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

by Patrisse Cullors

I am gripped with an encompassing sense of shame and humiliation. I don’t want to feel this way but here is all of our family’s pain on full blast before people who hate us. I try to stay centered, to say with my eyes, which are laser-focused on Monte, what the court will not allow me to say with my mouth. I love you Monte. I am coming for you. I won’t let them take you, baby. Just stay with me, Monte. Stay with me.

And then slowly I begin to consider: Is this what it is to be a mother who has to carry the weight of having to protect her children in a world that is conspiring to kill them? Are you forced to exist within a terrible trinary of emotion: rage, grief or guilt? What of the joy and the peace that loving a child brings? What of pride and of hope?

But I don’t know whether or not she actually believes me. I didn’t know then and I don’t know now.

I have been an organizer since I was 16 years old.

Chase and Monte reunite awkwardly; Chase won’t give his father a full embrace. He’s in full-blown adolescence and perhaps that explains part of it, but most of it is about how you can never get back the time.

From my neighborhood in LA to the Bay Area to Brooklyn, Black and Brown people have been moved out as young white people build exciting new lives standing on the bones of ours. The drug war as ethnic cleansing.

This is what our Black yesterday once looked like. And I think: If we are to survive, this is what our future must look like.

I am finding ways to heal my relationships with Black men, who, for all my love for them, are people who disappear, people who are inconsistent.

I am still just a kid whose fathers, both of them, disappeared. Whose brother did.

The war on drugs has done an incredible job of demonizing the people we need and love the most, of making someone’s use of drugs solely a matter of personal responsibility and weakness.

And there is no discussion about the fact that fully 75 percent of the people who use drugs never develop addiction.

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.

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 daughters and sons were criminalized for choices made often out of absolute desperation and lack of any other real options.

In the first photo, two white residents waded through the water with food. Beneath their picture, the caption read: “Two residents wade through chest-deep water after finding bread and soda from a local grocery store after Hurricane Katrina came through the area in New Orleans, Louisiana.” Right after it, they ran an image of a Black boy also wading through the water with food. The caption read, “A young man walks through chest-deep flood water after looting a grocery store in New Orleans on Tuesday, Aug. 30, 2005.” This is what it is like every day. Harm to white people, especially resourced white people, and the behaviors they engage in as a result, is framed sympathetically. Harm to us, more widespread, more embedded, more permanent, is framed as our own doing. This is to say that for a long time and for all the structural analysis I was learning about race and the world, at the end of the day, I was still just a teenager with a heart left broken. But then one day that summer, I don’t hear from Mark Anthony. We had been in the habit of talking not once but throughout the day, the days. I call him and call him but there’s no answer. This is before the age of texting and many of us do not have cell phones. So I call a landline that rings until it rings out. Mark Anthony is totally a ghost.

Not long before, Cheyenne and I had a torturous breakup—she’d left me for one of my friends.

Suspensions, for example, did little to move young people to wholeness or better performance.

Black children were far more at risk, suspended at nearly four times the rate of white students despite similar behavior patterns. Black children taught by white teachers were particularly at risk for suspension, the data showed again and again. (Although the reverse was not true. Black teachers did not move to suspend white children at higher rates.)

He said it was their responsibility to talk about sexual assault, their duty to force people to think about women’s sexual organs differently. He said women were powerful and ought to be honored as such.

Alicia and I brainstorm over the course of the next few days. We know we want to develop something. We know we want whatever we create to have global reach. Alicia reaches out to her friend Opal Tometi, a dedicated organizer who is running Black Alliance for Just Immigration, based in Brooklyn, New York. Opal is a master communicator and develops all the initial digital components we need to even get people to feel comfortable saying the words Black Lives Matter, for even among those closest to us, there are many who feel the words will be viewed as separatist, that they will isolate us. Opal pulls together the architecture for our first website and Twitter accounts, our Facebook and Tumblr. We are determined to take public this basic concept: That our lives mean something. That Black Lives Matter.

Most middle-class whites have no idea what it feels like to be subjected to police who are routinely suspicious, rude, belligerent, and brutal.

In June 2013 Trayvon Martin’s killer has not yet been acquitted and Alicia, Opal and I have not yet come together to form Black Lives Matter or shape it into a national and then international network.

The Deacons of Defense knew it when they organized themselves to protect people from the tyranny of white vigilantes and police in 1964 in Jonesboro, Louisiana, and then founded their first chapter in Bogalusa, Louisiana, on February 21, 1965, the day Malcolm X was assassinated.

And the Black Panthers knew it when Huey Newton and Bobby Seale, with two guns slung over their arms, organized in the name of self-defense against the Oakland Police Department in October 1966.

Sixty-three percent of these people killed by police are Black or Latinx. Black people, 6 percent of the California population, are targeted and killed at five times the rate of whites, and three times the rate of Latinxs, who have the largest number of people killed by police.

we know nothing else, we know that in the wake of the acquittal of Trayvon Martin’s killer, we have to change the conversation. We have to talk very specifically about the anti-Black racism that stalks us until it kills us.

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.

I talk about it, our erasure, with Black women journalists, including Akiba Solomon of Colorlines magazine, who tells our mutual friend—and my co-author—asha bandele. asha has worked with and for Essence magazine for almost 15 years.

Two months later Essence features a cover that for the first time in its history has no image, only the words BLACK LIVES MATTER.

IT IS OUR DUTY TO FIGHT FOR OUR FREEDOM! IT IS OUR DUTY TO WIN! WE MUST LOVE EACH OTHER AND SUPPORT EACH OTHER! WE HAVE NOTHING TO LOSE BUT OUR CHAINS!

We never fight, Mark Anthony and I; fighting is not our way with one another and I wonder later if maybe it would have helped. Did I feel that while Mark Anthony would always fight alongside me, it was also true that he wouldn’t fight for me, wouldn’t fight to keep me in his life as a wife and lover? I think I did. I suspected—perhaps I had always suspected—that I loved him and wanted him more than he did me.

I begin to date again. I want to love, I need to love. I want a family, a core, a loving and stable center to return to, to awaken to.

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.

I discussed my relationship with JT with Future, said that we were talking about having a baby. They couldn’t have been more respectful.

families. I told Future about Gabriel. I told them about Monte. I told them how much I wanted a child of my own.

It wasn’t easy, they said. And then they said, If having a baby is what you want, I will support you.

We are Queer and cannot take having a baby for granted in the way heterosexual couples can. And soon, I will learn how true Future is to their word when JT disconnects from me, from the baby.

Days later, I have my first doctor’s visit. JT says he will come with me. But when it’s time to get ready, he will not come out of the bathroom. I won’t beg. This is crazy and not what we agreed on. I call Carla. In no time she is picking me up, taking me to the doctor. Everything is fine: the heartbeat, the growth. I’m doing this. I’m having a baby. I’m having this baby. This baby whom I am already in love with. Not long after, I have a conversation with Future—we are speaking daily at this point, but this discussion is especially significant.

Months later, after the baby is born, JT and I will commit to a beautiful, restorative mediation process and I will learn about the grief he had been hosting privately, grief he didn’t know how to discuss or understand.

When I am five months pregnant we are ready to fully make the move but we spend time, first, on vacation in Toronto. During our stay there, Future tells me that one of their best friends is getting an award. They buy me clothes to attend the ceremony, a fitted black dress, and even five months pregnant, I feel gorgeous and sexy in it. We get into Future’s car and drive to their friend’s house to pick them up. Weird, I think. Why don’t they have their own transportation, I wonder, though fleetingly.

We’d planned on marrying, of course, but the horrors with immigration at the airport sped up our decision. dream hampton officiates the wedding for

Marijuana is the first point of contact so many young people have with police, contact that often sends them spiraling deeper into the claws of the prison industrial complex.

And then I get angry. Because we’ve tried so hard. Ninety-six percent of Black women tried so hard in voting against him.

Clinton had a universe of faults but under her administration we likely wouldn’t have seen married people being picked up and separated by border patrol. Health care, including Planned Parenthood, which is the only access to prenatal and gynecological health care many poor women have at all, wouldn’t be at risk.

Since Black Lives Matter was born in 2013 we have done some incredible work. We have built a decentralized movement that encourages and supports local leaders to name and claim the work that is needed in order to make their communities more just. This is monumentally difficult in a world that has made even activism a celebrity pursuit. But we have more than 20 chapters across the United States, in Canada and the UK, all autonomous but all connected and coordinated. We have centered and amplified the voices of those not only made most vulnerable but most unheard, even as they are on the front lines at every hour and in every space: Black women—all Black women.

We open the doors and ask people who have not been paid attention to to join us. And we have brought healing to our movement, the ideas and practices that demonstrate that as we seek to care for communities, we must also care for ourselves.

Across our network, we are devoted to pushing for and realizing bail reform and, perhaps closest to my own heart, we are envisioning and creating a new movement culture in which we care for the humanity of the people we’re fighting for and with.

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.