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

by Patrisse Cullors

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?

They preached it more than they preached about what it meant to be the world’s wealthiest nation and yet the place with extraordinary unemployment, an extraordinary lack of livable wages and an extraordinary disruption of basic opportunity.

And a prison population that, with extraordinary deliberation, today excludes the man who shot and killed a 17-year-old boy who was carrying Skittles and iced tea.

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

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

The swim or motherfucking sink generation.

that at the end of the day, from love we come. To love we must return.

Reverend Starsky D. Wilson.