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

by Patrisse Cullors

Renisha McBride, a 19-year-old girl, was in a car accident on November 2, 2013. Dazed and in pain, she knocked on the door of Theodore Wafer of Dearborn, Michigan. He answered her cry for help with the business end of a shotgun, killing this hurt and unarmed young woman without a thought. John Crawford, a 22-year-old father, picked up a toy gun in the toy section of a Walmart in Beavercreek, Ohio, two days before Michael Brown was killed. He was shot and killed by an off-duty police officer who was not indicted. There was the stunning public murder of Eric Garner on July 17, 2014, in New York City, and there was his haunting callout: I can’t breathe, I can’t breathe. These moments, in particular Mr. Garner’s murder because it was videoed by bystanders and went viral, animate our pain and rage and resolve but we still are speaking of the killings in individual terms. Each its own horrific, not yet seen as part of a movement that says Black Lives Do Not Matter.