shot and killed by an off-duty police officer who said he’d received a noise complaint. Shelly Frey, a 27-year-old mother of two, shot by Walmart security who accused her of shoplifting. Aiyana Stanley-Jones, a child of seven, killed when Detroit police off...