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Although Second Wave feminism declared that “the personal is political” and Black feminists did the work of expanding “the personal” to include people who were not White, straight, or middle-class, the idea that “I’m not free until we all are free” has always been a major one for us. This explains how both Blacks who were born free and those who became free acted as conductors on the Underground Railroad at great personal risk. How Black folks throughout the African Diaspora toiled to defeat the murderous system of South African apartheid. It’s our way of thinking, our cultural value, that provides the scaffolding for our drive toward universal equity.

As the Combahee River Collective put it in “A Black Feminist Statement” in 1977:

The most general statement of our politics at the present time would be that we are actively committed to struggling against racial, sexual, heterosexual, and class analysis and practice based upon the fact that the major systems of oppression are interlocking. The synthesis of these oppressions creates the conditions of our lives. As Black women we see Black feminism as the logical political movement to combat the manifold and simultaneous oppressions that all women of color face.…

We might use our position at the bottom, however, to make a clear leap into revolutionary action. If Black women were free, it would mean that everyone else would have to be free, since our freedom would necessitate the destruction of all the systems of oppression.

This belief that collective action brings about collective solutions underpins organizing in social movements. We are the informal and self-described strategists who refine tactics passed down from our previous tries at liberation, and we are the patient participants in the slow-going project of freedom. At our best and most holistic, we act as advocates for every Black person, regardless of gender, sexuality, class, immigration status, record of criminal charges, education level, quirk, or kink. As long as you don’t act all the way up and out, our instinct is to claim you. This is what pulls activists out of bed each morning—the way we instinctively understand that “Black Lives Matter” is a rallying cry, not a threat to the humanity of others.

There’s a reason you use your fists and not your individual fingertips to fight. From one of the minds behind Black Lives Matter, to a formerly incarcerated man working to restore the voting rights of others, to the woman who first encouraged survivors to say, “Me too,” the organizers featured in this chapter are knockout artists.

Patrisse Khan-Cullors on Why “We’ve Got to Tell a Different Story about Blackness”

Patrisse Khan-Cullors is best known for cofounding Black Lives Matter (BLM) in 2013 in response to the exoneration of George Zimmerman, the White self-appointed neighborhood watchman in Sanford, Florida, who followed seventeen-year-old Trayvon Martin as he walked home from the store and fatally shot him. But Khan-Cullors was a Los Angeles–based artist and organizer long before then. Her award-winning work with the Labor Community Strategy Center and her performance piece “Stained: An Intimate Portrayal of State Violence” were early shots fired in a career that has focused on making the lives of Black people truly matter. Her first book, When They Call You a Terrorist, was released in 2018. Here she talks to Akiba about the genesis of her community organizing.

How did you get into organizing?

Aww, the good old days. Let’s see. I grew up in Van Nuys, a working-class suburb of LA made up of mostly undocumented Latino immigrants, some Black folks, and some poor White people.

I was very concerned about the environment in elementary school and middle school. I think I adopted a whale in elementary school, and I was concerned with animals going extinct. At the time, the environmental movement had the best stronghold on messaging around organizing and activism.

I learned my actual organizing skills at a social justice camp up in the mountains of California when I was sixteen. The camp was run by National Conference for Community and Justice. We had seven days of training in a “tolerance” curriculum. But I wanted an action component to that. At one point during my training as a youth leader, I asked a group I was working with, “Do you take on the police?” They said, “No, we’re an environmental justice group.” I said, “Okay, I’ll take it.”

Still, no matter how much I tell people I’ve been a skilled strategist for fourteen or fifteen years, people don’t see it. I think it’s because I’m a woman, am Black, and it’s a more exciting thing to imagine, “Oh, you popped up out of nowhere!”

People don’t understand that organizing isn’t going online and cussing people out or going to a protest and calling something out. That’s the most visible shit; we’re not putting our boring-ass meetings on social media.

How do you define an organizer versus an activist?

Organizers are strategists. We are a part of producing and building the campaign. Activists are showing up to the things that organizers plan, signing the petitions, going on social [media] to promote the action. Sometimes organizers are activists as well—they can be out front and work behind the scenes.

Can you talk about the importance of telling your own story?

As Black Lives Matter—the brand of BLM—grew, it didn’t follow us. God forbid Black women are behind something huge. So I made an executive decision when the Melissa Harris-Perry show did a panel about BLM without inviting me or [cofounders Alicia Garza and Opal Tometi]. It was like, “Nah, that’s not going to work this time. We’re Black women; we know the story of being erased.”

We’re forty years in and just now really talking about Ella Baker. That’s no dis to MLK, but goddamn. Hundreds of Black women did work for the March on Washington. And after women did that work, [male organizers] decided that women weren’t going to speak. So I decided that this time patriarchy was not going to rule the land. Or at least we were going to compete with it.

Why do you think patriarchy is still so appealing to us?

We are wired for patriarchy. It’s how our bodies work. It’s not even in our minds. It’s in our belief system. We still believe in Black men more than Black women. That’s how you get a man as a “leader” of BLM. At least MLK actually was a leader! We need a culture shift.

How do you cope with being forward-facing when people take shots at your work?

This work takes an extreme amount of restraint, and it’s very lonely, very isolating. Sometimes I want to go on social media and go the hell off, but then I go call somebody. It takes community support, a commitment to what’s bigger. And I try not to feel sorry for myself. I literally have a centering practice, Jordan somatics. It looks like being able to wake up and sit on the edge of my bed, standing up and taking deep breaths and healing into the deepest parts of me. I remember that I’m human and doing the best that I can. I keep it in perspective by keeping my oldest homies close, people who aren’t a part of the movement. That gives me grounding and perspective.

What makes you proud about the work of BLM?

That we did something different than I would say the old guard did. We were talking about trans Black people, about police violence against Black women. We were looking at harm and violence inside of the Black community. For us, every victim is special and important, no matter their past. We’ve got to tell a different story about Blackness.

Redemption Song

For Christopher Rashad Green, organizing is about redemption.

He was sixteen years old the first time he was arrested.

“At fifteen, I was an honor roll student attending a college prep program on the campus of Rutgers University. On my sixteenth birthday, I was locked up. Six months. That’s how fast it happened,” says the Plainfield, New Jersey, native. “Looking back now, I still ask, How did that happen? Some of the members of my clique turned south, and I went south with them. Trying to fit in, I was making poor decisions, shooting heroin. And then I was locked up. Altogether, I’ve put about fifteen years in on this installment plan.”

After more than a dozen years in and out of prisons in New Jersey, New York, Texas, and Virginia for a series of addiction-related infractions, he’d had enough.

On May 20, 2010, at 11:00 a.m. Eastern Standard Time, police took Green into custody, and he decided that it would be his last time behind bars. “I can’t explain it, but within forty-eight hours I just had this resolve. I just knew that I would never come back,” Green says of his last three-year bid. “I said to myself, My reentry program starts now. I’m not going to wait to get to the end of my bid, I’m going to start it right now.”

And so he did.

He connected with mentors, joined a rehab program, started journaling—anything to prepare himself for the task of getting out and staying out. As he worked on himself, one word kept coming back to him: “service.”

“I would only be successful in life if I served other people. That was the message I got. I didn’t hear any voices or anything like that. But that, within my studying, that was the word that jumped out,” he said. “I tried to dissect it, and it came to me. I would never be successful, anywhere in life, until I figured out a way to serve.”

These days, Green is an organizer with the progressive nonprofit New Virginia Majority. He first attended a meeting in the fall of 2015, just as he was toying with the idea of getting his voting rights restored. “I hooked up with New Virginia Majority, and they were addressing the restoration of rights. It was just a perfect fit,” he says. “From that point on, I became pretty much the face of restoration of rights for New Virginia Majority.”

After volunteering for two years, he was hired as an organizer, focusing primarily on voter registration and restoration of rights, which means he does everything from knocking on doors to lobbying the state’s General Assembly members. “The role seems like it was carved out for me,” says Green, who is now based in Richmond, Virginia. “It keeps me alive.”

He sees his biggest task as helping Black people in his community push back against the idea that they don’t matter. “So many people, when we try to register them, say, ‘It’s not going to change anything. My vote’s not going to matter.’ And I say, ‘No, it does matter, brother. Because it’s not just about voting. It’s about being involved.’ I share my story with them, try to encourage them to jump in,” he says. “And then look what happened here in Virginia last year: the balance of power in the General Assembly was decided by one vote. One vote.”

Green estimates that he has helped thousands of Black people regain their right to participate in the democratic process. And on August 15, 2016, he secured his own. “I got to register and vote for the first time in almost thirty years,” says Green, who is fifty-eight. “When I first started working with New Virginia Majority, I heard this term: ‘political currency.’ Your vote is political currency. That kind of struck me as like, ‘Wow, my voice is like currency. Let me get my rights back.’ What could I lose for doing it? It’s my right. I’m a taxpaying citizen. I did my time.”

Green’s organizing work makes him feel like a new man. “I’m really trying to redeem myself. There’s no excuse for all the bad things I did over the years. But as my people say, ‘That’s old, that’s done. That’s the old Christopher. This is the new brother Christopher here.’”

The Makings of #MeToo: A Q+A with Tarana Burke

Tarana Burke is a veteran organizer, writer, and survivor of childhood sexual abuse. She has worked for nonprofits around the country, including Selma’s National Voting Rights Museum and Institute, Philadelphia’s Art Sanctuary, and New York City’s Girls for Gender Equity. She’s also an accidental celebrity.

Burke became famous in late 2017 after investigative reports confirmed sexual violence accusations against Hollywood producer Harvey Weinstein. That moment—which saw the toppling of Weinstein as well as TV hosts Matt Lauer and Charlie Rose, among many others—didn’t have a name until the White actress Alyssa Milano suggested that all survivors should tweet “me too.” What Milano soon found out, owing to a Black feminist Twitter outcry, was that Burke had founded a #MeToo movement in 2006 as a multiplatform initiative that provides refuge for Black survivors of sexual abuse and exploitation.

Milano gave Burke the credit she deserved, mainstream media caught on, and the organizer ran with the whole thing. Burke has been on billboards and on CNN. She has dropped the New Year’s Eve ball in New York City and been named a Time Person of the Year. And she has forced the influential Tom Joyner Morning Show to stop playing R. Kelly’s music.

Akiba sat down with Burke for a candid dialogue about movement-building.

Let’s start with Tarana as a youth organizer.

I started when I became a member of the 21st Century Youth Leadership Movement, in Selma, Alabama. It was founded by people who came from the Civil Rights, Black Power, and labor movements. They wanted to make sure there was another generation to carry on their legacy. So we went to a summer camp and took all kinds of classes. We were also expected to do something during the school year. The first thing I ever organized around was Donald Trump.

Really?

Yeah, via the Central Park jogger case. Isn’t that some full-circle shit?

It is! How old were you?

It was spring 1989, so I was fifteen. Yusef [Salaam, one of the Central Park Five] was dating a friend of mine. She came to the program, like, “They arrested my boyfriend, and I know he didn’t do it.”

When the story hit the newspapers, it was ridiculous. Donald Trump took out that full-page ad in the four major New York papers—the Daily News, Times, Post, and Newsday—calling [the accused] animals and calling for their heads. He really doubled down on this notion of the oversexed Black male out here preying on innocent White women.

So what did you do?

We held a protest in front of the New York Daily News, and we wrote letters to the editors of all the major newspapers. We were trying to make the point that they were criminalizing Black youth when there were plenty of examples of us doing positive things. The other point was that Donald Trump was racist.

Where were you raised?

In the South Bronx, not far from Yankee Stadium. My grandfather was a self-professed Garveyite: he believed in Marcus Mosiah Garvey. I was raised Catholic, but he told me that the only thing he wanted me to do was read a history book alongside the Bible so that I could learn what was actually going on in the world.

What did you learn?

When I was in seventh grade, he gave me They Came before Columbus and Roots. I was conflicted because I was a very good Catholic girl. At the same time, my mother had participated in the Black Power Movement in the ’70s and was a Womanist in the early ’80s because of Alice Walker.

That sounds like a well-rounded education!

It was. On the one hand, you had my mother with all of this Black feminist literature, and then you had my grandfather, who used to take me down to 125th Street to buy cassette tapes of John Henrick Clarke. We always had a birthday cake for Martin Luther King’s and Malcolm X’s birthdays. My granddaddy was like, “We don’t need no goddamned United States of America to tell us when to celebrate our people!”

[laughs] So you were primed for Black activism.

Yeah, I was primed. But in some ways, my mother and my grandfather didn’t [show] me how to make what they taught me useful for the community. I was a really conversant twelve-year-old, but until I found 21st Century, I didn’t have a way to put that into action.

How did you find out about this Selma-based movement as a kid from the Bronx?

21st Century’s New York chapter came through an organization called Jobs for Youth. I was the little assistant in the office. I made $3.10 an hour. One day the head of the office said, “Hey, you wanna go to Washington, DC?” and gave me a flyer. I took it home to my mother and asked, “Mommy, can I go to DC?” She was like, “How much it cost?” I said, “It’s free!” If that trip had been $50, I might not have been a 21st Century leader!

Ah, the trip to DC was such a staple!

Yes! So a bunch of us go to DC. It’s like eighty rambunctious-ass New York City high school kids. We get off at the 4-H center in Chevy Chase, Maryland, which I thought was a joke. I was like, “How does Chevy Chase have a whole city?”

Anyway, we get off the bus and see these Alabama-ass kids singing and dancing. They were joyous fucking kids. And we were some ornery New York kids asking, “What the fuck are they so happy for?”

So what did you do there?

We did a three-day leadership program. Although I was still crotchety, I was low-key, like, I love this! So when I got back to New York, I helped start our chapter. 21st Century is where I first learned that fighting White supremacy didn’t always have to look like what it looked like in history books. We had songs with lyrics like, “We are the ones we’ve been waiting for!” It was all geared toward us working for the community that we wanted to live in, in spite of White supremacy.

You were sold!

Yes. I became a complete and utter convert. It was like being in a sorority, and it was an escape from dealing with sexual abuse. I didn’t have to confront my own demons. Becoming a fighter and then an organizer allowed me to shield myself from this part of my life that was really torture.

So how did you go from being a 21st Century leader to founding the #MeToo movement?

The concept of “me too” had been bubbling under the surface for a long time. As an adult, working for 21st Century, we would have community meetings, and I was seeing [evidence of sexual abuse] everywhere. I was trying to figure out how to talk about it so it didn’t pathologize Black people or demonize the South. But living in Selma in particular, it was so pervasive. We had elders naming community problems, but not sexual abuse. I knew I wasn’t the only one who had been abused. I was like, “What criteria do you have to meet before something [rises] to the level of a community fucking problem?” A big part of this had to do with how James Bevel, the civil rights leader, was found to be a serial abuser. Before he died, he was convicted of molesting one of his fourteen daughters. What’s missing from the stories on the internet is how he was protected by the civil rights community. Some of my elders went mute when it came to sexual violence. They even allowed him to interact with kids. Even the accusation alone should have been enough. The adults should have said, “We don’t know if it’s true or not, but we can’t have you around our young people.” Their silence was it for me.

That is so awful.

I was being retraumatized. So that’s what sparked #MeToo. My elders and people who I respected did not take sexual violence seriously, but they had also given me all the skills I needed to do it myself.

Because the movement has a Hollywood component, I’ve heard whisperings among Black folks that #MeToo has been Whitewashed. How do you deal with that?

What I’ve been saying to Black people when I’m traveling around is that it’s not enough for y’all to celebrate me as an individual. Black people are not responding from that place of, “This is ours, a movement that started for us.” We’re still whispering. We are private. And we are still allowing this narrative that Black people can’t say “me too.”

I feel like we’re still trying to protect us, whoever us is. I don’t think we actually want CNN to do an exposé on abuse in the Black community. Somebody would be like, “But they fired Soledad O’Brien!”

It’s always going to be like that. Look what happened when [editor-in-chief] Kierna [Mayo] put that picture of the Huxtables under broken glass on the cover of Ebony. [Black] people lost their fucking minds. People were saying, “You can’t do that!” like it was a betrayal. And because of all of the uproar, we couldn’t have an honest conversation about sexual violence and Black men, or the way that we idolize fictional characters and protect them over human beings. At this point, you can get a large group of people to agree about R. Kelly [being a pedophile and sexual abuser], but that’s still a debate in our community.

We have to fight White supremacy and [how] it permeates our lives as Black people in America. But we’ve also been co-opted by it. I know I sound probably like my grandfather now, but we doing the work of the White folks ourselves. [laughs]

So let’s talk about what you started. I remember you having a “me too” curriculum, a website, and T-shirts.

Yes. That work was focused on young people I was working with in Philadelphia. A friend and I cofounded an organization called Just BE Inc., that came out of a rites of passage program that we had previously created called Jendayi Aza. [laughs] It meant, “You are powerful. Give thanks.” We put girls through twenty-one weeks of training. It was modeled after pledging a [Black] sorority with a little bit of Girl Scouts and African rites of passage. The girls loved it. We did it with high school–age girls for two years. Then a middle school asked us to create something for their girls.

So how did you get to “me too”?

When we first started our program, we didn’t include sexual violence in the curriculum. But the girls were always coming and telling us some new shit. We found out that one of our seventh-graders was “dating” a twenty-one-year-old man. We chased his ass away. And then we had another girl who had been left back so she was fourteen in the seventh grade. She had one child and was pregnant again. We found out she’d had her first baby when she was either twelve or thirteen, at the hands of her mother’s boyfriend.

That’s a lot, Tarana.

She and another little girl who I met in Selma were two of the saddest cases I ever had. The girl in Selma used to fight all the time. She was in foster care because her mom’s boyfriend had molested her and she got pregnant. She had the baby at twelve or thirteen and she and her child were in foster care together. When I met her, she was fourteen and pregnant again at the hands of another adult who assaulted her. These girls were so, so, so vulnerable.

So how did you deal with all of this given your own trauma?

After a few years, I needed to sit down. But back to the program: One night, I wrote out all of the concepts that became “me too.” Then my partner and I built a workshop around it. We would start with language, giving the girls legal definitions for what they were facing, because they just didn’t know. Most people don’t know.

No, they don’t.

The next part involved [the sexual assault stories of] Gabrielle Union, Mary J. Blige, Fantasia, Queen Latifah, Missy Elliot, and Oprah. The workshop would start with an icebreaker conversation that would lead to me saying, “I’m a survivor,” and telling them parts of my story. Our acronym was SAAE, which stood for Sexual Assault, Abuse, and Exploitation. We wanted a way to name exploitation in that gray area that people don’t really deal with.

So after you shared parts of your story, what would you do?

We had pasted a picture of each of the celebrities I named on a sheet of black paper and wrote the words “me too.” On the other side, we’d pasted a [stock photo] of a Black girl that we’d pulled off of the internet, wrote “me too” under her picture, and added some statistics. While the girls looked at the side of the paper with the girl’s picture on it, we would tell a story. Then we’d say, “Turn your page over.” And the girls would be like, “Oh, it’s Oprah!” It was so dramatic, but it worked for kids.

After going through that process, we would ask, “What do you think about when you think of Oprah?” They would write a whole bunch of [positive] words like “smart,” “rich,” and “pretty.” Then we’d ask them what words they thought of when they heard the phrase “Black girls.” And for the most part, they’d write down negatives: “loud,” “nappy head,” “ghetto.”

I know it’s problematic in some ways to base it around celebrities because I don’t know what their healing journey was. But what they represented to those girls was a different life. We were trying to show them that there’s a trajectory toward healing and joy. We wanted them to understand that trauma was part of their journey, but not where they lived. To make sure the entire program wasn’t depressing, we used music and arts and crafts and we took them on trips.

So did it ever get personal?

The way we ended the workshop was to give each girl in the class a sticky note and ask her to write down three things she’d learned. Then we’d say, “And if anybody wants to share more, you can write that on this piece of paper too. You can say ‘me too.’ You can write down your phone number or email address if you need help.” That was our way of making sure nobody was singled out. We also handed out resource sheets with the number of a local crisis center and counselors they could call. At the end of the first workshop, we collected all of the slips of paper and gave each girl a hug. There were about thirty-five girls in the class. When my partner and I got back to our room, we dumped all of those folded-up pieces of paper out of a manila envelope. There were like twenty-five “me toos” in there. My partner and I sat down and we cried and cried and cried.

Okay, so, how do you take care of yourself while you do this work?

[laughs] I feel like I don’t. I mean, I do and I don’t. Early on, I just felt like this was the price I had to pay and that I should just soldier on. Eventually my partner and I stopped working together, so it was literally just me doing these workshops. Then I had to put it down because it was a lot to handle.

So you just said that you “do and don’t” take care of yourself. In what ways do you take care of yourself?

The way I take care of myself in a bigger sense is the same way I take care of myself as a survivor, which is, I have to rejigger my thinking. I spent most of my life hyperfocused on the fact that I had been through these things. I was so protective of my brain and my body that I was always thinking of how to stay safe. That meant learning how to not think about the shit that happened. But I was still in a fucked-up place.

How did you change this?

When [my daughter] Kaia was born, I was panicked. I was like, “Okay, I gotta think of something better than this.” When I found out I was having a girl, I became obsessed with the idea of crafting a world where this child has access to joy. People always say she’s a great kid and ask me what I did. I tell them that I was incredibly intentional. I’ve failed in a lot of ways, and failed to protect her in some ways. But in terms of who she was as a person, it became really, really important to me from pregnancy on that she knew joy in her life. The only way I could figure out how to do that was to change my own life into one that would lead into the joy.

Okay, Oprah!

[laughs] With survivors of all kinds of things, it becomes such a part of your identity that you almost feel uncomfortable without it. Unless we are intentional about retraining our brains, we can end up leaning into the trauma because it’s what we know.

So what did you do specifically? Did you have a technique you used?

My overthinking Virgo brain was like, There’s gotta be a solution! I need to understand how to do this differently. So say I had a great day. I would think, This is wonderful! I’m so happy today! But then, when I had a minute of quiet, a memory of the trauma would come back. And so I would say to myself, This is not who you are! The ball and chain would come out, and I would be like, Get back to being this other thing! That became the routine, remembering who I actually am. Kaia became the touchstone.

How did that hold up when you were working with the young survivors?

Well, the kids became the other reason why I had to do things differently. I used to think, I’m already a lost cause, but let me help y’all get there so somebody can survive. But kids see through that. That’s when I knew I had to practice. I read self-help and affirmation books and wrote stuff down on sticky notes and put them on the mirror. And I would stand in front of the mirror every day and say, “I love myself!”

So you talked yourself out of negative thinking? That’s amazing.

Not really. I also felt like it was bullshit when I was saying it. I think I’m too much of an asshole to really believe some of that shit. But then I realized that it wasn’t just me being a pessimist. There just wasn’t enough there to help me.

What ultimately happened?

This remains part of the work of #MeToo. What drove me to healing was that I didn’t want to give these kids empty platitudes. Ultimately, I had to find something that was going to fill me when I wasn’t in 21st Century, doing Just Be, or whatever else. Do you know what I’m saying?

Yes. I know what you’re saying.

I wrote in a joy journal for a while. I would document what process I went through to feel joy because when I felt like shit, I needed something to refer back to.

One last question: did you study child development?

No. Political science. [laughs]

Well, okay. [laughs]

That’s the reason why it took me so long to do this work with both feet in. I felt comfortable with leadership development because I had come from 21st Century and had been through training programs. But I was hesitant about the #MeToo work because I didn’t want to mess up these kids. I’m not a social worker.

But in the end, I just forged ahead based on what I needed at their age and what I saw as their needs. They needed attention, somebody to make them understand their sense of self-worth despite whatever happened to them. And they needed to understand that there is possibility beyond this place. You don’t have to study nothing to do that.

I fight White supremacy with my money by boycotting businesses that discriminate against people of color not only through how they treat customers of color, but in the products they choose to carry, the politics they support, and the way they treat their employees of color.

—Paulette Martin, finance executive

“Generations” by Bianca Xunise (2017)

“‘Generations’ explores the decades of unrecognized labor Black women have done and continue to do for the benefit of all American people. This excerpt was a response to Black women pulling together and voting en masse to protect the American public.”—Bianca Xunise

Bianca Xunise is an illustrator and cartoonist based in Chicago. Her work focuses on the plight and daily struggles of identifying as a young Black feminist weirdo in modern society. Her storytelling can range from simple, relatable slice-of-life content to complex, nuanced narratives like police brutality, and it garnered her an Ignatz Award for Promising New Talent.

Think Globally, Act Locally: A Q+A with Tef Poe

St. Louis rapper, activist, and writer Kareem “Tef Poe” Jackson was already a community activist when Darren Wilson, a Ferguson, Missouri, White police officer, fatally shot eighteen-year-old Michael Brown. Brown’s killing—and the fact that authorities allowed his bleeding corpse to lie in the street for hours—pushed area people to protest daily. They were met with police, tanks, tear gas, and rubber bullets.

Tef was among the cadre of young organizers who made up the Ferguson movement. In 2015, he cofounded Hands Up United, a local organization that offers tech and small-business training, the free Books and Breakfast Program, healing circles, and spaces for political dialogues.

When Akiba interviewed Tef in November 2017, he and the movement were in a different place. He was in his second year at Harvard University as a Nasir Jones Hiphop Fellow, and the local movement had splintered. Tef is a self-described revolutionary and revealed himself to be a young Black man with one foot in the movement and the other in the streets of St. Louis.

Why do you put such a strong emphasis on local organizing?

It’s important because, when you look at history, it’s really the most effective. When street gangs organize a truce, that’s local organizing. Single mothers leaning on each other for resources is local organizing. All too often, we expect organizing to be this grand type of thing. The “we” in this scenario is the more academic, financially stable people that run the nonprofit sector. They intellectualize the issues and have grown into the face of the movement, and that would include myself sometimes. There is a disconnect between the people that do this professionally and the people who do this to live.

It can be difficult for people who aren’t indigenous to an area or who are poor to organize without money, though.

I’m not against the nonprofit sector. But I’m thinking of what it’s actually going to take to liberate Black folks in America. We use the word “revolution” all the time, but the fulfillment isn’t going to come through the nonprofit sector. It hasn’t for the last thirty to forty years. It’s like, when somebody gets killed by the police. We see mass mobilizations that come through the nonprofit sector that are usually more docile and less about a long-term stance of revolutionary conflict with the people we deem as our enemies. There has to be a space for more radical voices. We also have to trust the creativity of poor people.

How did Ferguson affect how you think about organizing?

I’m in a weird space after Ferguson. Before, I believed more in the power of legislation. I believed in political power with a voice at the table. I still believe we need to be at the table, but I’ve sat down with FBI and Department of Justice folks and police chiefs [and] the next day I’m getting arrested by these people. Literally, one day I went to a meeting with [law enforcement officials] and the very next day they killed a boy. I got arrested after they killed somebody!

Are you still active in Hands Up United?

Very much. Hands Up is coming up on three years in existence. We’re reassessing what we’re going to be. We spent most of 2017 trying to stay out of jail because a lot of the charges that we had accumulated during the Ferguson actions came to knock on our doors. They might have been petty cases, but the state wanted to push each and every one of them. We spent a lot of energy, money, and time trying to stay out of jail.

Talk about what Hands Up does.

Our Books and Breakfast Program has served more than twenty thousand people. We’ve given out over twelve thousand books and graduated three classes of Black technologists ages fifteen to thirty-five that we pulled off the streets and taught how to code and build websites for Black businesses. We started a food and clothing pantry. That gave us a different ability to show up in the community. We can show up and tell the shooters like, “Yo, today we’re out here giving away this food. There won’t be no shooting from this time to this time.” If we were to come to that community with just a clipboard, they may not necessarily listen.

You talk a lot about being poor and what that means in the movement. I’m interested in hearing more about class.

Not every Black person in America is poor, but they still Black. That carries its own type of mental, spiritual, and physical trauma because we have to rely on capitalism to, essentially, grant us our freedom papers. But poor folks are the most marginalized. If we’re gonna have a revolution, it’s gonna come through them first. Those are the people that are already shooting. They’re already living with socialist values whether they know it or not. We just have to figure out how to turn it into something more substantial.

A fundamental problem that I’ve observed is that some of our organizing promotes toxic masculinity among Black men under the guise of taking care of them. How do you address that?

I think we have to lead by example. I don’t shy away from the fact that women are soldiers. When we’re going into these ’hoods, we’re working with poor women for the most part. I struggle with the fact that a lot of brothers use negative language toward women. I’ve had conversations where I’ve lost friends. At the same time, I have an obligation to meet people where they’re at.

How do you do that? Pushing political stances in interpersonal relationships can be so complicated.

I don’t think that we can throw away humans if we’re claiming to be in the revolutionary space. I’ve met brothers fresh out of prison who are like, “Yo, I want to be a part of the revolution, how’s it going down?” They are comfortable because they can just be real. But there is some homophobia, sexism, and patriarchy involved. Some [movement] people go, “Fuck them. Forget them.” But they just got out of jail! We gotta address them with love. Some of my friends in the movement have died and we weren’t together because of them saying shit like, “Fuck these bitches. I don’t like these hoes.” I felt strongly about not being aligned with them when they passed. I felt as if I had shifted myself away from those brothers into a political body that didn’t embrace me and my identity. When I’d go to the meetings, I would be the only straight man in the room. So what that tells me is that [this movement] was not willing to struggle with people that don’t agree with us, even amongst ourselves.

Talk more about straight masculinity within a movement that is very steeped in Black feminism and queerness.

I am a person who is actively trying to purge myself of toxic masculine ways. I’m trying to show up not as an ally, but a straight up coconspirator with radical Black feminists.… I also will self-identify as an artist before I self-identify as being a Black man. That’s important to me. I’m going to use the art, and I’m going to be in the art in every capacity of my existence. I am a Black man, but I’m a lot more than that as well.

I fight White supremacy by reminding myself and everyone I can that race is fallacy, a divide-and-conquer strategy that will kill us all.

—Hank Willis Thomas, artist

QUESTION, ANSWERED

Neither of us identifies as an organizer, but we’re really interested in what makes people join movements and the groups that propel them. Here we each answer the question: “Are you a joiner?”

Akiba

People have often, as a compliment, called me an activist because I strive to create ways for people of color to say important things to one another and the rest of the world. But I deny this identity because it is not an informed assessment of my personality.

I am the child born in the mid-’70s of Philadelphia Black nationalists. Although my family has been improvisational and expansive in its activism, I somehow internalized the message that a narrow set of behaviors constitutes “real work.” These behaviors are of the ready-to-die or at least ready-to-seriously-suffer variety. And no matter what anyone has said since I heard at a young age that real revolutionaries had to be ready to subsist on rats and pigeons while hiding out in a sewer, my soul just can’t leave purism alone.

Without the drama and machismo of enforcing Black revolutionary purity, I can say that I believe that the most effective activism doesn’t happen without committing to something besides your paid work, sticky social media posts, and private acts of service. Practically speaking, and what I believe so far, is that you should join an organization that has agreed-upon values, transparent ways to resolve conflict, applied codes of conduct, political education, credible leadership, and a decent legal defense fund.

I get these (not-that-revelatory) ideas from years of observing how change works through journalism. On a personal level, I have come to this conclusion after people I believed in acted a complete fool and fucked up what could have been a good thing.

In a piece that she was kind enough to allow me to edit at Colorlines, the Black feminist scholar Barbara Ransby made a cogent argument for joining groups even as today’s decentralized movements spread through social media. In a June 2015 piece called “Ella Taught Me: Shattering the Myth of the Leaderless Movement,” Ransby wrote:

In my thirty years of working in many different groups, campaigns, and movements, I have been a part of efforts, not always successful, to strike the balance between mass mobilizing and organization-building; between inclusivity and accountability; and between strategic actions and spontaneous ones. Groups I’ve worked with have formed rotating steering and coordinating committees instead of electing officers. They’ve met regularly and devised ways for there to be lots of talking, learning, processing, and thinking out loud together. Communication was always key and accountability has been crucial.

I have found that without organizations, coalitions, and leadership teams, there is no collective strategy or accountability. An independent or freelance activist may share their opinion, and it may be an informed one, but if these words are not spoken in consultation or conversation with people on the ground, they are limited as a representation of a movement’s thinking and work.

At the time of writing this, Ransby was reflecting on the work of Black Lives Matter, Black Youth Project 100, the African American Policy Forum via the #SayHerName campaign, and the ascent of social media stars claiming ownership of the movement.

But all of this doesn’t explain why I’m not a joiner.

I think it comes down to romanticized childhood notions of movement work. Throughout the years, I have developed a set of defense mechanisms that make me a questionable-to-undermining member of non-work-related groups.

One, I don’t take actions that risk my livelihood unless I fully agree with the strategy and leadership. (In some dialects, that’s called “being a punk.” In others, it’s called “being smart.”)

Two, I have extremely high standards of individual accountability and become embittered when people, particularly those in leadership, don’t meet them.

Three, I don’t really trust anyone outside of my family and close friends.

I have no firsthand experience with COINTELPRO. I wasn’t even a zygote as that murderous disgrace ripped through my people’s work. Even more odd is that my biological and extended family have a deep organizing history. My late grandma, Mamie Nichols, an incredible community servant and organizer, has a freaking social service building named after her in her beloved Point Breeze South Philadelphia neighborhood.

My mother cofounded a group called Sisters Remember Malcolm and the Philadelphia Black Women’s Health Project. She was on the board of a local Black organization called Art Sanctuary. She worked in the parent organizing and school reform movement before right-wing operatives hijacked them. Even in retirement, this woman fantasizes about getting arrested doing her volunteer work with a multifaith grassroots network called POWER.

Meanwhile, my father was in the Kwanzaa Cooperative, was a principal member of an R&B band called The Company, and today works with the Philadelphia Jazz Project, Philly Cam, and an unnamed group of retired Black men trying to do something with coding and math. Like me, he doesn’t consider himself to be a joiner.

My late uncle, Richard Nichols, was the longtime manager and architect of The Roots, a group he helped hold together with revolutionary business acumen and duct tape. My late aunt, Yvette “Kinyozi” Smalls, had her own braid-based gang called Positive Hair Design. They didn’t bang on anything but unhealthy Black hair, but they kept it hot at the annual Odunde Festival and changed the minds of little Black girls who hated their kinky hair.

And what have I done?

Become someone who asks questions and then fact-checks, cross-checks, and triple-checks things people say for a living. Basically, my job privileges skepticism and my well-documented paranoia.

That paranoia, which one of my best friends stops me from flippantly calling “crazy,” is indeed justified by what I know of history. An informant destroyed Denmark Vesey’s 1822 revolt in Charleston, South Carolina. Ernest Withers, the Black photographer widely praised for taking some of the most intimate images of the Civil Rights Movement, turned out to be a paid FBI informant. William O’Neal, an FBI plant who became head of security of the Chicago chapter of the Black Panther Party, set up twenty-two-year-old chairman Fred Hampton to be murdered in his bed in a Chicago police raid. Those police also murdered twenty-one-year-old Mark Clark, and they sexually assaulted Hampton’s pregnant wife, then known as Deborah Johnson, by opening her robe and exposing her naked body auction-block style.

Besides scaring me, betrayals like these make me nauseous. A double agent in a trusted space of struggle rips apart our culture of survival. Betrayal makes us hypervigilant in unhealthy ways.

So while my inability to be a joiner is a source of frustration for me, I know to keep my mess to myself. Visceral paranoia and defensive what-ifs are not the best foundation for the kind of inspiration and faith that I believe people fighting White supremacy together need. If someone nice with their words (like me) always reserves the right to speak or change their mind, that does not make them a brilliant strategist. It makes them a critic—or a potentially toxic distraction. And yet, I know I am part of a greater project and legacy. I stay in my lane, yes. But I will never, ever, in my little smidgen of the world, let my folks be ground into dust. My position is not ideal, but it is. I believe that is enough.

Kenrya

It’s 1:00 a.m., and the mirrors are sweating.

Five of us are half-asleep in a surprisingly well-appointed room at the Embassy Suites in Romulus, Michigan, and it is hot and humid as hell, as a sixth woman makes clear after she quietly walks through and shuts the heavy door to the room, dropping her carry-on bag to the floor.

“How are y’all sleeping in here?” she asks as I stumble out of bed to help find the thermostat so we can turn off the heat.

We are so ragged from traveling that we haven’t even noticed it’s sweltering. It’s been years since we crowded so many bodies into a room, though at least on this post-college voyage everyone actually has a bed to share. But we didn’t hesitate to form like Voltron for this trip, purchasing last-minute airfares, renting a gleaming white Suburban, and piling into a hotel room just beyond the edge of Detroit Metropolitan Wayne County Airport. We are in town to help our linesister bury her father.

I am not one of those girls who grew up knowing she wanted to pledge. Hell, I didn’t even grow up knowing that I wanted to attend an HBCU. I applied to several colleges for undergrad, but when I hit the yard for a visit one warm April day, I knew Howard University was the place for me. It was my first time on an airplane, and I had never set foot in Washington, DC, before that day, but being on that campus felt like being in my Black-ass home.

We were everywhere! And we came in forms and fashions I had never encountered, with paper-bag test winners laughing beside moonlight that dared you to bring that colorism shit over here. The Jack and Jill set whose families owned homes on Martha’s Vineyard sat on the steps of Douglass beside those of us who had never heard of the enclave until Larenz Tate graced its beaches in The Inkwell. Brooklyn dudes in Timbs who thought a lazy two-step was the height of movement glared at the Atlanta cats who pulled all the chicks with their carefree twerking.

And among the crowd, joined at the hips, were the ladies of Delta Sigma Theta Incorporated’s Alpha Chapter. They threw the best social action programs, ran the key campus organizations, raised the most money for charity, and laughed the loudest in the caf. And I wanted in.

The average prospective member will tell you that she is seeking membership because of the organization’s long history of social justice advocacy and commitment to uplifting the Black community. And that makes sense: after the twenty-two founders broke ties with the first Black sorority to do their own thing, their initial official act was to participate in the Women’s Suffrage Parade in March 1913. My “power to the people” brain was drawn to the “say no more, fam” of it all—they didn’t think their original organization was doing enough for Black folks, so they threw up two fingers and did it themselves.

But the thing that captured my heart was seeing how the women on the line before mine interacted on campus. They were, in a word, sisterly. I could do community service beside anyone, but I was drawn to these women who came to the District from all over and found each other. They worked together, played together, fucked shit up together. And I too wanted a group of like-minded baddies to run the world with. So I pledged.

To this day, when anyone asks me about my Delta journey, I skip over the stuff I’m sure they want to know (Delta business is Delta business), and I tell them the most important part: my linesisters are the very best thing about this lifetime commitment.

I’ve worked with many groups over the years, organizing voter drives with my NAACP youth chapter, serving as chief of staff for HU’s student administration, teaching Saturday school for Black and Brown kids in New York City’s Alphabet City, helping Black co-eds develop their leadership skills. But for me, no group has illustrated quite as clearly the importance of working toward a goal—be it to stop responding when that fuckboy texts or to loosen the grip that Whiteness run amok has on our lives—with arms linked. My linesisters, you see, have shaped me.

We bonded on campus, but it was in the years after we graduated—as we found and lost and found ourselves many times over—that we became each other’s limbs. These ladies have been with me when I was at my lowest (propping me up as I processed the trauma of my marriage and subsequent divorce) and highest (watching my cooch intently as I pushed my kid out on all fours).

And then there are the funerals. We’ve gotten to an age where we are nursing our children while we bury those who first taught us to love. One day they are here, cooking oxtails for their grandchildren, musing on their days playing professional baseball, buying us crystal-encrusted elephants. And then their bodies are gone. But their souls abide.

And so does our sisterhood.