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

by Patrisse Cullors

It is Patrisse herself, and her co-workers and comrades—including Alicia, Opal, and the other organizers and activists affiliated with the Black Lives Matter network and movement—whose commitments and achievements are maligned with the label of terrorism. No white supremacist purveyor of violence has ever, to my knowledge, been labeled a terrorist by the state. Neither the slayers of Emmett Till nor the Ku Klux Klan bombers who extinguished the lives of Carole Robertson, Cynthia Wesley, Denise McNair, and Addie Mae Collins before they could emerge from girlhood were ever charged with terrorism or officially referred to as terrorists. But in the 1970s, President Richard Nixon instinctively hurled that label at me, and in 2013 Assata Shakur was designated by the FBI as one of the world’s ten most dangerous terrorists.

The seemingly simple phrase “Black Lives Matter” has disrupted undisputed assumptions about the logic of equality, justice, and human freedom in the United States and all over the world.

But my father, with no defenders or language that could dissect the harm done to him, is out there in the mix, a sustenance drug seller and a regular drug user. He is left to fend for himself. I try continually to talk to my father about structural realities, policies and decisions as being even more decisive in the outcomes of his life than any choice he personally made. I talk about the politics of personal responsibility, how it’s mostly a lie meant to keep us from challenging real-world legislative decisions that chart people’s paths, that undo people’s lives. It was easy to understand that when race was a blatant factor, a friend says to me in a political discussion one afternoon. Jim Crow left no questions or confusion. But now that race isn’t written into the law, she says, look for the codes. Look for the coded language everywhere, she says. They rewrote the laws, but they didn’t rewrite white supremacy. They kept that shit intact, she says. I don’t know if I ever convince my father of this line of thinking. A decade of 12-stepping has ensured that he only really knows how to hold himself accountable. Even with all my speeches and his engagement with me at the Strategy Center, I sense when we talk that everyone and everything else kind of gets a pass. For this reason we spend most of our time focusing on the here and the now. My father wants to re-center himself with me, in his life, in the world at large. He gets a job driving a cement truck and comes to meet me e...

My father pauses and breathes deep and then he tells me I can find him in the rundown hotel around the corner from where he lives. I rush over there, annoyed the place hadn’t already occurred to me. Dad, what the hell? I demand to know when he opens the door to his room. But he can barely answer me. All of him is sagging. From his bones on the inside to his skin on the outside, he’s a man gone limp. I don’t know whether to be angry or to be brokenhearted. I’m sorry, my father says quietly, his voice threadbare as tears begin to roll down my cheeks. I love this man so much. I do not want to lose him. This is all I can think about it. Stay with me, Dad. Don’t leave me. Don’t leave me please. As always, he is gentle with me. But there is also a stillness to him that comes as a surprise. I don’t want to call it peace. It is not peace. But there is a stillness and also a deep well of sadness. In that room my father, like me, begins to cry. He tells me he is embarrassed, ashamed. He tells me he caught another case and is awaiting trial. That’s why I hadn’t been able to reach him. He was in jail and for the moment, he’s out on bail. They want to give me seven years, he says ever so slowly, and those words hang there, a blade on a guillotine ready to sever us from ourselves. There is nothing about you I am not willing to know, I say to my father. My father who taught me to live beyond judgment. He tells me how much he hated driving that damn cement truck. He tells me how much he h...

At the court I approach the bailiff to ensure Monte’s on the docket. Monte Cullors? she asks. Yes, I say. She looks over some materials and disappears for a moment and then returns and looks me in my face. 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. And also, she continues, using the same flat tone, his face is covered with a spit net, she concludes. This woman, who perhaps has a brother or perhaps has a son or perhaps has loved somebody’s brother or son, is almost as nonchalant as the officer who told me my brother had been shot with rubber bullets and tased. My mouth is agape. I’m in shock. I’m trying to process what I cannot imagine. They are going to have my brother hemmed up like he’s Hannibal fucking Lecter? How is it possible that the only response we have for poor people who are mentally ill is criminalization? How does this align with the notion of a democratic or free society—to not take care of the least of these? More mentally ill people in our nation’s prisons than in all of our psychiatric hospitals—combined?! Human beings charged with all manner of terrible-sounding crimes—terrorism!—like my brother has been. What kind of society do we live in? And, like my brother, many have never harmed another being. And even those who have harmed others—what if there...

Monte’s first arrest for an attempted breaking and entering while he was in the middle of an episode was his first strike. While he was incarcerated, guards claimed to find a weapon in his cell. Monte denied it was his and we never knew about this, but regardless, he was convicted and therefore: strike two. This third incident in which the charge is terrorism, also in the midst of an episode where he yelled and carried on but threatened no one and hurt no one, represents strike three and that’s it. He qualifies for a living death sentence and that’s fucking that. The public defender is nonplussed as he says this, and he is not embarrassed that he has no plan to fight back. He says this is what Monte wants. He literally said that. Go tell my brother we’re hiring a lawyer, I order, and he disappears through a door, back where I suppose the holding cells are kept, where my brother is being kept. He comes back quickly. Your brother says don’t worry about it. Now I hiss: Go. Tell. My. Brother. We. ARE. Hiring. A. Lawyer. Full damn stop. This time when he disappears and returns, he is compliant. Is that humility I read on his face, I wonder? Your brother says fine, he informs my family. He says it’s okay to find a lawyer and that he might know someone, he mutters. We’re done here, I tell my mother. Being an organizer, volunteering with the Strategy Center, has made me bold. Fuck this loser. There is another way. Now we have only to find the money, which is a mountain that shoots...

There is rarely discussion about the trauma that often drives chaotic drug use and addiction. And there is no discussion about the fact that fully 75 percent of the people who use drugs never develop addiction. (For some drugs, like marijuana, fully 90 percent of those who use never become addicted.) They wake up, go to work or school, pay their taxes, raise their kids, make love with their partners. They live. They live regular old boring lives. But for my father, my brother, others I know, chaos was a factor before drugs were a part of their lives. Why does no one ever address that? Where we could see that other laws were race-based and aimed at disrupting Black life, we had—we still have—a hard time accepting drug policy as race policy and the war on drugs as the legal response to the gains of the Civil Rights and Black Power Movements. At the time the drug war was launched, Black people stood, worldwide, atop a moral mountain. America—the world—knew it owed us for centuries of slavery and Jim Crow. And instead of doubling down on how to repair the harm, it made us the harm. After removing a debilitating number of jobs and the funding to ensure quality schools, after instituting laws that disrupted families’ possibility to thrive—welfare laws beginning in the 1970s meant that women often lost benefits needed to feed their children if they had a man present in the home, even if between the two of them they still subsisted on poverty wages—our mothers and fathers and daug...

I start cursing. I am outraged. In what fucking world does this make sense? I put a call out: Have people heard about 17-year-old Trayvon Martin? I have loved so many young men who look just like this boy. I feel immediate grief, and as my friends begin to respond, they, too, are grief stricken. We meet at my home. We circle up. A multiracial group of roughly 15 people dedicated to ending white supremacy and creating a world in which all of our children can thrive. We process. We talk about what we’ve seen and experienced in our lives. We cry. At some point Al Sharpton hears about what happened to Trayvon and a huge rally is held in New York. An arrest is demanded. And at first it seems ignored. But the demand is elevated in Florida by a group of brilliant and brave young organizers, the Dream Defenders, led by Umi Agnew. They occupy the governor’s office, bringing direct action back into the fore for our generation. They use social media to amplify their voices, and they inspire a nation of organizers, including me, as I am working in LA to build out Dignity and Power Now. After weeks of protest, the killer is arrested and the world begins to know the extent to which he is a sick and deranged man, a man whose violence was known, a man who had had police called on him. 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 kn...

They know who we are and give us private space in the back to meet. And in between the hours of planning and strategizing about what to do, we sing gospel songs and we mourn. We laugh and we cry. By the end of the night Angela Peoples from the LGBTQ human rights organization GetEQUAL says, Y’all. They’re gonna do a candidates forum. Bernie Sanders and Martin O’Malley are going to be there. We need to interrupt that. And I say, We need to shut it down. And that was that. The next day, I text Jose Antonio Vargas, the brave journalist who had been part of the Washington Post team that garnered a Pulitzer for its breaking coverage of the mass shooting at Virginia Tech, and who outed himself as undocumented, having been sent to the United States from the Philippines as a child to live with his grandparents. Jose is going to be moderating the candidates’ forum shortly and because I know him, I have to tell him we are coming. Okay, he says. And with that, 100 of us from the Black Lives Matter Movement and the immigrant rights movement break up into two lines and enter the room where the candidates are speaking. Amber Phillips, an organizer and a woman with one of the most amazing voices anyone could ever hear, sets it off. She begins singing: Which side are you on my people, which side are you on? (We’re on the freedom side!) Tia Oso, a Nigerian sister from Arizona who worked with Opal’s organization, Black Alliance for Just Immigration, hits the stage first. We wanted to begin b...

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. And I will say that to my precious Shine, or Malik, or Nisa, or Nina or any of the children and young people we cherish and lift up, that you are brilliant beings of light. You have the power to shape-shift not only yourselves but the whole of the world. You, each one, are endowed with gifts you don’t even yet know, and you, each one, are what love and the possibility of a world in which our lives truly matter looks like.