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.

We know that if we can get the nation to see, say and understand that Black Lives Matter, then every life would stand a chance. Black people are the only humans in this nation ever legally designated, after all, as not human. Which is not to erase any group’s harm or ongoing pain, in particular the genocide carried out against First Nation peoples. But it is to say that there is something quite basic that has to be addressed in the culture, in the hearts and minds of people who have benefited from, and were raised up on, the notion that Black people are not fully human.

August 9, 2014, changed that. In Ferguson, Missouri, on that date, an 18-year-old boy named Michael Brown was chased by a police officer, Darren Wilson. We don’t know why. Later, reports would accuse Mike Brown of a scuffle at a convenience store, but whatever truth there may or may not have been to that story, what is true is that that scuffle was not known when Wilson, like Trayvon Martin’s killer, gave chase. Wilson would claim that, upon confronting the teenager, who was headed to college in a matter of weeks, he felt that his life was in danger. But Mike Brown was unarmed and autopsy reports confirm that not only was he shot in the hand and chest—presumably enough to stop him if he was charging at Wilson, which witnesses dispute—but also he was shot in the top of his head. Twice. Mike Brown’s body was left in the hot Missouri sun for four and a half hours following his murder.

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. We are a generation called to action.

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

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...

And one by one almost all of us begin to speak: 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.

But in the wake of the election, it is important that I look in the mirror, that we all do. His campaign and election has put all of our lives even more at risk. In 2016, hate crimes in the United States rose 6 percent in 25 of the largest cities. And we, Black people, were the most common target of them, with hate crimes directed at us disproportionately, at nearly 30 percent, according to FBI statistics.

And if ever someone calls my child a terrorist, if they call any of the children in my life terrorists, I will hold my child, any child, close to me and I will explain that terrorism is being stalked and surveilled simply because you are alive. And terrorism is being put in solitary confinement and starved and beaten. And terrorism is not being able to feed your children despite working three jobs. And terrorism is not having a decent school or a place to play. I will tell them that what freedom looks like, what democracy looks like, is the push for and realization of justice, dignity and peace.