If the spurious argument that we live in a postracial society, and that Barack Obama’s election represented the nail in the coffin of American racism, had any real traction among serious-minded people, the Black Lives Matter Movement and Movement for Black Lives (BLMM/M4BL) stopped that lie in its tracks and further underscored the lesson that neither representative politics nor charismatic leaders constitute a magic formula for liberation.
As I was growing up in Detroit in the early 1970s, in the wake of the 1967 rebellion—another uprising sparked by police violence—there was a horrific police decoy unit operating in the city at the time called S.T.R.E.S.S. The acronym stood for Stop the Robberies, Enjoy Safe Streets. White undercover cops would creep around Black neighborhoods, sometimes feigning intoxication, all but asking to be robbed in order to entrap young, would-be robbers. These setups also resulted in a number of back-alley shootings and violent arrests of Black Detroiters.1 At the time, some of us naively felt that a desegregated police force populated by Black officers from our community would curb or eliminate police violence, and the election of the city’s first Black mayor, Coleman Young, in 1974, would deal a decisive blow to racism and police violence in our city. We were wrong. The anti–police violence protesters in Ferguson, Oakland, Chicago, New York, and Baltimore in 2014 and 2015 knew better. Even if not everyone articulated the problem in these terms, their actions represented an understanding of the systemic nature of racism and the complex workings of a multiracial, white-supremacist, neoliberal state. In other words, this generation of Black activists has witnessed desegregated police forces, many more Black elected officials (including a Black man in the White House), and the growth of a Black millionaire class, but Black poverty, suffering, and vilification still exist, and they are increasingly class specific.
This understanding was most clear on the streets of Baltimore after the death in police custody of twenty-five-year-old Freddie Gray on April 19, 2015, eight months after the death of Michael Brown. Gray was arrested on a minor infraction, handcuffed, and literally tossed into the back of a police van, after which the officers reportedly took a deliberately bumpy route, presumably to teach Gray a lesson for whatever he had said or done. He died five days later, and the city erupted in protest. People poured into the streets by the thousands. Curfews were imposed and ignored, the Maryland National Guard was in the streets, and violent clashes took place between crowds and police. Cars were attacked, rocks were thrown, businesses were looted, and dozens of people were arrested. Baltimore in spring 2015 was the second major rebellion to follow a police killing in less than a year. But Baltimore was not Ferguson. In Baltimore the city’s mayor, Stephanie Rawlings Blake, was Black, as were many of the city’s police and elected officials, including the outspoken young Black female state’s attorney, Marilyn J. Mosby.2
Gray’s case was not a simple racial formula of white cop killing Black youth, as three of the six police officers indicted for Gray’s murder were black, including a Black woman. Given these demographics, one might have expected activists to hesitate before making the allegation of racism. But they did not. It was immediately clear to them that the problem was structural racism, which included profiling and harassment of a certain type of poor or working-class Black youth, an aggressive policing style in poor Black communities. That notorious blue code of silence among cops, which often trumps any kind of racial solidarity that Black officers might otherwise feel toward the Black community, is very real.
Black political rage was on full display in Baltimore during those days in April. Having witnessed the disastrous handling of the Ferguson protests, Baltimore officials took a different approach. Apologies were given, “preemptive” measures were taken, concern was expressed for the Gray family, and community meetings were held. Still, protesters wore T-shirts that read “Fuck the Police.” And by all indications, they meant it.
After a series of high-profile police killings across the country—Tamir Rice, Walter Johnson, John Crawford, Eric Garner, and more—the Baltimore crowds were not in the mood for dialogue or apologies. They were outraged and fed up. At the height of that rage, Black elected officials and the nation’s first Black president counseled calm. In President Obama’s words, “Anger is not always productive. All too often it distracts attention from solving real problems.” In this case it was Black anger that had uncovered, and forced national attention on, issues that had for too long been swept under the rug.3
Rutgers University professor and outspoken Black feminist scholar-activist Brittney Cooper captured this sentiment in her provocative essay in Salon entitled “In Defense of Black Rage: Michael Brown, Police and the American Dream.” She wrote, “No, I don’t support looting. But I question a society that always sees the product of the provocation and never the provocation itself. I question a society that values property over black life. But I know that our particular system of law was conceived on the founding premise that black lives are white property.”4 Long before Ferguson and long before Baltimore, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., the Black prophet of nonviolence, understood the underpinnings of Black rage when he said, “I could never again raise my voice against the violence of the oppressed in the ghettos without having first spoken clearly to the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today: my own government.”5
In July 2016, as the movement was being castigated and disparaged for the actions of a lone Black gunman with a history of mental problems, who ambushed and killed five police officers in Dallas, BYP100 took the bold stance of defending Black rage and rejecting the criticisms being levied against the larger BLMM/M4BL. On July 8, BYP100 issued a statement that indicted state violence and insisted that movement organizations should not back down or retreat from protests or organized campaigns in light of harsh and threatening criticisms: “Black rage is justified rage. Let us stay steadfast in our mission and stand unapologetically with our people.”6 They were in no way endorsing the sniper’s actions, but at the same time they were not going to be intimidated into silence by those who sought to blame and indict BLMM/M4BL for actions they had nothing to do with.
Cooper, King, and BYP100 sought to put rage and rebellion in political and historical context while simultaneously confronting the hypocrisy of state actors, who deplore violence against property during mass protests but daily engage in practices that do violent harm on a large scale to human beings in the United States and around the world.
In Baltimore, as in Ferguson, spontaneous rebellion in the streets sparked the formation of new organizations and further energized existing ones. Two local organizations at the center of the protests after Freddie Gray’s death Leaders of a Beautiful Struggle (LBS) and Baltimore Bloc. LBS was formed five years before Gray’s death by newly politicized members of high school and college debate teams, who decided to apply their research and oratorical skills to community organizing. One of the founders, and its director of public policy, Dayvon Love, articulated a grassroots radical vision of Black politics, arguing that “those most affected must be in the leadership” of movement work, and “those of and from communities most affected must speak for ourselves.”7 LBS joined forces with Baltimore Bloc, the Baltimore Algebra Project, and others to form a new coalition. “Baltimore United for Change” represented a constellation of forces that occupied the Baltimore City Hall on Wednesday, October 14, 2015, to protest the confirmation of the unpopular Kevin Davis as the permanent Baltimore police commissioner. One of the principal organizers was Makayla Gilliam-Price, a dynamic teenage leader of a group called City Bloc. Gilliam-Price is the child of an activist family, whose parents were leaders of an anti–death penalty campaign to save her uncle’s life in the late 1990s. Tyrone X. Gilliam, whom many believed was innocent of any crime, was executed on Maryland’s notorious death row while Makayla was just a baby. Nearly two decades later, the family’s fighting spirit continued in Makayla.8
During the city hall takeover, sixteen people were arrested after enduring harsh treatment at the hands of the Baltimore officials: bathrooms were closed, no food or water was allowed in, and finally the power was turned off. The sixteen were released Friday, October 16. LBS had also participated in an earlier campaign to prevent the building of a new hundred-million-dollar juvenile detention center, viewing it as yet another investment in what activists have critiqued as the school-to-prison pipeline.9 LBS, it should be noted, has a different leadership model than many of the other groups discussed in this book. They opted for an LLC organizational model, rather than a nonprofit arrangement. They have a CEO, a COO, and various directors. In Love’s view, this model gives his group more independence.10
The class divides within the Black community in Baltimore were on full display during the protests and factored in on a number of levels. First, there is the life story of Freddie Gray, who grew up poor and suffered from lead poisoning as a child, which impacted him the rest of his life.11 Local organizers like Love, a child of working-class Baltimore residents, understood the interrelated nature of race and class in the lives of the city’s Black poor. He also understood that whether the local officials were Black or white was not the decisive factor in making a change. In a television interview, Love observed, “People reduce racism to individual white folks in leadership. Baltimore shows the sophistication of white supremacy. How it takes black figures, puts them in institutional positions to give the veneer of justice when really the same institutional arrangement exists.”12
Baltimore Bloc, an antiracist, multiracial formation, was another group that responded to Freddie Gray’s death. Some of its members were arrested along with members of LBS, and others, in the protests that followed. They were also involved in protesting police killings before Gray’s high-profile death. In July 2013, young Tyrone West was killed by Baltimore cops attempting to take him into custody.13 Baltimore Bloc became close to the family and helped to keep West’s case in the public eye. Protests around this case were ongoing as the tragedy of Freddie Gray’s death played out. Baltimore Bloc had also organized around homelessness and policing. However, in 2014 after the Ferguson uprising, Black activists Ralikh Hayes, Tre Murphy, and Michaela Brown joined the group to lend their organizing skills, building upon the work of founders Duane “Shorty” Davis and Payam Sohrabi. Brown and others have since left Baltimore Bloc to found Baltimore Leaders Organizing for Change.14
While explicit and highly visible feminist leadership may not have been involved in the Baltimore struggle, as it was in other contexts, gender still played a role. The fact that two of the most powerful politicians in the city, and one of the cops implicated in Gray’s death, were Black women militates against any simple formula that would put all Black people on the same side. Women were also prominent in the streets. And when the Department of Justice report on Baltimore came out after months of investigation, it revealed, not surprisingly, that women were also being harassed, profiled, and abused by the Baltimore police. The report indicated that Baltimore officers sometimes treated with contempt women who tried to report sexual assault. One victim was referred to by an officer as “a conniving little whore.”15 Even though in Baltimore, as elsewhere, the cases of police “misconduct” that grabbed public attention were those involving male victims, numerous, lesser-known, female victims suffered similarly. Their cases, however, were rarely elevated to the level of national protest. This was the message of the #SAYHERNAME campaign, which will be taken up in the next chapter.
Sixteen months after Freddie Gray’s death, twenty-three-year-old Korryn Gaines, a Black mother of two, was shot dead by Baltimore County police, revealing another aspect of the racial and gendered nature of state violence. The shooting occurred inside Gaines’s apartment just outside Baltimore in Randallstown, Maryland. She was killed on August 1, 2016, in the presence of her five-year-old son, who was also injured by police in the fray. The police were trying to serve a bench warrant for a simple traffic violation and another misdemeanor. Gaines, like many Americans, was a gun owner. She also had a strong sense of individual liberty and had had previous run-ins with the police, during which she felt her rights were being violated.16 She believed in the right to bear arms and in the right to self-defense, as she expressed in cell phone videos and Facebook posts, which provide glimpses into Gaines’s political views.17 She was outraged by police killings of unarmed Black people, thought she was a potential victim, and was determined not to be “kidnapped” or killed without a fight.
Clearly, some of Gaines’s views may have been unorthodox. For example, in lieu of her state-issued license plate, which she argued authorities had wrongly confiscated, her car carried a cardboard sign that read simply, “Free Traveler.”18 This makeshift plate had precipitated her earlier encounter with the police. Whatever one thinks about Gaines’s ideas or her tactics of resistance to an authority she felt was unjust, she surely did not, activists insisted, deserve to be executed in front of her child because of those beliefs.
When police arrived at Gaines’s home that ominous August day, she refused to let them in and indicated she was armed. After a seven-hour standoff, police opened fire on Gaines, who returned fire and was killed within minutes. No officers were hurt. Two months later, seven antigovernment followers of white ranchers Cliven and Ammon Bundy were acquitted after a six-week armed standoff, in which they seized control of government lands in a federal wildlife reserve in Oregon. They were not given the death penalty for their armed confrontation with government forces; rather, their actions were judged legally justified, and they were eventually set free.19 As one headline read, “Sovereign law made Cliven Bundy a ‘patriot’ but Korryn Gaines ‘crazy.’”20 The contrast and similarities between the two cases are striking. What is also striking is the venomous comments and mocking condemnation of Gaines on social media by whites and a handful of Blacks, who suggested her alleged stupidity and recklessness resulted in her death. Whether Gaines had a diagnosable mental illness, which some have speculated on but her family denies, psychological stress owing to her life circumstances (she had been a victim of domestic violence), or an unshakeable conviction that she was living in an oppressive society with few resources to fight back, she did not deserve to be murdered.
Protests for Korryn Gaines were smaller than for Freddie Gray, but Black feminists were in the lead. They argued that as a Black woman she had been condemned and vilified for her resolve not to be broken. Whatever she had done, Gaines had not injured or killed anyone and did not fire the first shot in her fatal encounter with the police in her own home. A large sector of the movement, wedded to a rejection of respectability politics, refused to write Korryn Gaines off or devalue the loss of her life because she was not a perfect victim. A few days after the incident, BYP100’s Charlene Carruthers wrote an impassioned essay in Colorlines magazine entitled “In Defense of Korryn Gaines, Black Women and Children.”21 She used Gaines’s case as a launching point to talk about the vulnerability of Black women and children in a society that pathologizes Black mothers and their families. When BYP100 members joined a civil disobedience action in front of the Fraternal Order of Police offices in Baltimore some months later, in solidarity with Baltimore Bloc organizers, they wore T-shirts that read, “Remember Korryn.”
Another group that emerged in the wake of Ferguson and defended Korryn Gaines’s memory was Black Feminist Futures, a small network initiated by Atlanta-based artist-activist Paris Hatcher. When Gaines was killed, Black Feminist Futures organized and encouraged others to organize altars in her memory. Dozens of them sprung up in public and private spaces around the country and were sites for numerous vigils.
Black Feminist Futures has also hosted “visioning salons,” borrowed from Black surrealists of the early twentieth century and very much a part of the larger Afrofuturist movement, to imagine alternative futures and create space for Black joy and healing amid a movement born of pain and trauma. This work is situated within a BLMM/M4BL culture that has embraced self-care, healing, and spiritual practices as tools for sustaining movement work.22
While the Baltimore uprising began as an expression of Black rage in the wake of Gray’s death, Black officials had a dual approach—harshly condemning the militant protesters and feigning empathy for the peaceful ones. Marilyn Mosby, the young Black prosecutor, who indeed enjoyed community support and was considered progressive, held a press conference announcing she would prosecute the six implicated officers. “I heard your calls for ‘no justice, no peace!’” she said in direct response to the protesters.23 The implied promise was of justice, but the outcome fell short in the eyes of many. All of the officers implicated in Gray’s death were charged, but eventually all either were acquitted or had the charges against them dropped.24 The damning Department of Justice report on Baltimore’s policing practices was issued on August 10, 2016. It concluded, in part, “BPD [Baltimore Police Department] engages in a pattern or practice of … making unconstitutional stops, searches, and arrests [and] using enforcement strategies that produce severe and unjustified disparities in the rates of stops, searches and arrests of African Americans; using excessive force; and retaliating against people engaging in constitutionally-protected expression.”25 The struggle in Baltimore continues.
The Baltimore uprising, if nothing else, highlighted the limits of simply getting Black politicians elected to office or having Black people generally in positions of formal power. It occurred just as the US presidential primaries unfolded—a historic election that witnessed the ascendance of an openly socialist candidate, a serious female contender on the Democratic side, and an unscrupulous and unorthodox right-winger on the Republican side. The new wave of Black activists and organizers who came up in Ferguson, Baltimore, and beyond sought to engage this new electoral landscape on their own terms. But that electoral reckoning was not straightforward.
The issues raised by BLMM/M4BL had been forced to the forefront of public discourse and had to be addressed by politicians in the 2016 race, even if, in the case of Republicans, it was to castigate and vilify the movement. On the Democratic side, both primary frontrunners, Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders, appealed to the mass base of BLMM/M4BL and expressed sympathy for its goals, although not always its tactics. Most movement organizations and leaders weighed in on the issues of the election—challenging, critiquing, and publicly educating the candidates but refraining from any formal endorsements (with a few exceptions).26 They also paid careful attention to local races without making major investments in the presidential campaigns. When asked, all of them were clear in their opposition to Trump, although they varied in their assessments of the likelihood that he would win. They refused at the same time to be uncritical cheerleaders for either Clinton or Sanders, both of whom, they argued, failed to offer a robust and convincing agenda for combatting racism. Bernie, although he clearly had a radical economic agenda, seemed philosophically just not to get it when it came to race. And most young Black activists did not trust Hillary because of her longstanding history with Wall Street and the Democratic Party machine, combined with her 1990s superpredator statement.
There were two critical moments during the 2015–16 presidential primary when BLMM/M4BL activists disrupted events at which Bernie Sanders was speaking to put issues of anti-Black violence and structural racism on the table: a Netroots Nation event in Arizona and a Sanders rally in Seattle a few weeks later. At the Netroots event in Phoenix on July 18, 2015, Black Alliance for Just Immigration organizer Tia Oso seized the microphone and the stage to confront Sanders and former Maryland governor Martin O’Malley about their weak stances on police brutality and racism. BLMGN cofounder Patrisse Khan-Cullors and others took part in the action as well. As Joe Dinkin wrote in The Nation, “[Bernie] had the opportunity to rewrite his own narrative and expand his base and he failed.”27 On August 8, 2015, despite being booed and heckled by liberal whites in the Seattle audience, two bold and articulate Black women commandeered the microphones to point out issues that candidates were not addressing with rigor. This should have been an opportunity for Sanders to embrace a more forceful antiracist platform, but he didn’t.28 At the same time, if Sanders had managed to earn a more solid Black vote in the primary, and if he had been the Democratic candidate for president in 2016, the Left and BLMM/M4BL would have been fighting a different, more winnable battle postelection. Everything else said, and all criticisms wholly justified, Sanders was one of the most radical presidential contenders for a major party nomination that the US electorate has seen since the Jesse Jackson bids in 1984 and 1988. Sadly, in the wake of the primaries, Sanders was sucked into the vortex of the corporatist Democratic Party and endorsed the opponent he had so eloquently critiqued, all of which was a setback for the prosocialist momentum of his campaign.
Several months before the November 2016 election, and just as the Movement for Black Lives was releasing its massive policy statement as a challenge to elected officials and candidates alike, Alicia Garza offered the following overview of her, and by extension much of the movement’s, assessment of electoral politics and the two-party system as they relate to social movements: “What we’ve seen is an attempt by mainstream politics and politicians to co-opt movements that galvanize people in order for them to move closer to their own goals and objectives. . . . We don’t think that playing a corrupt game is going to bring change and make Black lives matter.”29
There has been much reassessing and soul-searching within BLMM/M4BL circles since the election of Donald Trump in November 2016. While most movement organizers still seem skeptical of mainstream politics, creative approaches to electoral strategy have emerged, as reflected in the M4BL’s newly formed Electoral Justice Project (EJP), headed by Jessica Byrd, Rukia Lumumba, and Kayla Reed, and Alicia Garza’s new Black Futures Lab, which has an electoral component that will conduct a massive survey of Black political opinion, dubbed “The Black Census.”30 Jessica Byrd’s experience with the consulting, coaching, and training firm Three Point Strategies, which helps communities build successful electoral campaigns, has been an anchor for M4BL’s entry into electoral work. Byrd began working on political campaigns as a teenager. She is a Black queer feminist, and she brings who she is to her work. A savvy optimist, she still has no illusions that elections alone will liberate Black people. She is convinced that by identifying the right candidates, mobilizing voters, and connecting with movement strategists, electoral work can make a difference.
Finally, the historic election of Chokwe Antar Lumumba, a thirty-six-year-old Black lawyer with family roots in the Black liberation struggle, as mayor of Jackson, Mississippi—on the promise of making Jackson “the most radical city on the planet”—means new possibilities are in the air.31 Most agree that none of this work in the electoral arena should supplant grassroots organizing and movement-building, if Black working-class people are going to see anything that approximates freedom and justice. In addition, organizers have already experienced the dead-end political results when social movements working in marginalized communities forfeit their agency and simply deliver votes to politicians without a strategy or a plan for ensuring accountability. Acute awareness of the limits of the current electoral system is shared by organizations across the BLMM/M4BL network. Still, most savvy organizers are using an array of tools and tactics in pursuit of their goals.
“Rage” is often deemed irrational and unproductive, in need of containment and suppression. But there is such a thing as righteous rage: fury and indignation that fuels constructive, rather than destructive, action. In Chicago’s #ByeAnita campaign, for example, it was the mobilization of Black anger that realized a just electoral outcome, the ouster of a state’s attorney deemed by many to be racist and unresponsive to community concerns. It is Black rage, combined with strategic demands, that has pushed politicians to make at least minimal concessions to the call for greater police accountability in cities where protests have occurred. Rage is not always ineffective. If channeled and mobilized, collective rage can be simply the refusal to tolerate the intolerable. And that refusal can show up in many forms, from the streets to the polls.