Unbound: My Story of Liberation and the Birth of the Me Too Movement

by Tarana Burke

“This poem is powerful because she is powerful, and we’re not even talking about all of the stuff she’s been through,” I explained.

“This is a poem about a Black woman making sure the world understands that she is not defeated despite what they may think of her.”

When I was done, the class was silent except for a few awkward snickers. My classmates’ reactions ranged ...

As I sat tuning out my teacher, my mind returned to what I had just seen—how had a woman who had been through what I’d been through been able to claim such confidence and pride? I asked to be excused to the restroom and walked down the hall until I got to the one stairwell that wasn’t constantly overrun with kids. I sat down, stunned by how badly I wanted to both scream and cry.

Everything I knew and held sacred in my memory of young Maya Angelou and what happened to her was smacking up against what I had just heard. And even though I stood up in class and defended her right to be “phenomenal,” intellectually, I didn’t understand what that meant or how it was even possible emotionally.

While I was finding newfound comfort in anger, she was smiling. While I was lashing out, she was laughing and reciting beautiful poetry. Why wasn’t she mad? Why wasn’t she cursi...

Even if I didn’t believe it all the time, Maya Angelou had given me a model for how to step out into the world and make them believe it.

Before, I had thought she was giving me a road map for how to “go along to get along” or “fake it till you make it.” I was convinced that she lived a dual life like my own. But when she opened her mouth, none of that proved to be true. Listening to her voice, watching her lips perfectly articulate each and every syllable of that poem, I knew she meant every word. I believed her.

I believed that she felt like a Phenomenal Woman as she delivered each line with an audacity and authenticity I had never seen before. I felt like I knew the kind of pain she had to be holding ...

Where had her shame gone? How had it not seeped into her cells, and if it had, how did she get it out? And if all of it—the pain, shame, and fear—were still there, where did she find space for this thing I saw in her face and heard in ...

More than anything, I contemplated the question that eventually became central to my healing.

If what I saw was real, how could a body that holds that kind of pain also hold joy?

Transferring felt like another chance to reinvent myself. I didn’t want to fight. I didn’t want to cut class. I wanted to lean into the “me” I had caught a glimpse of the day we read “Phenomenal Woman” in class.

My honors classes were predominately white, as were most of the teachers at the school. There were few activities for Black and Brown students, and I found myself challenging students and teachers alike about issues in the media or around the school.

I quickly found my lane at Lehman. I joined the track team—which I had quit at Truman, even though I had been running since I was six years old.

there was about a three-day period, usually over a weekend, where I was in limbo and on my best behavior because any little slip-up could get the trip revoked.

In my mother’s house, you didn’t actually know if you were going until the day you left. But I made it. I made it on that trip, and it was worth every one of those phases. My life would never be the same.

I didn’t make you a leader. You were a leader before you got on that bus this morning. You were a leader when you woke up this morning. You are a leader because you are a strong Black man. You were born a leader.”

Everyone’s attention followed her, but I watched that boy. I could see his eyes welling up with tears. He was breathing heavily, his nostrils flaring like an angry bull. I knew that feeling. I knew the struggle of bottling up emotions that were just below the surface of our skin, begging to be freed.

Later that year, a group of five Black boys were accused of assaulting a white woman in Central Park, famously known as the Central Park Jogger case. One of the accused boys, Yusef Salaam, was dating a girl from my school who was also in 21C. We didn’t know him well, but the shock of seeing someone we knew, even casually, blasted across the media so viciously was powerful.

None of us believed that they had beaten and raped the jogger.

We were all familiar with Black men being falsely accused, and we could not sit by and watch the boys in the Central Park case, or Black youth generally, be shamed and demonized in this vulgar way. I didn’t empathize with the jogger as a rape survivor at the time—I connected with the young Black and Brown boys whose lives were being snuffed out simply because their Black and Brown skin made them expendable.

The jogger had never even identified the five Black boys as her attackers. She couldn’t, because she had lost all memory of the attack. I didn’t think of the trial as a rape trial until much later, when the true rapist was revealed.

My mother found out about it by reading my diary while I was away at my aunt’s house in South Carolina for the summer. She did not respond well. She called my aunt, furious and demanding that I come home early. She had no shame in reading my private thoughts and feelings and used the moment to heap more shame on.

She simply snapped, “Now that you are having sex they have to check you to make sure you don’t have any diseases or anything.” No nurturing—just shame and judgment.

One of the worst things about surviving sexual violence—of any kind—is that for a period of time you lose the power to make decisions about your own body. Someone else takes control.

Whether they physically wrestle or coerce it away, they take it. It is an indescribably dehumanizing feeling.

My mother didn’t bother to take two minutes to warn me that a doctor was going to enter me with foreign objects. I lay on that table, afraid and ashamed and embarrassed—and hurt as the doctor prodded me and hit me with a barrage of questions. “How long have you been sexually active?”

I told her that it hurt. And she did the thing that so many people have the audacity to do: she corrected my feelings. “It doesn’t hurt. It’s uncomfortable,” she insisted. “You can withstand a little discomfort.”

I lay my head back down and resigned myself to her definition of my experience. I told myself it didn’t hurt, but it did. It hurt my head that couldn’t keep up with the pace of this moment, and it hurt my heart that was already so battered and bruised. I had learned long ago that silence was my best friend in these moments, so I lay there silently in shame and pain.

as usual I was left to wonder about it, because all communication between us was either interrogation or delegation. Even without hearing all the words being said, the familiar tone in her voice sent me spiraling backward.

As I got older I heard stories of women who resented their children or mistreated them because they looked just like their fathers—the ones who had abandoned the family or mistreated the mothers.

I don’t know much about my biological father, but I know that the circumstances of my birth are painful to my mother. In later years, I’ve thought that it was maybe not hate she had for me, but for herself.

Maybe what I felt from her as a child was a manifestation of the pain and memories that my reflection brought up in her.

There is no question that self-hate severely limits one’s capacity to love fu...

Capacity and desire are not the same thing, especially in d...

No matter how deep my desire was to love my child, I was still encumbered by the ghosts I had tried to bury. I failed—often. If I hadn’t had the experiences I had with my mother, I’m not sure I would have fought so hard to build my capacity.

Resting on my desire was not enough to both love and liberate my child in the way I wanted to.

I know how hard it hits when you realize that each life has its own purpose, even the lives of our children, and that purpose is not dictated by our needs.

there was Mrs. Sanders. She was larger than life to me. She was an alchemist, a dream weaver, a warrior. She had crafted a universe for us to evolve and thrive and shape-shift into believers in our own infinite and immediate power—the leaders she was sure we already were. Of course I trusted her.

Just twenty-four hours after I decided to trust her and take a chance, I was enrolled in college. I spent the rest of the afternoon making the other phone calls and faxing the additional paperwork. I laid out all the information in a notebook and went home to face my mother.

you’re supposed to pick up and go off to college in Alabama when?” “They said I need to get there by next week so I can keep my room. Mrs. Sanders paid the deposit to hold it already.” “And what about books and supplies and all of that kind of stuff?” “Mrs. Sanders said don’t worry about all of that now, just get there.” “Mrs. Sanders said, huh.”

I waited for the bomb to drop. There was always a bomb with my mother. I tried to dampen my excitement so as not to stir her up. My mother, without spending a single dollar, and maybe unbeknownst to her, had gifted me with so much, but her greatest gift was knowing when I most needed her to say yes.

She said yes to letting me read books and try new activities and go on trips like the o...

The older I got, the more each yes gave way to bigger and better opportunities, but the yeses also seemed more difficult to come by and were matched ...

I wouldn’t have been able to appreciate the doors Mrs. Sanders had opened for me without the groundwork my mother had laid and the importance she had placed on education and culture, but she sometimes made walking through those doors feel like walking through a minefield. Now I had gotten everything that mig...

how are you going to get there?” She looked me directly in the eyes, like she...

“I … I need you to get me a ticket,”...

Although I never had too many details about our financial situation, I knew that money was perpetually tight and I tried not to ask for things that were outlandish or selfish.

“With what money, Tarana Janeen?” As soon as I heard both my names I knew that I had tripped a wire.