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

by Tarana Burke

A long time ago I’d learned about something called the butterfly effect. It is an underlying facet of chaos theory.

The butterfly effect says that an event in nature as simple as a butterfly flapping its wings can set off a series of events that can result in something as massive...

In that moment, sitting in my car, that unsettled feeling was the flutter of butterfly wings. I didn’t know what to call it or where it was leading but I knew it was important. What I didn’t understand was how it would change the trajectory of my whole life.

Their resolve to bide their time until it ran out felt like someone flashing the glare of a mirror in my face. I didn’t want to see myself, but there I was. And even when I closed my eyes to protect them from the glare, I could still feel its heat.

I wanted them to feel seen and heard and valued.

In many of our sessions, which took place in school twice a week as a replacement for gym class, the girls did more talking than we did. It took a minute to get them used to having that kind of space after being told that they were too loud, too nosey, too talkative, or just too much, but once they opened up—they opened all the way up.

None of our work specifically addressed sexual abuse, assault, or exploitation, but among the three programs, we were dealing with it.

We were dealing with two middle school girls who were gang-raped—one of whom tried to commit suicide as a result and another who got pregnant at fourteen and was made to keep the baby as punishment for “opening her legs.”

We were dealing with a girl who was in the Children’s Home, the local foster care program, with the baby she’d had by her mom’s boyfriend and pregnant with the child of another abuser. We were dealing with a girl who was sixteen and pregnant by a thirty-five-year-old married man....

And we were dealing with an administrator at the local high school who, we had come to find out, was allowing girls to get out of detention or other trouble if they went to his office and gave him a lap dance or, as in the case of the dance team member in our pr...

Every story I heard and had no solution for rendered me stricken for days. Sexual violence was not part of our program but dealing with it was clearly vital to our work.

Few people in our social justice circles saw this emerging work as real “movement” work. They classified it as social work—as if these weren’t the same people who marched through streets chanting, “Who will speak for the children? Who will call out their names?” The hypocrisy, the apathy, the sheer depth of it all was unbearable.

Those last two words burned holes into my ears—and my heart. They. Knew. The they being Hank and Rose Sanders. The they being Malika Sanders. My friend. My sister. She knew. She knew and still she was dating Franklin, Reverend Bevel’s self-proclaimed “chief lieutenant” and right-hand man, who had told us he had parted ways with the cult leader because he disapproved of his relationship with Malika.

Reverend Bevel still had access to community children, and where he didn’t, his minions did. He breezed in and out of the museum office freely and frequently—giving him access to my child as well. I was sick.

When it comes to sexual violence in the Black community, the culture of secrecy and silence is more complex than just wanting to protect the perpetrator. The long history of false accusations of sexual violence against Black men along with our tumultuous relationship with law enforcement is a factor.

Bevel had been given shelter by my elders, my mentors, my teachers—the very people I loved so unconditionally and who, I believed, loved me back. They didn’t just carry his secret; they allowed him to be around the children they claimed to care for—community children, their children, my child.

The betrayal was dizzying. My whole life, my response to harm had been to take what was coming to me, pack it neatly in a container, and put it away. Now, it wasn’t just me who was harmed; it was those I cared about and felt responsible for. And even if I had work to do in understanding that I wasn’t a receptacle for harm—I was certain that my child wasn’t, and neither were the children in my community.

The shift from that day forward was swift but not easy. I knew it was possible to both love and loathe a person, but I had no idea what it did to the person carrying those two emotions simultaneously. One has to dominate, or they will canc...

I asked God where all this left me. What could I do now? How was I going to help these girls? A stillness came over me and the rumbling settled. I heard, or felt, an answer. It’s you.

I opened my eyes and looked around, but I already knew. I was so certain that it frightened me. I wanted to continue wailing like I didn’t hear it, but I did and now I couldn’t unhear it. But why me?

I had created what I thought was a formidable coping mechanism for all the ways my past experiences and present situations haunted me. I had compartmentalized my life and kept a huge open space to store the bad things—my own internal dusty attic. My...

I almost never opened that door—I barely walked down the hallway that led to it. The system had worked, or I’d convinced myself it did, but now it was...

I had stopped spending time with the Sanders family, though they didn’t know the extent to which our relationship had been ruined yet. Malika had since married Franklin, the former chief lieutenant, who had by now denounced Bevel and his teachings. Bevel’s wife and several of his followers still had refuge in our community, but he was mostly gone, it seemed. I had stopped attending the Sanders’s events, and I knew peo...

I had confronted Malika and Franklin, but they responded only with frustratingly well-crafted answers. Franklin, who had been the closest to Bevel, swore to me and Annie that he knew nothing of the incest or Bevel’s history as a ...

I decided to write down all the little things I had been doing to work on myself and all the bits of information that I had gathered in my short journey, and I started shaping them into a workshop.

I wrote out the story of Heaven. I wrote about how carrying my own shame had kept me from stepping out into the world to be who I was meant to be. And then I wrote about the celebrities who I knew the girls looked up to and whose stories of survival inspired me over the years, like Mary J. Blige, Fantasia, Queen Latifah, Gabrielle Union, Oprah, and of course, Maya Angelou.

I wrote down a list of words that I wished someone had explained to me when I was their age. I defined things like grooming, ...

When I looked up it was dark outside. I had been writing—longhand—for hours. I felt good about what I had put down on paper, but it still felt incomplete. Parts of my own experience were embedded in what I was creating, but I knew I needed to share my actual ...

I hung my head and said a quiet prayer, asking God to intervene and lend me support. And then I did the unthinkable. I remembered. All of it. On purpose.

How different would her life be if I had found a fraction of the courage that child had?

How different would it all be if I just had a little bit more courage? But what was courage? I wondered.

How could I find it if I didn’t know what it looked like? Maybe Heaven had courage because she had me. Maybe community creates courage? What if courage creates community?

Maybe empathy creates courage? How can you express empathy toward others if you can’t empathize with yourself? Is the co...

For the first time in my life my story was completely out of my body and I had finally told it to the one person who needed to hear it most, myself.

I searched around for a blank piece of paper. I wanted to capture this while it was coming. I found a steno pad that hadn’t been used and picked up a pen. I opened the pad and at the top of the page I wrote two words.

me...

Two weeks out from the move, I still couldn’t find an apartment. God, this is all you, I prayed. I don’t have a hand in this at all. I’m just doing my best to be obedient. If this is your will, you are going to have to come in and fill in these blanks. Period. Again. This is all you, Big Dog.

The only missing piece was to let Mrs. Sanders know that I was leaving. I’d spent very little time around her and her family over that last year. While most of my other community family and elders, like Ms. Ann, knew of my plans already, Mrs. Sanders had no idea.

As much as I was disgusted and deeply disappointed by her and her family’s failures in the Bevel fiasco, I also desperately loved this woman.

This woman who had nurtured me and poured everything into me for nearly twenty years. This woman who told me that I had power and that I was a leader when I didn’t believe it.

This woman who gave me the support to make me believe it. And this woman who was beautifully human and flawed, no...

In our ‘me too’ workshops, I always told the stories of famous women who had experienced sexual violence. I didn’t use their names—just quotes from interviews they gave.

After telling the story, I would put it in a category, for example, What she just described was statutory rape, or What happened to her was sexual assault, or This experience is sexual abuse.

After sharing the stories and explaining the categories, I would reveal the names. When I shared a name like Gabrielle Union or Fantasia, it always caused a stir. And when I added Oprah Winfre...

These girls couldn’t believe that the Black women they adored and admired had dealt with the same things and gone on to be...

Afterward, I would say to the group that no one ever has to share their story, but if they saw themselves in any of these stories, they could write “me too” on a piece of paper with their name or contact information or nothing at all. Sometimes, simply getting that bit of information out of thei...

Those workshops took at least two hours. They often ran over because of questions and one-on-ones and a need for con...

I always ended by talking about community. From how they could access community support to the kind of community we were building in this movement to how that community doesn’t have to be a large group of folks. Sometimes community is just two people I would explain—as long as there is trust, love, empathy, and compassion.

I opened the paper. It said IT WAS A BOY AT CAMP. HE MADE ME DO BAD STUFF WITH HIS BROTHER AND I DIDN’T WANT TO. I’M SORRY MOMMY. I felt my heart fold inside of my chest. That last line fell on me like a sledgehammer. My baby was sorry. My child was apologizing to me.

After some time, Kaia sat up and began to tell me the story of what happened to them. They were five and at a 21C summer camp. They told me who was involved and all the details as I fought to suppress my anger. They apologized again for not telling me because they thought they would get in trouble.