In the early 2000s, I was a part of a national collective that we called Ella’s Daughters. Inspired by the tradition of Ella Baker, we engaged in what we called political quilting, working to build bridges and responsiveness among different sectors of the national progressive community of scholars, activists, and artists. I later learned that the Center for Third World Organizing in Oakland used a similar movement-building metaphor—“weaving cloth.” The idea here is that, in order to sustain a powerful mass movement, we need to forge strong and reinforcing ties between our various communities, organizations, and movement sectors as we work to connect all the strands, to stitch—or weave together—disparate patches of struggle.
Building connections between distinct organizing communities is one important task of movement-building, and creating arenas in which trust and collaboration can be forged and collective thinking can occur is another. Modern maroon spaces, in a sense, are ones where organizers can come together, fortify themselves to face the brutal terrain of everyday struggle, and forge new levels of consensus. It is important to note that maroonage, in the era of slavery, was not simply about escape. Maroon communities—communities of fugitive slaves and their descendants—built semiautonomous spaces, but they also often confronted and fought against slave empires. Since 2014, three entities have served as maroon spaces, providing refuge and connectivity, retreat spaces, and training grounds for movement organizations and individuals. They are Black Organizing for Leadership and Dignity (BOLD), Blackbird, and the BlackOUT Collective (BOC).
BOLD has been an incubator for organizers who have taken their place at the forefront of BLMM/M4BL. Founded in 2012, BOLD has trained more than three hundred activists working in critical movement organizations throughout the country. The three pillars of BOLD’s training are political education, transformational organizing, and embodied leadership (relying on theories of somatic therapy). Denise Perry, a fifty-something Black, queer feminist and former labor organizer based in Miami, who is the principal force behind BOLD, is revered within movement circles for her quiet strength and clarity. The group conducts a series of week-long intensive workshops and trainings several times a year for cohorts of Black nonprofit workers and administrators. Its main training site is a reclaimed slave plantation in North Carolina. Alicia Garza and Opal Tometi met each other at a BOLD training session.
BOLD’s mission is to train and sustain a generation of capable and healthy Black leaders, who can support one another and the growing movement. But the ever-humble Perry, who has been referred to lovingly as the Harriet Tubman of the movement (leading BOLD participants to freedom over treacherous terrain), will quickly add, “BOLD is family.” She signs her email notes, “Black Love.” In this way she and her comrade, organizer, trainer, and movement intellectual Sendolo Diaminah (BOLD’s program coordinator) aim not only to impart tangible skills to Black organizers but also to aid them in creating community and a support network that can help to sustain activists for the long haul. BOLD’s explicit mission is “to facilitate social transformation and fundamental improvements in the lives and living conditions of Black people by (re)building the social justice infrastructure required to organize Black communities.”1
While the names of a number of BOLD alumni are recognizable in media accounts of BLMM/M4BL actions, many of those in the BOLD family were doing slow and steady organizing well before August 9, 2014, and have continued to do so since then, plugging away and supporting major mobilizations as they arise. BOLD trainings and retreats have created interstitial spaces of reflection, community building, and skill acquisition that occur during low points in public mass-movement action or serve as temporary oases for reflection when things become especially intense. BOLD is a space where Black organizers dedicated to long-term social justice come together to connect and retool. And when new opportunities arise, or crises develop, they often organize with one another, independent of BOLD. Political quilters like the leaders of BOLD create opportunities for making critical connections. In Perry’s words, BOLD is “working to unleash Black-led organizing, placing the power to transform and govern this country in the hands of its most marginalized communities.”2
Another, newer set of political quilters is made up of the three founders of Blackbird—Thenjiwe McHarris, Mervyn Marcano, and Maurice (Moe) Mitchell. Originally a group of Brooklyn-based resource mobilizers, conveners, and consensus and capacity builders, they have had a large influence on the evolution of the movement since Ferguson. The Blackbird founders had known one another through their participation in the Malcolm X Grassroots Movement years earlier but had not worked closely together as a team. They reconnected in Ferguson and decided to pool their energies and mobilize their skills in service to the growing movement. All were profoundly moved by the courage and resolve of the Ferguson protesters, and all decided to quit their jobs in 2014 to devote themselves full-time to movement-building work. “We chose to lean into risk” in making a commitment to the struggle that had been ignited in Ferguson, McHarris recalled. Mitchell took a leave from his job to embed himself in the Ferguson struggle from August through December 2014.3 He walked the streets of Ferguson, facilitated meetings and strategy sessions, reached out to networks of activists and allies throughout the country, and listened to the ideas and frustrations of the new activists he met there.
McHarris brought an important perspective and skill set with her to Ferguson as well. Having grown up in a working-class Black family in the Bronx in the 1980s and ’90s, McHarris had been exposed to political organizing and theory through her membership in the Malcolm X Grassroots Movement for several years. Then, as a staff person for several NGOs, and a participant in a number of UN forums, she had traveled throughout the world, notably throughout the African Diaspora, and witnessed anticolonial and postcolonial struggles firsthand from South Africa to Brazil. She read the global implications of what was happening in Ferguson in the summer and fall of 2014.
Ferguson was as much a baptism by fire for the Blackbird founders and other national activists who migrated there as it was for locals. In McHarris’s words, “The momentum of the moment propelled things forward. It [Ferguson] was a political laboratory that allowed people to engage in ways they had not done before.” Despite the intensity of the situation on the ground, the events were not as random as some media depictions have suggested. “There was a certain rigor” to the discussions that were going on, McHarris recalls, marked by daily planning sessions leading up to Ferguson October, the massive protests planned and timed to coincide with the grand jury’s expected decision about whether to indict Darren Wilson. McHarris recounts that she and her Blackbird comrades urged local leaders to “nationalize” the struggle, knowing that if other activists came from around the country, they would be catalyzed and inspired.4 The groups and individuals who had invested in Ferguson began planning a “Shut It Down” campaign once the nonindictment verdict was announced. While the team that would soon form Blackbird embraced the mantra “High impact, low ego” and kept under the radar of many outside observers, their role by all accounts was critical. “We had a theory of change,” Mitchell observed, “that sought to build local and national capacity simultaneously.”5
After Ferguson October, in which tens of thousands of people protested, marched, and rallied, activists gathered in New York in December 2014 for a strategy meeting at which the Movement for Black Lives coalition was formed. After that was a Los Angeles meeting, and finally a core of activists converged on Selma, Alabama, in March 2015 for the fiftieth anniversary of the historic 1965 civil rights march across the Edmund Pettus Bridge, known as Bloody Sunday because of the terror that local sheriffs unleashed on peaceful Black protesters. There the activists took the opportunity, with history as their backdrop, to meet and hone plans for the new M4BL formation.
One of Blackbird’s signature contributions to the movement was its role in helping to organize the major July 2015 convening on the campus of Cleveland State University, which brought over two thousand Black organizers together under the M4BL banner. Thereafter, the M4BL coalition organized seven national “tables,” or committees intended to combine and coordinate forces. Those tables—strategy, action, communications, policy, organizing, electoral strategy, and resources—have representatives from BYP100, Dream Defenders, Black Lives Matter Global Network, Southerners on New Ground, Organization for Black Struggle, and dozens of other national and local organizations. In fall 2017, M4BL launched its Electoral Justice Project, headed up by political strategist Jessica Byrd and St. Louis activist Kayla Reed, as well as Mississippi-based lawyer and activist Rukia Lumumba, with the intent of supporting electoral engagement on its own terms in order to contend for power through a strong, independent, and radical Black infrastructure.
Since 2014, Blackbird has secured funding and grown its staff to include a cohort of talented young organizers and strategists: Karl Kumodzi, Marbre Stahly-Butts, and Iman Young. Key individuals (not already mentioned) who have provided political and intellectual leadership to the M4BL tables coordinated by Blackbird staff include M. Adams, a Madison, Wisconsin–based activist and the leader of Freedom Inc., an organization that works with low- and no-income people of color communities; and Ash-Lee Henderson, who refers to herself as an “Afrilachian,” a Black Appalachian from Tennessee. In 2017, Henderson was in her early thirties but already had over a decade of organizing experience under her belt, having worked with Project South, Students against Sweatshops, and other organizing efforts. And finally there is Cazembe Jackson, a trans man based in Atlanta, who was for a time a national organizer for Freedom Road Socialist Organization. These three, among many others, have influenced the politics and direction of the group.
Anchored by the Blackbird staff, and reflecting the strength and lucidity of its constituent groups, the “Vision for Black Lives” policy platform produced in August 2016 is the second significant accomplishment of the M4BL effort. Stahly-Butts, a lawyer who worked for years combating racism in the criminal justice system, played a leadership role in its coordination. The “Vision for Black Lives,” which took over a year to complete and included input from dozens of progressive Black-led organizations and individual scholars and researchers, tackled a broad set of issues, from cash bonds to climate change, to Palestine. A set of actions and policy remedies was proposed for each problem. Writing in the Boston Review, Robin D.G. Kelley adeptly summarized the importance of the comprehensive document as follows: it is “a plan for ending structural racism, saving the planet, and transforming the entire nation—not just Black lives.”6 If not for the racism and shortsightedness that still plague certain sectors of the predominantly white Left, the “Vision for Black Lives” would have been embraced as a movement manifesto that, while rooted in Black struggles, speaks to a thoroughly broad-based set of progressive issues.
Finally, the third group of “political quilters” is the Black woman–led BOC, also formed during Ferguson October, which organizes direct-action training for local and national organizations. One media review described them as “the badass women” who “shut shit down.” The term shut shit down, ubiquitous in M4BL circles, signals a rejection of the politics of respectability and the notion that actions deemed undignified or impolite are off limits. In choosing to shut shit down, activists are calling for change and attention through disruption and are forcefully insisting that people not “dance on the bodies of the dead,” as one poetic protestor put it. The BOC was cofounded by two women with long histories of organizing, despite their relatively young ages: Chinyere Tutashinda and Celeste Faison. They are also active in the M4BL coalition, along with their fellow BlackOUT trainer Karissa Lewis, an urban farmer and activist, who also serves as the executive director of Oakland’s Center for Third World Organizing. In reflecting on BlackOUT’s approach to training and tactical support, Chinyere indicated, “Direct action as a tactic is one that black people have been using for hundreds of years, from worker slow-downs to sit-ins. We see our work as connecting to that tradition.”7
From their base in Oakland, BOC members travel around the country doing direct-action and preparedness training. They have helped local organizers shut down bridges, highways, buildings, and meetings. Celeste Faison, who now works for the National Domestic Workers Alliance, took a short leave from her job as a youth organizer to join the 2014 protests in Ferguson and was moved by the courage and determination she witnessed there. At one point Faison observed protesters late at night literally walking up and down the street and looping back to do the same thing over and over again. She thought to herself that she and others were in positions to offer more creative tactics to the work. The group that would later form the BOC began to brainstorm ways to do just that. They eventually developed workshops to teach organizers techniques to make direct actions more effective, dynamic, and impactful.
Black Brunch came out of the efforts of the BOC and other Oakland-area activists in December 2014 and January 2015. For this quietly disruptive strategy, groups of protesters went into ritzy restaurants during Sunday brunch in cities like Oakland and New York to read the names of Black victims of police violence to mimosa-drinking patrons, before being forced by management to leave.
The BOC’s actions are also similar to but bolder than the civil rights–era Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee’s civil disobedience trainings. Its behind-the-scenes movement-builders have been invaluable resources for the growing force of BLMM/M4BL. The BOC has been a leading force in the BLMM/M4BL policy, strategy, and action tables.
BOLD, Blackbird, and the BOC play solidifying and cohering roles in the BLMM/M4BL ecosystem. While none are base-building or mass organizations, they all provide the support, resources, and connective tissue needed to bind together different pieces of the whole, and bolster individual organizations and the movement overall.