Many themes, dilemmas, and challenges have created both tensions and opportunities for growth within the Black Lives Matter Movement and Movement for Black Lives (BLMM/M4BL) nationally. This chapter will briefly highlight six of them: 1) the reassertion of a politicized Black identity, 2) the power and limits of social media and new communications strategies, 3) intergenerational organizing and youth leadership, 4) Black feminist influences, 5) abolitionist practices of accountability, and 6) the class politics of the movement, including tensions over money. Since a movement by definition is an eclectic mix of distinct forces moving in a coordinated direction, there is no “party line” or rigid ideology, but there are shared assumptions, values, and analyses, in addition to struggles over which of the narratives, theories, and demands will move to center stage. This chapter will touch on some of the internal differences, as well as the common ground on which movement organizers stand.
The term unapologetically Black, coined initially by Fresco Steez (Angie Rollins), popularized by BYP100, and taken up by others, has become one of the mantras for this movement. It appears in chants, in speeches, on T-shirts, and on social media. It has also popped up in some very unlikely places. For example, Fortune magazine reprinted a speech by Mellody Hobson, the Black president of Ariel Investments and the wife of multibillionaire film mogul George Lucas, in which she also embraced the term. After attending the funeral of John Johnson, founder of Ebony and Jet magazines, Hobson recounted having an epiphany. In her words, one of the eulogists got up and said, “He [Johnson] was unapologetically black.” “It hit me so hard,” she recalled. She then admitted to herself, “[I had] been apologizing for who I am, about being a woman, and about being black—and it stops today.”1 Hobson’s rather striking reality check is revealing on many levels. What it seems to suggest is that one of the common prerequisites for individual Black success has been that Black elites like Hobson, though they may engage in facile gestures of kinship, often effectively distance themselves from the suffering and struggles of the mass of ordinary Black people. In fact, success sometimes depends on their proving themselves “different” and apart from the mass of ordinary Black people. That distancing can be both physical and psychological. For wealthy and privileged Blacks in the late twentieth and twenty-first centuries, downplaying or apologizing for one’s “blackness” does not necessarily mean “passing” for white, as light-skinned Blacks might have done generations ago. Rather, it means expressing political and class loyalty, as a condition of acceptance by wealthy white counterparts. That choice can be masked by charitable gestures, by support for modest liberal reforms, or by an aesthetic nod to African or African American cultural or artistic projects, but the choice remains the same. What being unapologetically Black now means for Mellody Hobson in her newly awakened state we do not know, but we know it means something quite different for thousands of newly minted young Black organizers, who have lifted up the term and deploy it in their organizing work.
Thousands of digital media agitators, local organizers, and street protesters have made the term unapologetically Black nearly as ubiquitous as Black Lives Matter. They are, at the most basic level, rejecting the fiction of a postracial world. Instead, they are foregrounding all the ways in which anti-Black attitudes and practices still exist and are refracted through the prisms of gender, sexuality, citizenship status, and class. And perhaps most significantly, they are refusing to disassociate from the common experience of ordinary Black folk, rejecting the idea that they should somehow be embarrassed (as the now-disgraced Bill Cosby once suggested they should be) by the Black poor.2
Unapologetically Black also tests the limits of the generic, amorphous, and sometimes confounding political category “people of color,” which covers a vast range of diverse experiences, cultures, national identities, phenotypes, and, most important, relations to power and oppression. Unapologetically Black acknowledges that blackness is rooted in a particular political and historical context with bloody roots in the transatlantic slave trade, colonialism, slavery, and Jim Crow (old and new). It exists as the ultimate antithesis of white supremacy, the ideological anchor of racial capitalism. But it also acknowledges something else—that is, the positive aspects of a shared connection to an African American past. These include the strength that comes from resilience, resistance, and collective survival practices. While the dominant culture still denigrates and exoticizes dark skin, and pathologizes many Black social and cultural practices, BLMM/M4BL gatherings often start or end with the song “I Love Being Black” written by BYP100 member JeNae Taylor, a twenty-first-century version of “Say It Loud— I’m Black and I’m Proud,” which resonated for the 1960s and ’70s generations.
Increasingly as the erroneous notion of “postracialism” crept into popular discourse and the vernacular in the early 2000s, those concerns specific to poor and working-class Black communities were either buried in language about an eclectic set of communities of color or mentioned defensively. Organizers who focused on the particularities of Black oppression were often accused of reinforcing a Black-white binary. While the term people of color emerged in a political context as a laudable call to unity, a recognition of the global uses of white supremacy in pursuit of empire, and an understanding of the violence and suffering enacted upon the people of the Global South, it also sometimes obscures the myriad differences that reside within that large and unwieldy category. Teasing out and better understanding these differences are important components of building principled multiracial, multiethnic coalitions.
Unapologetically Black as a slogan is also a counterpoint to Barack Obama’s ambivalent relationship to blackness. During one of the 2008 Democratic primary debates, that ambivalence was revealed with painful clarity. It was when then-Senator Obama was forced to choose between being accepted by an overwhelmingly white electorate and Democratic Party power brokers, or affirming his relationship to his longtime spiritual leader, radical Black pastor the Reverend Jeremiah Wright of Chicago’s Trinity Church. Obama initially hedged but eventually came out and vehemently “denounced” Wright, the man who had married the Obamas, baptized their children, and counseled the future president many times. The title of Barack Obama’s bestselling book, The Audacity of Hope, was borrowed from the title of one of Wright’s sermons.3 Beginning in the 1970s, the mantra of Wright’s church and the sign that stood in front of it proclaimed, “Unashamedly Black and Unapologetically Christian.”4 It is important to note that not only is Wright known for his progressive and radical views on race and racism (from initiating one of the first AIDS ministries to opening his church to antiapartheid organizations when few others would), but he is also a longstanding advocate of peace, is prolabor, and is committed to economic justice issues.5 So Obama’s choice to disassociate from Wright was as much political as it was racial. It represented a decisive break with the left-leaning politics that had influenced Obama as a young community organizer, as well as with the Black radical tradition. His speeches mocking and chastising “Cousin Pookie” for laziness and telling Black college students that racism should not be an “excuse” for failure are evidence of Obama’s adherence to a twenty-first-century politics of respectability. While Obama continued to enjoy soul music, admire Black artists and athletes, and express himself occasionally in Black urban vernacular, his political break with the Black working class—except as loyal voters—was clear.
The second critical theme for understanding this phase of the Black Freedom Movement is the new digital technology. Social media is the place where news of outrageous injustices is disseminated and people are called to action. It is the soapbox and public square of this generation, where many of the debates about strategy, tactics, and ideas are argued out in sound-bite form, for good or ill. In many ways, it is where BLMM/M4BL was incubated.
Most people first learned of Michael Brown’s death through Twitter or Facebook. The fatal police shooting of twelve-year-old Tamir Rice in a park near downtown Cleveland, videotaped on a police dash camera, went viral on the Internet and triggered protests. Eric Garner’s violent strangulation death by police after he tried to break up a fight between two other men in Staten Island, New York, was sent out to social media months after his death, which is when the case got significant attention and support. Unarguably, social media has had a powerful and profound impact as a communication tool that lends itself to democratic and inclusive practices of discourse, as well as to distortion and manipulation. It can serve to mobilize, publicize, bypass a disinterested mainstream media, and force issues into the public eye, or it can serve antithetical and nefarious purposes.
Some observers have labeled social media activists “citizen journalists,” who report and disseminate stories that the mainstream press might otherwise ignore or distort.6 Without their incessant tweets to update a global public on the Ferguson uprising, the support and solidarity actions that took place in hundreds of cities might not have occurred. Without an unwavering observer with a cell phone and a Facebook account, the police execution of Walter Scott, shot in the back while running away after a traffic stop in South Carolina, might have been erroneously reported as an act of self-defense, which was the official account of the officer who shot him. Most dramatic of all were the live Facebook feeds that captured the July 6, 2016, deadly police shooting of Philando Castile in a St. Paul, Minnesota, suburb as he sat in the car with his girlfriend, Diamond Reynolds, and her young daughter. The vivid and visceral images fueled anger and propelled people to action. They also jolted many white Americans, putting a reality in front of them that many had not seen before and might not have believed had it not been on their computer and cell phone screens.
Twitter in particular has become a special kind of public square for African Americans, who use the medium in a higher concentration than their white counterparts—so much so that the Black online communities that follow, engage, and retweet one another are sometimes referred to as “Black Twitter.” Much of this back and forth, involving hundreds of thousands of users, is about nonpolitical topics. However, the community can be mobilized when political events occur.7
The immediate and unfiltered character of social media messaging is part of its power and danger. While Twitter and Facebook have been tools for movement building, they have also been sites for some nasty exchanges, for accusations, for name-calling, and for shaming. Within the large, eclectic, and occasionally fractious world of Black Twitter, there have even been threats. Some of these fights have revolved around politics and tactics, and some seem to have been painfully personal.
DeRay Mckesson is one of the most prominent social media personalities to emerge out of the Ferguson moment. With hundreds of thousands of followers on Twitter, a high-profile presence at major protests, and numerous media appearances, for which he nearly always wears his signature blue Patagonia vest, Mckesson has become his own brand. Appearing regularly on national media as a kind of self-appointed spokesperson, he seems to some observers to be shamelessly self-promoting. As Patrisse Khan-Cullors put it, he has “celebritized the movement.” Mckesson, a Baltimore native, was at the center of some of the most pivotal events of the BLMM/M4BL protests. He made sacrifices, suffered harassment and arrests, and became a strong voice against police violence.8 What he did not do was join forces with the hundreds of organizers who formed the M4BL coalition. While hundreds of M4BL members sat through painstaking meetings, discussing strategies and tactics, establishing democratic practices of decision making, building a membership base, and forging consensus on what politics to put forth publicly, Mckesson took a different path. With the exception of his short-lived and ill-fated Baltimore mayoral bid, it appears Mckesson has worked with a small team and concentrated largely on his web-based Campaign Zero police reform project and other social media activity. He also has a penchant for befriending celebrities. Mckesson once famously made the hyperbolic remark that “Twitter is the revolution.”9
A more skeptical view of social media is articulated by Dream Defenders cofounder Phillip Agnew. At a large Black radicalism conference at Temple University in early 2016, Agnew gave a talk provocatively challenging the often-unquestioned role of social media in movement work.10 This was after he and his Dream Defenders comrades took a temporary self-imposed hiatus, or “blackout” as they called it, from Twitter and Facebook. In the Temple speech, Agnew offered a harsh critique of social media as “an arena where unchecked hate, dominance, farce, and individualism now flourish,” pointing out that social media often inflates egos, promotes individualism, and distracts from the hard work of face-to-face organizing.11 In the final analysis, and Agnew’s wise warnings notwithstanding, social media has been a critical and important tool for publicity and for creating a forum for debate and politicization. Overreliance on it, or assuming it can perform political miracles, is, however, misguided.
Chanted by many BLMM/M4BL protesters, the slogan in the above heading reflects the youth-centered character of the movement. While courageous and passionate young people have been at the cutting edge of every successful social and revolutionary movement throughout time, organizers and observers have to be careful about fetishizing “youth” as a political category. To be young is a phase of life, not a political status. There are radical, liberal, and conservative youth. And conversely, there are radical elders. When veteran civil rights spokesperson and media personality Reverend Al Sharpton encountered a hostile response from young Ferguson activists, and was confronted at his own rally in Washington, DC, in December 2014 by young activists from Ferguson, who insisted he did not represent them, the reason was not primarily his age. He was confronted, according to many Ferguson activists, because he was perceived as politically arrogant, opportunistic, and out of step with the politics of the day. In contrast, when radical feminist, socialist, and prison abolitionist Angela Y. Davis, eleven years Sharpton’s senior, went to Ferguson during the height of the Ferguson demonstrations, she was warmly embraced: “She did not come at us the same way [that Sharpton did].,” according to one young St. Louis activist. She was not trying to “scold and mold us.”12
Similarly, sixty-five-year-old Jamala Rogers of Organization for Black Struggle; Makani Themba, the sixty-something former director of the Praxis Project; Linda Burnham of the National Domestic Workers Alliance; and legendary Black feminists Barbara Smith and Beverly Guy-Sheftall all have been accepted as trusted advisors and participants in this phase of struggle, as has Cathy Cohen. A scholar-activist in her fifties, Cohen first conceived of and jumpstarted the formation that later evolved into BYP100, and she continues to work closely with the group. Robin D.G. Kelley, who is in his fifties, and I, now in my early sixties, continue to work closely with organizations in the BLMM/M4BL constellation. In the words of BYP100 leader Charlene Carruthers, most of the disagreements within the movement “are along the lines of ideology, not necessarily age.”13 That said, the optimism, energy, fervor, and fearlessness of youth, when harnessed to rigorous analysis and radical politics, are virtually unstoppable.
Young people in BLMM/M4BL, from Ferguson youth in Lost Voices to the more tightly organized BYP100, have embodied passion and determination that many observers have found awe inspiring. These young activists, standing toe to toe with police during tense demonstrations; refusing to obey orders from a militarized Ferguson police force; chanting brazenly, “Whose streets? Our streets!” and “Back up. Back up. We want our freedom, freedom. Racist-ass cops, we don’t need ’em, need ’em,” all represent a direct challenge to the legitimacy of violent state power as it currently exists. They are not recycling 1960s chants and songs but are rather employing bold new ones. They are a new generation claiming its voice of defiance, while at the same time holding onto a sense of history. Another popular chant that honors movement veterans and elders starts with “What side are you on, my people, what side are you on?” It continues, “Ella Baker was a freedom fighter, she taught us how to fight. We gonna fight all day and night until we get it right.”
Both Ella Baker and Assata Shakur have been powerful symbols and inspirations for many of the BLMM/M4BL activists, especially BYP100. The group’s 2017 national membership meeting in New Orleans embraced a quote by Ella Baker as its theme: “We who believe in freedom [cannot rest].” T-shirts emblazoned with Baker’s image were also widely distributed, and Baker is quoted widely in movement literature and speeches, especially her insistence that “strong people don’t need a strong leader.”
Led by the charismatic Atlanta-based organizer Mary Hooks of Southerners on New Ground, many movement gatherings end with the following statement, again emphasizing intergenerational ties: “The Mandate for Black people in this time is to avenge the suffering of our ancestors, to earn the respect of future generations, and to be willing to be transformed in the service of the work.”14 Hooks recites it with soul-stirring conviction, linking the contemporary movement both to history and to the future.
This generation of activists has been profoundly influenced directly and indirectly by the radical Black Feminist tradition that emerged in the 1970s, transmitted through books, poetry, images, personal relationships, and shared political spaces. This tradition, holistic, intersectional, radical, and inclusive, recognizes that the personal is political, and the political is profoundly personal.
Black feminist politics, language, and sensibilities are palpable throughout BLMM/M4BL movement circles. Some of these activists were feminists well before they became part of this phase of struggle, and others were exposed to new ideas, finding old ways of thinking challenged by the processes of struggle. “Assata Taught Us,” a popular slogan on T-shirts worn by BLMM/M4BL organizers, refers to Black Liberation Army leader, former political prisoner, and political exile Assata Shakur, a strong woman who defied gender conventions in her leadership role in the Black Liberation Army in the 1970s. In a media interview, protest leader Ashley Yates recalls coming up with the idea to use the term while sitting in a coffee shop in Ferguson and thinking about ways to capture the spirit of the uprising.15 What better symbol than a militant Black woman who defied the odds to free herself from prison, as Shakur did before seeking exile in Cuba.
When asked which authors most impacted their evolving political edification, many leaders of BLMM/M4BL cited bell hooks, Angela Davis, Audre Lorde, Paula Giddings, Barbara Smith, Beth Richie, Cathy Cohen, Beverly Guy-Sheftall, myself (my book on Ella Baker), and finally fiction writer Toni Morrison, because of her creation of complex and self-determining female characters.16 These were the intellectual building blocks of their collective consciousness, augmented by their own lived experiences and the wisdom of grandmothers, mothers, and aunties, who never wrote books but whose understanding of the complicated world ensured survival and inspired critical resistance.
How do these Black feminist politics show up in practice? The first line of Dream Defenders’ vision statement reads as follows: “We believe that our liberation necessitates the destruction of the political and economic systems of Capitalism and Imperialism as well as Patriarchy.” One of BYP100’s fundamental principles is that they organize through “a black queer feminist lens,” and are fighting for a “black queer feminist future.” Similarly, BLMGN’s work is informed by Black feminist politics and a dedication to the inclusion of LGBTQIA folk. And M4BL’s tour de force policy document, the “Vision for Black Lives,” highlights gender, class, citizenship, settler colonialism, sexuality, and environment, echoing the ethos of radical Black feminists’ radically holistic politics on every page.17
The feminist organizers who launched and have led the BLMM/M4BL campaigns for the past four years have also wrestled with an obvious dilemma: the most highly publicized victims of police violence during this time, and in terms of dominant narratives, have been male. That is not because Black women have somehow been sheltered or exempted from such violence, as Andrea Ritchie’s 2017 book, Invisible No More, graphically illustrates.18 So Black feminist organizers have focused on the cases of women like Marissa Alexander, Sandra Bland, Rekia Boyd, Mya Hall, and Ayanna Stanley, while simultaneously supporting the high-profile cases of male victims. A Detroit-based filmmaker, feminist activist, cultural critic, and BLMM/M4BL supporter, dream hampton, directed and produced a powerful documentary that sought to expand who we see as victims of state violence, and even how we define the parameters of that violence. The film, Treasure: From Tragedy to Trans Justice, Mapping a Detroit Story, chronicles the life and murder of transgender teenager Shelley “Treasure” Hilliard. hampton is one of a number of artists who have contributed their talents to further the aims of #SAYHERNAME and of BLMM/M4BL in general.
In spring 2015, critical race theorist, legal scholar, and feminist Kimberlé Crenshaw and her African American Policy Forum, in collaboration with Andrea Ritchie and with Rachel Anspach, Rachel Gilmer, and Luke Harris, issued “Say Her Name: Resisting Police Brutality against Black Women,” a report that documented hundreds of cases of police violence against Black women, many of which had gone virtually unnoticed by the media. The authors also offered statistics and a narrative frame that illuminate the contexts in which police violence against Black women often occurs. This was an outgrowth of the ongoing efforts by Crenshaw, Ritchie, and others to draw attention to the bias against, and invisibilization of, Black women and girls. In some ways the campaign can be traced back to feminist responses to President Obama’s My Brother’s Keeper initiative. In addition to Crenshaw, journalist and political scientist Melissa Harris-Perry also used her network and platform to amplify the demand for more federal attention to the needs of Black women and girls in the president’s agenda, eventually organizing a historic conference at the White House on this very subject.
In 2014, a group of activists led by Crenshaw came together to launch “Why We Can’t Wait,” a campaign to demand expansion of Obama’s My Brother’s Keeper’s effort to include women and girls, and later to put forward a media campaign called “Black Girls Matter.” According to Gilmer, and simply put, “We argued that you cannot have a program that elevates the needs of Black men, without elevating the needs of the women who raise them and the sisters they grow up with.”19 Kimberlé Crenshaw’s work demanded not only resources but protection from violence for Black women and girls as well. With a powerful TED talk seen by tens of thousands of viewers, in which she told some of the stories behind the statistics, Crenshaw helped to make the narrative of Black women and police violence real for a large audience. By early May 2015, much research had gone into the violence report, but a release date had not yet been set. The authors had decided on a title, though. It was Say Her Name, an obvious reference to the many nameless Black women killed by police or victimized by other forms of state violence.
In parallel time, a group of Chicago-based activists had been working to publicize the case of Rekia Boyd after the 2015 acquittal of Dante Servin, the Chicago cop who fatally shot her in 2012. BYP100 was the main catalyst for this effort, viewing it as part of a larger effort to push back against the narrative about police violence that focused almost solely on men. They had marched, chanted, and cried in response to the cases of Michael Brown, Trayvon Martin, Philando Castile, and others, but they knew those incidents were only half the story. Rekia Boyd’s case, for example, told a different story, and the young feminist activists in BYP100, along with the Chicago-based Project NIA, Black Lives Matter Chicago (BLM-Chi), Assata’s Daughters, and other groups, were determined to disseminate her story, along with those of women like her, as widely as possible.
BYP100, joined with the groups Ferguson Action and BLMGN, issued a call for a day of action on May 21, 2015, to remember women and girls who had been victims of violence. Dozens of cities, from Memphis to Atlanta, to San Francisco, to Chicago, to New York, agreed to participate. The Movement for Black Lives organizers were recruited to help cast a wider net and pull in other activists around the country, while BYP100 chapters also planned local actions.
When the Say Her Name authors learned of the day of action being planned, Andrea Ritchie reached out to Carruthers of BYP100 to see if coordinating the release of the report with the May 21 events would be helpful. Carruthers agreed, and the report was issued on May 20, giving momentum to the protests. The African American Policy Forum had its own vigil in New York’s Union Square the night the report was released, with Crenshaw, feminist activist and playwright Eve Ensler, and some of the families of slain women on the program.
On May 21, BYP100 held an emotional rally in New York City, and Movement for Black Lives affiliates rallied, mourned, engaged in rituals of remembrance, and disrupted business as usual in some twenty cities to draw attention to the myriad forms of state violence that impact Black women and girls. They fused their efforts with the African American Policy Forum–derived banner, #SAYHERNAME. They also used the hashtags #JusticeforRekia and #Blackwomenmatter. In San Francisco, over a dozen Black women bared their breasts in a dramatic protest to demand attention to both the objectification of Black women’s bodies and the harm done to those bodies. With the protesters linking arms to block traffic in San Francisco’s busy financial district, the San Francisco protest was by far the most visually and viscerally impactful.
#SAYHERNAME was not just an event, it was part of an ongoing effort to expose the links between state violence and sexual violence. Another critical case that captured the attention of feminists working against gender-based state violence was that of Oklahoma police officer Daniel Holtzclaw, who had assaulted, raped, and/or sodomized thirteen Black women while they were in his custody. This case was both outrageous and complicated. Outrageous because there were so many women involved, the abuse was so egregious, and the incidents had occurred over an extended period of time. Complicated because most of the women had criminal records, past drug addictions, and a collective history of arrests. The question was, would they be believed? A team of progressive lawyers working with grassroots activists set about making the legal case and publicizing the women’s stories to make them legible and sympathetic to the public. One of those leaders was Grace Franklin, cofounder of the OKC Artists for Justice. The net result was a conviction on thirteen of the thirty-six charges, and an unprecedented 263-year prison sentence for Holtzclaw.20 While some activists definitely called for a long prison sentence for Holtzclaw, abolitionists were ambivalent. Even in this heinous case, some BLMM/M4BL organizers argued not for prison time but for attention to the needs of the survivors and some assurances that the offender would be stripped of his power and monitored to prevent future abuses. At the same time, no one protested the sentence, and many applauded it.
Of the dozens of women shot, beaten, and brutalized by law enforcement over the past few years, two cases stand out, because organizers built campaigns that made what would otherwise have been invisible visible. One is that of Sandra Bland, the woman who was pulled over by a local police officer in Texas for allegedly changing lanes without using her turn signal and who ended up dead in her jail cell a short time later. The video of Bland’s rough and unnecessary arrest for a minor traffic violation went viral after the twenty-eight-year-old’s suspicious death in custody was deemed a suicide. As Black feminist activists and others protested Bland’s death, her name began to appear everywhere—on Twitter and in speeches and articles about police violence. Her family’s vigilance (especially that of her sister) helped to keep a spotlight on the case. Ultimately no one was charged in her death, but the vivid details of her case drew attention to the issue of police violence and harassment of Black women.21 The second standout case was that of Rekia Boyd, which will be discussed in a later chapter. It was yet another example of applied Black feminist and Black feminist abolitionist politics. Boyd was killed, and Chicago activists led a campaign to have the off-duty police officer who killed her fired. The persistence and volume of the grassroots “Justice for Rekia” movement took Boyd’s case from obscurity to the national spotlight.
Political work is not done by angels or robots but by people—complicated and beautifully imperfect human beings, all of whom have been socialized in a hetero-patriarchal capitalist society. In the scholarship on other social movements, and in the memoirs of many participants, we see how competition, ego, sexism, homophobia, and even interpersonal violence have plagued past movements. These dynamics were not predominant in most movements, but they were present. BLMM/M4BL is no exception. But the ways in which organizers have tried to deal with these internal challenges are perhaps exceptional and hopeful. Jamala Rogers underscores the importance of movement healing when she writes, “And what of redemption? When wrongdoing and harm has been acknowledged by those in our movement, there’s rarely a healing process that takes into full account both accountability and personal salvation. Restorative justice has a vital place in our movement, not just in the corrupt courts system.”22 This abolitionist/restorative justice impulse travels throughout the BLMM/M4BL circuit of organizations and is reflected in speeches, websites, movement documents, and practice.
One particularly complicated case of sexual impropriety, played out in social and mainstream print media in Chicago, tested the movement’s commitment to accountability and restorative justice. A prominent, charismatic, and well-respected young cisgender male organizer with BYP100 was accused of sexual assault. The incident had happened years before, when the activist was a teenager, and involved an acquaintance, unwanted sexual advances, and sexual touching without consent. The young woman had carried this experience with her and was retraumatized when she saw the person who had violated her raised up as a hero in the movement. Not invested in the police or punishment as a solution, she instead turned to the movement, writing an open letter telling her story.
BYP100 defines itself as a Black feminist organization, and it was quick to respond. The organization invited Mariame Kaba, a longtime activist and trusted local facilitator and restorative justice/transformative justice practitioner, to help. With her guidance, they hoped to put in place a healing and restorative process that centered on the young woman’s concerns. The male member was suspended from leadership, and a team began working on the case to get both parties to agree to a process of healing and restitution. The process extended over at least an eighteen-month period. It was an arduous, messy, and time-consuming process, but BYP100 managed to see it through.23 BYP100 dealt similarly with several other cases that were not as high profile but also had to do with displays of what they describe as “toxic masculinity.” BYP100 has created a Healing and Safety Council, with the input of scholar, activist, and BYP100 member Kai Green and others, and has institutionalized policies to address various transgressions. Similarly, BLMGN has a full-time staff person devoted exclusively to healing justice.
This is one way that contemporary activists are sharper and more principled in their handling of allegations of sexism and sexual assault, and the stresses and strains that come with political organizing, than previous generations. Even the survivor who was not a member of BYP100 herself felt positive about the process: “I’m very impressed that BYP is willing to take the time to go through the accountability process,” she observed.24
During my research on Ella Baker, I remember vividly the stories women in the civil rights movement told me about sexual harassment and assault in movement circles in the 1960s. At that time, few women dared to report such instances except to close girlfriends. And some still whispered about it decades later. They feared that their revelations might be used against movement organizations and leaders by those who wanted to discredit the work. The accusation of “airing dirty laundry” as a silencing tactic is documented in Aishah Simmons’s NO!, a powerful documentary about rape in the Black community, and in Danielle McGuire’s powerful book At the Dark End of the Street.25
More recently, Anita Hill made the very credible claim in 1991 that US Supreme Court nominee Clarence Thomas had sexually harassed her years before when she worked for him. She fought an uphill battle to be believed. Her case sparked the formation of another important organizational antecedent to BLMM/M4BL, cofounded by Elsa Barkley Brown, Deborah King, and myself: African American Women in Defense of Ourselves, a Black women’s solidarity campaign, raised fifty thousand dollars and composed a statement, signed by sixteen hundred Black women. Published in the New York Times and in several African American weeklies, the statement insisted that Hill be believed and her allegations be taken seriously. The statement also outlined the complex intersection of race, class, gender, and sexuality in the lives of Black women. Fast-forward twenty-five years. While sexual harassment and assault are still real within the Black community and society at large, at least social movement organizations have mechanisms and a commitment to respond.
Internal movement struggles and tensions are real, but so are concerted efforts to foster fairness and a sense of political community without glossing over issues of politics, power, and privilege. Expert and committed facilitators like Adrienne Maree Brown from Detroit; Makani Temba from Jackson, Mississippi, and Detroit; Ayoka Turner and Ntanya Lee from Oakland; and Denise Perry from Miami have guided many of these organizations and coalitions through difficult processes of decision making and conflict resolution. This is a necessary and healthy component of movement-building. Restorative justice practitioners like Mariame Kaba and Black healers like the women and femmes in the Harriet’s Apothecary health and healing collective, founded by Adaku Utah in 2014, have been tremendous resources for BLMM/M4BL organizers and organizations.26
Both intracommunal violence (violence within the Black community) and state violence against transgender and gender-nonconforming Black people have also been issues around which BLMM/ M4BL groups and individuals have organized, making visible some of the most vulnerable members of our communities and confronting homophobia and transphobia in the process. The work of transgender activist Elle Hearn, former BLMGN staff person and founder of the Marsha P. Johnson Institute; the advocacy and service work of Brave Space Alliance, led by LaSaia Wade, a Black trans woman in Chicago and member of BLM-CHI; and the efforts of Georgia-based queer transgender activist Raquel Willis, national coordinator for the Transgender Law Center, are but three examples of this work by individuals who are either part of or loosely affiliated with BLMM/M4BL. Another group in the BLMM/M4BL orbit whose work warrants mention is Freedom Inc. in Madison. Led by queer and gender-nonconforming activist M. Adams, the group brings together Black and Southeast Asian survivors of violence, especially gender and sexual violence, to build new leadership and to organize collaboratively. Freedom Inc.’s “Hands Off Black Womyn” campaign successfully fought for the release of a number of Black people who were incarcerated because they were gender nonconforming, sex workers, or defending themselves against sexual or domestic violence.
Another critically important campaign that reflects the intersectional feminist politics of the movement is the work of the queer, Southern-based racial and economic justice group Southerners on New Ground (SONG) to advance the efforts to end cash bail. People who have been charged with a crime and are awaiting trial—in other words, people who are presumed innocent, since they have not been convicted of anything—languish in jails around the country because they are too poor to make bail and be released until their trial dates. Many of these people are women, and many of these women are mothers. SONG contributed mightily to the campaign to end cash bail through its Black Mama’s Bail Out on Mother’s Day 2017. Through its partnership with preexisting bail reform groups, SONG has enabled the release of dozens of women, reuniting them with their families and children.27 SONG’s vision, and the inspirational leadership of its codirector Mary Hooks, has propelled this work forward and made explicit the links between gender justice, racial justice, the injustice of sexual oppression, and the injustice of the jail and prison industries.
Capitalism with Black in front of it won’t liberate our people.
Charlene Carruthers
By centering poor, marginalized, and formerly incarcerated sectors of the Black community, in addition to LGBTQIA folks, BLMM/M4BL inescapably positions itself in opposition to neoliberal racial capitalism, though of course opposition to the extreme injustices of capitalism does not necessarily mean endorsement of a system-wide overhaul.28 The nuances of the movement’s positions on class and capitalism, which have been a subject of internal discussion and debate, continue to evolve.
While some have argued that Black businesses and Black capitalism should be part of a strategy for Black liberation, my view is that the majority consensus within BLMM/M4BL circles builds on Cedric Robinson’s assessment of racial capitalism as one of the foundations of Black social and economic oppression.29 The “Vision for Black Lives” statement states explicitly, “We stand in solidarity with our international family against the ravages of global capitalism,” and outlines a platform agenda that concentrates on issues most impacting poor and working-class Black folk.30 The vision statement, the most developed policy statement of the movement, includes a condemnation of cash bail, support for increasing the minimum wage, a defense of labor unions, support of immigrant workers, condemnation of student debt, and a call for free education, among its many socialist-leaning economic justice proposals. BYP100’s “Agenda to Build Black Futures” policy document opens with the following: “America’s economic system has systematically failed Black communities.”31
The political education agendas of BYP100, Dream Defenders, and M4BL overall have included readings and discussions about the history and nature of racial capitalism. In 2017, members of M4BL participated in workshops/think tanks in Chicago with presentations by Black Left scholars and writers, including Donna Murch, Lester Spence, Leith Mullings, Cornel West, Beverly Guy-Sheftall, Robin D.G. Kelley, Michael Dawson, and myself. Earlier national BLMM/M4BL gatherings featured discussions of racial capitalism and included a range of Black Left thinkers, including Ruth Wilson Gilmore, Cathy Cohen, Beth Richie, Brittany Cooper, and Kali Akuno, codirector of Cooperation Jackson, a network of Mississippi-based cooperatives. A handful of organizers working on M4BL are also members or supporters of socialist organizations, most notably Freedom Road Socialist Organization, the newly formed LeftRoots, and the International Socialist Organization. Radical anticapitalist thinkers within BLMM/M4BL like James Hayes, formerly of the Ohio Student Association, have organized various retreats and international discussions about race, Marxism, and social change.
Finally, I have been struck by the personal and family stories of many core organizers in the BLMM/M4BL network. Some of these stories have been shared in confidence, so I will not mention them by name, but BLMGN cofounder Patrisse Khan-Cullors32 talks openly about her family’s experiences with poverty, the criminal justice system, and the police in her public interviews and writings.33 Other key organizers have parents or siblings who are currently or were formerly incarcerated. Some have experienced brief bouts of homelessness and longer periods of unemployment. Others still are struggling single parents trying to make ends meet and change the world at the same time. They are not, as I once overheard someone say disparagingly, “a bunch of Black college kids.” Students and college-trained professionals are involved, but many others come from working-class backgrounds and others still live in Black working-class and poor communities. In other words, they understand, as several pieces of literature have asserted, that racial justice is economic justice and vice versa.
The inescapable tension about money is another aspect of the class dynamics within BLMM/M4BL that warrants mention. Many of the new BLMM/M4BL organizations are either nonprofits with 501(c)(3) tax-exempt status or have fiscal sponsors that allow them to receive grants and donations, hire staff, pay for travel, rent space, and print literature. Funding allows organizers to work full-time, perhaps with greater focus and efficiency. It also creates new problems and vulnerabilities. Even with the best intentions, there is competition between organizations and, not surprisingly, tension between the objectives of funders and the political goals of organizations. To their great credit, BLMM/M4BL leaders took the unusual step of setting up a resources table to try to more equitably distribute and reallocate funds that were being directed toward the movement, often in an unbalanced way. For the most part, tensions over resources have been managed or muted. However, sometimes conflicts about money and resources bubble up to the surface. Ferguson was one example of this.
The greater Ferguson area was for nearly a year the epicenter of Black resistance to police-based state violence. Young people who had never been involved in political actions before were thrust into the spotlight. Decisions were made in the heat of battle. And the battles were intense. Amid teargas and tanks, street protestors continued to come out to rally, march, chant, and demand action. Many people felt they were in a war zone, viewing themselves as warriors for a just cause. Even though no deaths were attributed directly to the Ferguson uprising, the human toll was high. People lost their jobs, suffered numerous arrests and injuries, endured threats, and experienced mental and physical fatigue. At least one young activist was sentenced to serious jail time.
As Ferguson garnered national and international attention, outside supporters began to funnel money and resources into the area. The money helped and, in some unintentional ways, it also hurt. According to local St. Louis organizers, few, if any, Black organizations in Ferguson were willing and able to accept this volume of donations. So the progressive but predominantly white group Missourians Organizing for Reform and Empowerment (MORE) agreed to serve that function, working in tandem with the long-established Organization for Black Struggle. Some activists were upset when they got wind of the money sitting in MORE’s bank account. They felt they should have a say in how the money was distributed, but there was not an overarching movement infrastructure that everyone had agreed to that could have resolved such a dispute, even though a decision-making plan was being established. A bit of chaos ensued.
Things came to a head on May 14, 2015, when seventeen Black activists who had been on the streets of Ferguson week after week occupied the offices of MORE and demanded that the staff write them seventeen checks dividing up the funds. Under pressure, the white executive director did just that and was harshly criticized by Organization for Black Struggle leaders and others after the fact. Jamala Rogers wrote bluntly, “The shake-down pretty much cleaned out a bank account designed to support movement activities.”34 Rogers is a seasoned activist, who long ago opted to forego what might have been a more comfortable and lucrative career in favor of a life in disciplined struggle and movement work. She undoubtedly made sacrifices to do so. She was appalled by what she viewed as self-serving strong-arm tactics by a handful of individuals to obtain what were intended to be movement resources.
The inexperienced activists who occupied MORE’s offices, on the other hand, felt they were taking blows, making sacrifices, and experiencing threatened evictions and job losses. They felt their actions had, in part, inspired the funds flowing into Ferguson and so they deserved some financial relief. They created the hashtag #cutthecheck to underscore their demands and rally supporters on social media. This was a dramatic example of confrontation over resources, but more subtle tensions exist in every movement that seeks outside funding.
The #cutthecheck episode also revealed deep class and generational divides. Older activists came of age politically when the expectation of “getting paid” was nonexistent. Today’s activists see their peers and some middle-class elders earning a comfortable income, in some cases, by doing various forms of community organizing. Also, when broad-based movements are at their peak, they bring together people with very different levels of class privilege. Folks who are barely getting by on poverty-level wages or below are in a coalition that includes professionals with college degrees and lucrative salaries. This is a recipe for some level of tension.
The six themes and areas of tension described in this chapter offer a small glimpse into the complex inner workings of the BLMM/M4BL network, with layered dynamics that are very much in flux, and reflective of politics and collective values that are still evolving.