AT THE EARLY TEA PARTY RALLIES, AMID THE SIGNS CALLING to “Take Our Country Back” and the American flags, there was another noticeable pattern: signs that remarked upon the race of the new president.
Some called for his birth certificate, or played on the fact that Barack Obama’s father was Kenyan. One woman giggled as she read off her two-sided sign. “What’s the difference between the Cleveland Zoo and the White House?” the front asked. “The zoo has an African lion and the White House has a lyin’ African.” Others were blunt: “Don’t Blame Me, I Voted For the American.” There were pictures of Obama as a witch-doctor, a reference to the health-care reform bill in the works in Washington. Outright racist slurs were rare, but the implication that the nation’s first black president was somehow un-American, an outsider, or otherwise incomprehensible to the people who rallied in anger at town halls or outside the nation’s capital was fairly common. Black members of Congress, including civil rights icon John Lewis (D-GA), former chairman of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), and James Clyburn (D-SC), were greeted with racial slurs at a protest against the health-care bill; Emanuel Cleaver II (D-MO) was spat upon.1
Obama’s election would probably have inflamed avowed racists at the best of times. But he came into office during a massive economic crisis, one that had thrown millions out of work, obliterated retirement savings, and caused a wave of foreclosures that was accelerating and that would continue long after recovery had supposedly come. The combination was destabilizing even to many who would never have admitted to a belief in white supremacy. As people scrambled to protect what they had and cast about for someone to blame, suspicions flared. Anyone else’s gain felt like it might come at one’s own expense. All of that tension made it harder for people to see what they had in common and to imagine working together to make things better.
J. D. Meadows joined the Council of Conservative Citizens (CCC), which hosted a Tea Party protest in his hometown of Ripley, Mississippi. The group’s economic message hit home for him; factory closings in his town had put his aunt and uncle out of work, and meanwhile, he had watched the government bail out the banks and the bankers get richer. “Most people around here, whether they’re Democrat or Republican, liberal or conservative, are fed up with the government in some way or form,” he said. Asked about the CCC’s position on race, Meadows said, “The media plays races off against each other when the races should be united for liberty.” Pressed further on the subject, he said that he would leave a rally where there were overt racist themes promoted.2
But the CCC’s organizer in the area, Brian Pace, was convinced that he could bring members like Meadows around to white supremacist beliefs. Pace, who sold Confederate flag memorabilia as a sideline, explained that he began conversations by talking about the economy and slowly “educated” people on race.3
Tea Partiers were conscious of the fact that the racist signs gave them a bad name, and many of them worked hard to counter that reputation, posting guidelines on their websites on how to deal with racist outbursts, inviting black conservative speakers to address their gatherings, and reiterating, in interviews, that they had no problem with immigrants or black people. But even when they decried the kind of overt racism that has become déclassé in recent years, surveys found Tea Partiers more likely to agree with statements like, “If blacks would only try harder, they could be just as well off as whites,” and, “The Obama administration favors blacks over whites.” People who agreed with statements like these might never utter a racist epithet, but their belief that there were no structures of racism remaining in the United States fueled resentment—a resentment that was inflamed in times of crisis.4
Those periodic flare-ups obscured the fact that the people who had been hit hardest by the financial crisis were black and Latino, and that far from getting a handout from the new black president, black people had seen nearly half their wealth wiped out, compared to just under 30 percent for US families overall. Tensions had been heightened during a polarizing election, and the crash piled on yet more pressure, inspiring some people to point fingers and others to offer solidarity.5
By seeming contrast with the Tea Party, other activists taking to the streets after the financial crisis and the election made fighting racism part of their strategy. When Occupy Wall Street erupted in New York City in 2011, for example, among the signs that dotted the park were proclamations that “I Am Troy Davis.” Davis was executed in September 2011 for a crime he maintained he did not commit; an international movement sprang up around his case, but it was not enough to save him. “Race is everything in this case,” Representative Lewis had said in 2008, noting that Davis, a black man, had been convicted of killing a white police officer. After Davis’s execution, one occupier bore a sign that read, “Troy Davis would still be alive if he had been rich and white.” Across the country, when Occupy Oakland took over Frank Ogawa Plaza outside of Oakland’s city hall, the occupiers renamed it “Oscar Grant Plaza.” Grant, another young black man, was prostrate on the ground when he was shot in the back by a white Bay Area Rapid Transit officer in 2009.6
Among the young protesters, the term “intersectionality,” coined by legal scholar Kimberlé Crenshaw in 1989, was often used to describe the way people face multiple axes of oppression at once—for instance, a black woman does not face racism or sexism separately, but rather as intertwined, overlapping experiences. Sociologist Ruth Milkman, who studied Occupy, noted, “This generation uses the word intersectionality as if it were a household label.”7
Earnest attempts at color blindness within Occupy didn’t always go smoothly, though. Often they revealed a disconnect between the activists in the parks and the people they desperately wanted to reach. There were valid criticisms of the way the slogan “We are the 99 percent” could elide real differences. Manissa McCleave Maharawal was unsure about Occupy at first, having heard that it was mostly white people. She went anyway, and felt a connection to the movement, but when she stopped by the occupation one night with some friends, on the way home from a South Asians for Justice meeting, they saw a problem unfolding. The movement was about to agree on its “Declaration,” which contained a line about “being one race, the human race, formerly divided by race, class,” that put them off. If it made them uncomfortable, they worried it would warn other people of color away entirely.
“Blocking” the Declaration was hard, although the movement’s consensus process theoretically gave anyone the right to do so. A “block” was supposed to be taken very seriously—it was supposed to be something you were willing to leave the movement over. Maharawal wrote later, “There in that circle, on that street-corner we did a crash course on racism, white privilege, structural racism, oppression. We did a course on history and the Declaration of Independence and colonialism and slavery. It was hard. It was real. It hurt. But people listened. We had to fight for it. I’m going to say that again: we had to fight for it. But it felt worth it.”8
At Occupy Atlanta, another “block” made news when Representative Lewis stopped by and asked to speak. The assembly debated the proposal, as they did everything—loudly and in public—and decided to ask the congressman to address the assembly later, at the time scheduled for public speakers. Lewis couldn’t stay, and he appeared unruffled by the decision, telling reporters that the process represented “grassroots democracy at its best.” But someone caught the event on video, and it shot around the Internet. The movement’s horizontal ideals—that no one, not even a member of Congress, was more important than any other—seemed to clash with the respect due to a hero of a past movement, particularly to a black hero of the civil rights movement. The image of white protesters rejecting the black congressman was hard to shake.9
But frequent clashes with police were beginning to show some occupiers what it was like to exist under the gaze of armed officers day and night, and began to create connections that went beyond lip service to communities of color. For white protesters, being surveilled by police was a new experience; for a black Latina like Nelini Stamp, it was a fact of life, a problem that she had grown up with. The deaths of black men like Amadou Diallo and Sean Bell at the hands of police had shaped her work as an organizer and her practices of activism and civil disobedience.
In New York’s outer reaches, community organizers were building a movement to challenge the New York Police Department’s “stop-and-frisk” tactics—a policy that encouraged officers to stop people who appeared “suspicious” and pat them down, ostensibly for guns, more often for drugs—and the occupiers began to take notice. White protesters began to venture to marches in Harlem and the Bronx and the far reaches of Brooklyn’s East New York. Experienced organizers, Stamp noted, deployed the white activists, who would be treated with more deference by police than the black and Latino residents of those heavily policed neighborhoods, to make audacious demands, using their privilege as a shield.
On February 2, 2012, an NYPD officer burst into the Bronx apartment where eighteen-year-old Ramarley Graham lived with his grandmother. Graham was shot in the bathroom; his grandmother was thrown to the ground as he died in front of her. The police said they were pursuing Graham, who was unarmed, for possession of marijuana, and activists took to the streets, demanding charges against the officers. They made the connection between the pursuit of Graham and stop-and-frisk; ostensibly used to try to find weapons, the tactic most often resulted in minor pot arrests. That year, 85 percent of the people frisked by police had been black or Latino. Graham’s death activated networks that had been strengthened by Occupy, but protests remained local. And then on February 26, seventeen-year-old Trayvon Martin was shot in Sanford, Florida.10
Martin’s killer, George Zimmerman, was a neighborhood watch member, not a police officer, who had tailed the black teenager on his way home from a convenience store. At first, Zimmerman was not arrested for the crime. Authorities cited Florida’s Stand Your Ground law, which allows individuals who have used force against others to claim self-defense when they are in a public place and have a legitimate fear for their life. But to those already in motion around the abuses of the police, Martin’s death was on a continuum with Graham’s, another black teenager killed because society considered children like him a threat. “This is not just a state violence problem, it’s our country’s problem,” Stamp said.
The undercurrent of racism that had long simmered in the United States seemed to be bursting into the open, stoked by economic strife, the discomfort of some with a black president, and a new culture of protest. For people around the country, Martin’s death became a flashpoint; the claim that wearing a hooded sweatshirt had somehow made him seem suspicious angered many, including Daniel Maree, who called for a “Million Hoodie March” in New York on March 21. Maree founded the Million Hoodies network, which helped push an online petition calling for Zimmerman’s arrest to over 2 million signatures. Celebrities like basketball superstar LeBron James, musicians Frank Ocean and Ludacris, and even members of Congress made speeches, took photos, and turned up to protests in hoodies, challenging the oft-trotted-out line that black men and boys would be safe if they’d stop dressing like thugs.11
Ciara Taylor was a student at Florida A&M University in Tallahassee when she heard about Martin’s death. His story was a turning point for her because it put the lie to pretty fables about respectability and upward mobility. “Trayvon still had two very loving parents who would nurture him, he lived in a suburban community, and he was killed in his neighborhood by this guy who calls himself a neighborhood watchman,” she said. “In this country they tell you if you work hard you can live in these communities that are supposed to be safe and everyone is equal and free.” Like Martin, Taylor had grown up black in the suburbs, and she’d believed that story; although she had still experienced some level of racism, she had mostly bought into the myth of progress. That belief was now shattered, the possibility of individually escaping the tendrils of racism exposed as false.
Taylor had participated in some activism in high school—she protested the controversial presidential election in Florida in 2000, when the US Supreme Court had stepped in to resolve disputes over the vote count and put George W. Bush into the White House. Taylor remembered “thinking how much it sucks I’m basically yelling at my neighbors,” while decisions were being made behind closed doors that neither side could influence. In college, she organized in favor of a living wage for campus workers and in opposition to the budget cuts that discontinued her major the year before she was due to graduate. She didn’t remember how she found herself on that particular phone call to organize a response to Martin’s shooting, only that she was skeptical that anything would bring justice.
Organizers Gabriel Pendas, Ahmad Abuznaid, and Phillip Agnew (who has since changed his name to umi selah) knew each other from college activism around the death of yet another young black man, Martin Lee Anderson, in 2006. Pendas had just returned from an event celebrating the anniversary of the 1965 march from Selma to Montgomery, and suggested a march from Daytona to Sanford. Taylor remained skeptical, but she was angry enough to try anything. They scheduled the march for April 6.
Nelini Stamp got a call from a friend who worked with the progressive “netroots” organization MoveOn; the friend was looking for someone with experience in direct action to help the march organizers plan the event. Stamp accepted the offer of a plane ticket and flew down to join the march, even though she had only the barest connection to the Florida group. Martin’s death, she said, made her wonder about the value of the economic justice organizing she had been doing. “What’s it worth, if we can still be killed because we’re walking around who we are?” she asked. When she arrived, she saw that the group was smaller than the organizers had expected, with just forty people. Nevertheless, they set out.
Taylor, envisioning the photos of civil rights leaders in suits marching arm in arm, had worn dress pants to the march. She laughed at herself later, remembering the heat. But even in that heat, people pulled their cars over on the side of the road to join the march for a while, calling home for a ride later on. Taylor also recalled racist slurs shouted from passing cars, and a gas station owner who wouldn’t let them in to buy supplies or use the restroom. They spent nights in African Methodist Episcopal (AME) churches with a civil rights history, and members of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee came to meet with them. They sang civil rights songs, and Stamp rewrote a song she had written for Occupy Homes into a marching song for Trayvon.
Most of the marchers were not members of any organization; they were students or alumni of Florida schools who had done some activism in the past but had regular jobs. Ahmad Abuznaid had just taken the bar exam; umi selah was a pharmaceutical salesman. But as they marched, they began to feel that they couldn’t go back to the life they’d had before. “We all said, this can’t be it, this weekend can’t be it,” Stamp said.
As the marchers got closer to Sanford, rumors began to fly. They heard that the Ku Klux Klan and other white supremacist groups planned to be in town as well. When they reached the church where they were staying that night, Taylor was asked to address the crowd of local residents and elected officials that had gathered. “I had the elected officials and law enforcement stand up and people started automatically applauding,” she said. “I said ‘These people are the people who could’ve had George Zimmerman arrested from day one and they haven’t.’” The atmosphere in the room changed after that. Taylor challenged those in power to pick a side rather than issuing platitudes about how tragic it all was.
That night at the church, the group stayed up most of the night finalizing plans for a sit-in at the Sanford police station. The legal and financial support they were expecting evaporated; some of the organizations and celebrity backers the group had heard from earlier were now deciding against having their names associated with such an action.
Although only a small portion of the group, including Taylor, was still willing to risk arrest, the whole group marched to the police station from the church, singing as they went. “We went to the doors, knelt and just sort of prayed,” Taylor said. “We didn’t know what was going to happen.”
Instead of getting arrested, the group was asked to come in to meet with local elected officials and police. State attorney Angela Corey, who had been appointed as special prosecutor in the case in March, was on the phone. And after an hour or so, Taylor said, they were told Zimmerman would be arrested. There would be an investigation into the Stand Your Ground law. The direct action, coupled with the intensifying national protest and 2 million petition signatures, had finally brought the local officials around.
It felt like a tremendous victory to them. But to some members of the Sanford community, it wasn’t so simple. Many felt disempowered by an outside group coming in to take action. The group that would become the Dream Defenders realized, Taylor said, that in the future they wanted to help give people the skills they would need to fight their own battles.
Zimmerman was arrested on April 11 and charged with second-degree murder. Nelini Stamp went back to New York to pack her bags. “I’m moving to Florida for a while,” she told me at the time. “I think what’s happening there could be the new SNCC.”
IT WAS NOT THAT TRAYVON MARTIN WAS MORE DESERVING OF THESE protests than any other young black man dead at the hands of a guardian of order, self-appointed or official. Indeed, as Ciara Taylor said, the protests were for everyone—they were for thousands of lost futures as much as they were for Trayvon’s. The networks were in place that allowed these protests to take off: the infrastructure of the Internet, which allowed more people than ever to plan and communicate with one another quickly, and the networks of trust formed through earlier protests, which then brought in new people and their own social networks. And it was not that George Zimmerman shot a teenage boy in a hoodie because of the lousy economy or a black president, but that the tensions were stretched to the breaking point already, with people’s anger, fueled by repeated social breakdowns, driving them to take sides.
“The economic downturn and the election of the first African American president present unique drivers for right-wing radicalization and recruitment,” warned a 2009 US Department of Homeland Security report. Among the examples it cited was the shooting of three police officers in Pittsburgh by a man influenced by racist ideology. Border militias expanded, fueled by fear and anger at immigrants from Latin America, who were perceived as taking American jobs. In May 2009, white supremacists Shawna Forde, Jason Eugene Bush, and Albert Gaxiola killed nine-year-old Brisenia Flores and her father in a robbery that Forde had planned; she intended to use the stolen money to fund her Minutemen American Defense group. Brisenia’s mother was shot during the raid and heard her daughter plead for her life; the invaders had pretended to be law enforcement when they knocked on the door.12
It’s impossible to trace specific acts of violence to any particular inflamed rhetoric, but there is no doubt that heated debate after 2008 had violent undertones. On March 23, 2010, Sarah Palin Tweeted “Don’t retreat, instead—RELOAD!” with a map of “targeted” election districts in the crosshairs of a gun. That rhetoric exploded on the 2016 campaign trail, where Donald Trump’s calls for deporting undocumented immigrants and registering Muslims for surveillance led to rallies where black protesters and reporters were punched and dragged out by security. Trump declared at one campaign stop, “I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody, and I wouldn’t lose any voters, OK?” Actual violence seemed to be lurking around every corner, from a stepped-up rate of mass shootings (including one on January 8, 2011, that nearly killed Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords [D-AZ], who had been on Palin’s map and whose opponent in 2010 had held an event to “Get on Target for Victory in November” by shooting a fully automatic M16) to the deaths of Trayvon Martin, Jordan Davis (a black seventeen-year-old shot at a gas station in Jacksonville, Florida, by a man who wanted him to turn his music down, November 23, 2012), and Renisha McBride (a black nineteen-year-old shot while knocking on a stranger’s door for help in a Detroit suburb on November 2, 2013). Inflamed rhetoric ran high, while actual security—the economic kind that allows one to pay the bills—was in short supply; for those who already saw their gun as the thin line of defense between themselves and government tyranny or encroaching hordes of immigrants, the grip on the trigger might be even tighter.13
In times of economic crisis, producerist beliefs often take on a nastier tone than usual as more people begin blaming the “moochers” off the state for the broader condition of the economy. Such scapegoating can easily adopt racist language, and after the election of President Obama, it did: many believed “Obamacare,” for example, to be a handout from the black president to black and brown people; others considered the stimulus package to be a handout to the undeserving, a measure that left the (white) middle class to fend for itself. In that space, existing white supremacist groups won new converts.
Groups like the Council of Conservative Citizens, a descendant of the white Citizens’ Councils founded in the civil rights era to battle desegregation, had a resurgence, fueled in part by the Tea Party movement. Gordon Baum, the leader of the CCC until his death in 2015, claimed that the organization saw its most dramatic growth after Obama’s election. “Our nose is being rubbed into the fact that Obama’s black and we better all recognize the fact that he’s a black man and he’s our president,” Baum complained.14
The Citizens’ Councils were created in Mississippi just after the 1954 US Supreme Court Brown v. Board of Education decision desegregated the schools. They were made up of self-proclaimed “concerned and patriotic citizens” fighting “communism and mongrelization.” Scholar Charles Payne described them as “pursuing the agenda of the Klan with the demeanor of the Rotary Club.” When Baum went to build his new organization, the CCC, it was the mailing list of the Citizens’ Councils that he used—he’d been their Midwest field organizer.15
The distaste for talking about racism in the United States allowed groups like this to operate under the radar, and they were able to recruit people who might otherwise have avoided them had they been more up-front about their beliefs. That “demeanor of the Rotary Club” gave them a veneer of respectability that was important. Scholar of right-wing populism Chip Berlet argued that people like J. D. Meadows might have joined another organization if there had been one available that found a way to talk to people like him about their economic troubles. And on the other side, when liberal organizations and pundits acquiesce to the idea of a “color-blind” nation and time, they allow everyone to act as if racism is a thing of the past, to pretend that the structures of slavery and Jim Crow have left no marks on our current economy, and to detach phrases like “states’ rights” from their deep connection to secession and George Wallace in the schoolhouse door, keeping black students out of the University of Alabama.16
We forget the violence that was used to maintain structures of racism, that race as we now understand it was created by violent acts. Most people, if prodded, will mouth the truism that “race is a social construction,” often in service of the idea that race is over if we want it to be, that anyone who brings up the persistence of racism is in fact the one perpetuating it. If American society is unequal, we want to believe it is because some people simply aren’t working hard enough. Never mind the ferocious irony contained in believing that the descendants of people brought here as slaves to labor for decades under the constant bite of the lash have not worked enough. We did not see the violence that created and maintained slavery, and color-blind ideology allows us to pretend not to see the violence that continues to maintain inequality.
When we say “race is a social construction,” what we mean is that there is no biological distinction, no scientific reason, to think that people with brown skin are different from people with white skin. But what “social construction” also means is that European settlers in this country needed a justification for dispossessing the people who were already here of their land and their very lives, and needed another justification for why certain people were slaves and others were not. Racism, as scholars Barbara Fields and Karen Fields wrote, created our idea of race, not the other way around. It was created in order to build the structures that produced wealth for those settlers, the wealth that has been handed down through generations in this country.17
Racism—and racist violence—maintains race even today. W. E. B. Du Bois concluded in 1923 that what made a person black was that he “must ride ‘Jim Crow’ in Georgia.” The boundaries might be more porous today; we cannot say in the same way that a black person is one who is pushed into a subprime loan when she qualifies for a prime one, or that a black person is one who can be killed by police with impunity, though both of those things are much more likely to happen to black people than they are to white people. But Du Bois’s description reminds us of the force required. It would have been impossible for Trayvon Martin to argue with George Zimmerman that he did not identify as black, that he was post-racial, when the gun was aimed at his head. There might have been no law that prevented Martin and his father from living in a mostly white suburb, but that didn’t stop Zimmerman from feeling justified in using force to try to eject him from it.18
“Everyone has skin color, but not everyone’s skin color counts as race, let alone as evidence of criminal conduct,” the Fieldses wrote. “The missing step between someone’s physical appearance and an invidious outcome is the practice of a double standard: in a word, racism.” The belief in “race” as a fixed category disappears this racism, leaving even the most well-meaning people writing sentences such as “her real crime was to be black” when discussing the pointless arrest of a young woman. Blackness is not a crime, and we know that, but somehow to write “the real problem was that the police officer was steeped in the beliefs of American racism” is too much.19
Without an understanding of power and who wields it, some argue that the existence of black churches is equivalent to the establishment of Jim Crow laws. Yet on June 17, 2015, the Reverend Clementa Pinckney and eleven of his congregants at Emanuel AME Church in Charleston, South Carolina, demonstrated the difference when they welcomed a young white man to their Bible study meeting. The young man sat with them for an hour before pulling out a gun and shooting nine of them dead. Dylann Roof decorated his car and clothing with the flags of white supremacist regimes: Rhodesia, South Africa, the American Confederacy. He’d been turned on to white supremacy, a manifesto traced to him explained, when he found the website of the Council of Conservative Citizens while trawling the Web after the death of Trayvon Martin.20
Politicians scrambled in the days after Roof’s manifesto was discovered to give back political donations they’d received from the president of the CCC. The Confederate flag, which still waved in front of the South Carolina Capitol, had been a battleground in the state for decades, since it was raised in the days after the Brown decision. Protesters thronged outside of the Capitol, demanding the flag’s removal, in the summer of 2015. A South Carolinian who showed up to defend the flag, John Anthony Miller, said his grandfathers had fought under it. “I had no use for the flag being on top of the Capitol. It did not belong there. That was put up there for spite,” he acknowledged, but he argued that he was hurt that people wanted the flag removed from the grounds. “Last time I checked these grounds are a museum,” he said. “This is a war memorial for my grandparents. That’s a memorial for those who died for what they believed in . . . states’ rights, having stuff crammed down their throats by the federal government.”21
Miller decried Dylann Roof’s violent acts, and decried racism, but he wanted to maintain the flag and went and spoke with the other side; online, behind anonymous comments, others declared support for the flag in more vicious terms. “Here we see a moderately-sized clique of primitive savages, and a few White Leftist bottom-feeders, launching a tribal raid on a group of Southerners attempting to defend their heritage from cultural genocide,” one blog wrote of a group of counter-protesters at a Confederate flag rally. Brian Pace wrote a letter to his local paper arguing that Mississippi should keep the Confederate battle flag on its state flag and identifying himself as the president of something called the European American Front. The pro-flag rallies spread, spiked by the removal of the flag from the South Carolina Capitol. The first removal was carried out in civil disobedience on June 27, 2015, by North Carolina organizer Bree Newsome, who scaled the flagpole and brought down the flag, risking a jail sentence alongside her ally James Ian Tyson. The second time, on July 10, was by the vote of the South Carolina state legislature. Debate about Confederate flags and memorials continued to rage, reaching well beyond the South—students protested Yale’s Calhoun College, named for a famous alumnus and relentless battler for the spread of slavery, John C. Calhoun, and were waved off as unserious by commentators on both sides of the aisle. It is easy to decry racism in the wake of a brutal, blatant attack; it is harder to shake the way such beliefs wind their way into mainstream politics and into our culture’s most venerated institutions.22
VIOLENCE WAS EMBEDDED IN THE UNITED STATES’ POLITICAL AND economic systems from the very beginning. It took violence to take the land, violence to move African people here and hold them as slaves, and violence to make them work and to force them to innovate, and get more productive each year. That violence is embedded in the Constitution if you know where to look for it: in the language counting slaves as three-fifths of a person, for example, and in the amendment linking imprisonment to slavery at the moment of its abolition (“Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted . . . ”).
The way we talk about the effects of racism today can make it seem as though it is a hate that simply happened rather than an ideology developed to justify keeping millions of people (around 20 percent of the population in 1800) in forced labor. That labor produced the main raw commodity of the industrial revolution. Slavery created massive wealth for many people—not just the direct enslavers of other people, but factory and mill owners, retail salespeople, speculators, and perhaps most importantly, financiers. And when it ended, though the slaves were free, the rest of that wealth was not distributed back to the people who had created it. The legacy of inequality remains.23
It was in the interests of the wealthiest planters to encourage as many white people as possible to own slaves; it ensured that even if they had little else, they had the feeling of belonging to the white upper class. And many others, including in places like London and New York, where slavery was abolished fairly early on, sunk their money into bonds made by securitizing slaves—humans who were still working on plantations, but who were mortgaged to raise capital by their owners in a process that historian Edward E. Baptist likened to the home mortgage–backed financial products that created the financial crisis of 2008. Companies like Lehman Brothers, which collapsed in 2008 and kick-started that crisis, got their start providing capital to slaveholders. Slavery was not a system outside of modern capitalism; it helped to build it.24
It took violence to end slavery, too, the massive bloodshed of the Civil War, in which more than 600,000 people died. It took federal troops stationed across the South after the war’s end to allow black people some semblance of actual freedom. Underlying the rationale for expanding and perpetuating slavery had also been the fear of slaves’ retribution, a fear concretized by the Haitian Revolution, where black people rose up and drove out their enslavers. It was that fear—as well as by then deeply inculcated racist beliefs that reiterated, despite the end of slavery, that black people were not whites’ equals, that they were capable only of hard labor or brute violence—that led to the organization of groups like the Ku Klux Klan, which aimed to maintain white supremacy through violence.
While many of the laws that were set up under the Jim Crow regime explicitly to prevent black people from exercising political rights, such as poll taxes and literacy requirements, also disenfranchised poor white people, the group violence of lynching allowed those white people a way to feel like citizens who were invested in protecting the security of their communities, according to historian Robin D. G. Kelley. Lynching not only served to terrorize black people out of making demands—for higher wages, for voting rights, for reparations, for a share of the wealth they’d created—but also helped create a unifying “white” identity, one that expanded to take on the European immigrant groups who came to the country in waves before and after the Civil War. That white identity served as what Du Bois called a “public and psychological wage,” a supplement to the meager wages that the so-called “white working class” was paid. Even the word “boss,” borrowed from the Dutch, was used so that white workers could differentiate themselves from slaves—slaves had “masters,” while free white workers had a boss.25
In order to push for economic advancement and political rights, former slaves and their descendants had to challenge a justice system that was mostly based on mob rule. “Black Codes” criminalized the tiniest of infractions, including vagrancy, absence from work, insulting white people, and perhaps notably, the possession of guns (and have their echoes in today’s “broken windows” policing).26
Discrimination was written into the New Deal’s labor laws: farmworkers and domestic workers—mostly black men and black women, respectively, at the time, and work that had been done, until emancipation, by slaves—were left out of the protections of the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA, 1938) and the National Labor Relations Act (NLRA, 1935), making them ineligible for the protections of a union and for minimum wage and overtime pay. These exclusions and others were not explicitly racist, as their implicit racism would spill over to affect non-black workers in these fields, but the exclusions disproportionately affected people of color, and they would last well beyond the civil rights era, and are still having an effect today.27
With labor unions given official sanction by the NLRA in 1935, the labor movement grew exponentially, but even outside of the South it was lukewarm about organizing black wage workers. Communist organizers argued that excluding black people from unions would drag down wages and conditions for all by undercutting the contracts that unions won, but others simply refused to admit black workers. Even famously progressive leaders, like those in United Auto Workers Local 600 at the Ford River Rouge plant outside of Detroit, faced impromptu wildcat strikes in the 1940s by white workers when black employees were transferred into all-white units. Operation Dixie, the major attempt of the Congress of Industrial Organizations to organize the nonunion workplaces of the South, foundered in the early 1950s on its inability to break down the resistance of white people to interracial unionism and its unwillingness to challenge the racist violence that black workers still faced. As a result, the South remained mostly unorganized. Pretending racism didn’t exist, it turned out, was a poor strategy for bringing black and white workers together. Antiunion right-to-work laws were pushed through in most southern states, promoted with explicitly racist language by people like Vance Muse and his “Christian American Association.” Muse argued, “From now on, white women and white men will be forced into organizations with black African apes whom they will have to call ‘brother’ or lose their jobs.”28
In the face of all this oppression, the decision of what we now know as the civil rights movement to embrace nonviolence as a strategy can seem even more amazing, but it also makes a particular kind of sense. Surrounded by white people with guns and a criminal legal system that mostly served to lock them up or kill them after sham trials (all-white juries, of course, were common, as denying black people the right to even register to vote kept them off jury rolls as well), black people could have little hope of winning an armed conflict. Yet as Charles E. Cobb Jr., journalist, professor, and former Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee activist, wrote in his book This Nonviolent Stuff’ll Get You Killed, armed self-defense was also a part of the struggle. And it began not among the Black Panthers or with Malcolm X, but among tenant farmers and grandmothers in the rural South, where a gun wouldn’t win you equality but might stave off the lynch mob. As one farmer explained to nonviolent organizers, “I wasn’t being non-nonviolent; I was just protecting my family.” Others tartly noted that nonviolent strategies were being taught all over black communities, while no one had volunteered to teach nonviolence to the Klan.29
The rights won by the civil rights movement guaranteed some measure of protection for black people’s political rights, access to the ballot, and some measure of justice through fewer all-white juries. The schools were legally desegregated; George Wallace had to step out of that schoolhouse door and let the black students through. But Wallace and others managed to ride a wave of white resentment of desegregation and a newly rocky economy to new prominence. The Confederate flag was raised again over the South Carolina capitol in 1962 in defiance of desegregation, a symbol of the backlash to the black freedom struggle. Martin Luther King Jr. was killed in Memphis, where he’d gone to join sanitation workers whose strike slogan, “I am a man,” was echoed in 2013 by fast food strikers in New York.30
Desegregation and affirmative action hit just as the economy skidded downward. White workers didn’t want to hear that they’d had the benefits of the affirmative action of whiteness for decades when they were hunting for a job. As historian Jefferson Cowie wrote, “diversity arrived to American industry just as industry was leaving America,” and the answers from politicians often made things worse. The truck drivers who moved freight at the nation’s ports had been a strong, unionized, mostly white male workforce, but rather than pushing the unions to accept women and workers of color while maintaining a standard of living, elected officials chose to deregulate the industry, allowing bosses to classify the drivers as “independent contractors” who were responsible for maintaining their own trucks. The quality of the work and the take-home pay plummeted just as black workers and women were allowed in—and that story was repeated around the country.31
There was a brief attempt at fixing this problem in the late 1970s, as Senator Hubert Humphrey (D-MN) and Congressman Augustus Hawkins (D-CA) pushed forward a bill that would, in its original incarnation, have created an extensive apparatus for ensuring full employment. The bill was to provide the universal right to a job, and to do so it would have required the US government to do something like economic planning, an idea that turned out to be a bridge too far for members of Congress steeped in anticommunism. The bill was mostly defanged, and the version that was passed in 1978 had little effect.32
And so scarcity continued to inflame racist feelings as the economy began to take the shape with which we are now familiar. Incomes for those at the top continued to grow, and everyone else was forced to make do with less. While some tried to organize across race lines—Jobs or Income Now and the Young Patriots in Chicago worked alongside the Black Panthers on issues like police brutality as well as economic justice—too many others were susceptible to the charms of Ronald Reagan. Reagan put a smiling face on cuts to the welfare payments that supported so many, white as well as black, through economic rough patches. And too many were won over by the strategies of Republican campaigner Lee Atwater, who explained in 1981, referring to the infamous “southern strategy”: “You start out in 1954 by saying, ‘Nigger, nigger, nigger.’ By 1968 you can’t say ‘nigger’—that hurts you. Backfires. So you say stuff like forced busing, states’ rights and all that stuff. You’re getting so abstract now you’re talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you’re talking about are totally economic things and a by-product of them is blacks get hurt worse than whites. And subconsciously maybe that is part of it.”33
IT WAS THE VIOLENCE OF SLAVERY, THE VIOLENCE OF A WHITE SUPREMACIST regime enforced with burning crosses, lynch ropes and bullets, and a racist legal regime on top of it, that left black families with dramatically less wealth than white ones, right up to the present. As Robin D. G. Kelley said, these ideologies structured capitalism in the United States, and those effects are still with us today. The lowest that the black-white wealth gap ever got was in 1995, when the ratio between the median white and black households in terms of wealth was seven to one. Then the 2008 financial crisis wiped out about half of black wealth.34
Most of that wealth was in homes. For decades, policies and predatory sellers combined to ensure that when black families did manage to buy homes, they still wound up with less equity, less appreciation, and less of a financial safety net stored away in those homes. The Federal Housing Administration was created by the same New Deal administration that left black farmworkers and domestic workers out of labor protections, and like the labor laws, it wrote black people out of the gains that families would make from its backing of private mortgages. Its decision to insure a mortgage would lower interest rates and down-payment sizes, but that decision would be based on the home’s location on a map, which rated neighborhoods A through D—A was the best, D was where mostly black people lived. Those areas were colored red; thus the term “redlining.”
It wasn’t that you couldn’t buy a home without FHA insurance. It just opened you up to a host of predatory schemes. Speculators bought up cheap properties in black neighborhoods and sold them “on contract” to black buyers, a process by which the seller held on to the title, and if the buyer missed a single payment, forfeited everything they had put into “their” home. The home that they had hoped would allow them to build wealth instead took all they had.35
In those redlined neighborhoods, public services were lax and private businesses unlikely to invest. Public schools, which draw their funding from property tax revenue, were underfunded. Redlining was officially outlawed by the Fair Housing Act of 1968, and activists pushed for the 1977 Community Reinvestment Act (CRA), which required federally insured banks to lend in the low-income neighborhoods where they took deposits, to make up for some of the damages done by decades of racist policy. But all the CRA did was ensure that qualified borrowers were not shut out of mortgages because of their neighborhood. It could not replace the generations of wealth that the black working class had been denied.36
By 2005, the median black household had a net worth of $12,124; for white families it was $134,992. Home equity was the lion’s share of that wealth, some 59 percent for black families. The disparity in homeownership between black and white families was 25 percent in 2007. And then the housing bubble burst, exposing what journalist Kai Wright called “the myth of the black middle class.” People who had just begun to have the trappings of a middle-class living, who had bought a home, were making payments, and had a decent job, but nothing put away in case of emergency, were wiped out when the layoffs began. When their home values plunged, what little they had was gone, and if their jobs disappeared, they had no way to keep making payments.37
The social safety net that many people might have relied on in rough times had been gutted; “welfare reform” (what President Bill Clinton glowingly called “end[ing] welfare as we know it”) had arrived, following a campaign loaded with racist stereotypes, alongside the deregulation of the financial industry that allowed for the growth of the speculative bubble, which was inflated by financial products made out of mortgages. People of color, regardless of income, were steered into subprime loans, often in the same neighborhoods that had been previously redlined. Wells Fargo paid out more than $175 million to settle allegations that it had pushed black and Latino borrowers into subprime mortgages when white people with similar credit and incomes were given normal “prime” loans.38
Perhaps the worst part of the subprime scam was that large numbers of those loans were refinances of existing mortgages, and many of those probably unnecessary. “A lot of our older African-Americans were house rich but cash poor. So lenders came up with these scams to siphon the wealth away,” Center for Responsible Lending researcher Nikitra Bailey told Kai Wright. Around the country, 57.5 percent of refinance loans to low-income African Americans were subprime, as were 54.3 percent to moderate-income black borrowers. These predatory loans stripped what wealth existed in these communities, so recently hard-won, and put it back into the pockets of wealthy lenders. By 2009, the median black family had just $5,677 in wealth; the white median was still over $100,000. Black homeownership was down to 44 percent.39
This raiding of black wealth would have been bad enough without a crash, if homeowners were simply paying too much interest, struggling to keep up with variable-rate mortgages. But when the crisis hit, black unemployment went through the roof—and at the best of times, it has always been higher than the rate for white workers. Back in 2007, when the unemployment rate for white workers was 3.9 percent, it was 8.2 percent for black people. By 2009, black unemployment was near 15 percent; in the spring of 2011, two years into the supposed recovery, it was still higher, over 16 percent. Even black workers with college degrees were twice as likely to be unemployed as white workers with college degrees. Wages, too, were already lower for black workers. By 2015, the actual number of black children in poverty, 4.2 million, was higher than the number of white children in poverty, 4.1 million, despite the fact that there are more than three times as many white children in the United States.40
The history of redlining and white flight from the cities turned neighborhoods into disaster zones, and those neighborhoods were where the double whammy of job loss and foreclosure hit the hardest. In Baltimore’s Sandtown-Winchester and Harlem Park neighborhoods, the unemployment rate in 2011 was one in five, almost twice that of the whole city, and about a third of the residents lived below the poverty line. Almost a quarter of the neighborhood’s buildings were vacant, and the ones that were occupied were health hazards—the neighborhood had three times more lead paint violations than the rest of Baltimore. Freddie Gray grew up in Sandtown-Winchester and suffered lead paint poisoning as a child; at age twenty-five, he was killed in the back of a police van. In neighborhoods like Gray’s, interactions with the police for low-level infractions are all too common, the only solution the state seems to have for rampant poverty. In “those neighborhoods,” black and brown people get arrested for violations like “obstructing pedestrian traffic,” and the excuse given is that “those neighborhoods” are where the crime is.41
It’s not enough that people like Gray were blamed for their own deaths, for being in the wrong place at the wrong time with brown skin. The people in “those neighborhoods” were also blamed for causing the entire financial crisis, a shift of blame that would have been laughable if it hadn’t been nearly pulled off by a whole chorus of sanctimonious columnists and congressmen intoning pieties about “moral hazard” and people signing up for mortgages they couldn’t afford. “Political correctness,” they said, was to blame for the collapse, because lower-income people simply couldn’t be trusted to own homes.42
The Community Reinvestment Act was the target of their ire, although, as many pointed out, the biggest subprime lenders were private-sector companies that were not subjected to the rules of the CRA. It is also worth noting that the idea of the “ownership society,” of getting every person to own a home as a way of involving them personally in American capitalism, was as dear to the hearts of Republicans like George W. Bush as it was to Democrats like Jimmy Carter, who signed the CRA into law. But what those arguments really meant was that the people who finally got mortgages after the government stepped in had been unworthy of that effort, that in fact they had deserved all along to be shut out of the process, that racism had had nothing to do with it. Such an argument not only washed clean the hands of banks like Wells Fargo but absolved all of the architects of redlining as well as the lenders who managed to profit from it.43
Shifting the blame served to make those who escaped relatively unscathed from the recession feel better about their good choices, and to feel less inclined to share what they had to make the victims of the crisis whole. And since the implicit message behind so much of the victim-blaming was that trying to help black people only made things worse for everyone, it was okay to simply write them off instead.44
In this context, with what little wealth black communities had been able to amass crumbling away, and demagogues blaming them for their own suffering, the death of Trayvon Martin took on a meaning that was larger than life. It spurred people around the country into action. And in the context of protests around the country against inequality, activists began to connect the violence they faced with the economic crisis that had been ongoing, even permanent, among black people.
CHARLENE CARRUTHERS REMEMBERED RIGHT WHERE SHE HAD BEEN when the verdict in George Zimmerman’s trial for shooting Trayvon Martin came down. At the time, she was still director of digital engagement at National People’s Action. Cathy Cohen, founder of the Black Youth Project, had called a convening to discuss what black youth organizing could look like, a gathering of one hundred young black activists from around the country, in the summer of 2013. And on July 13, 2013, the Zimmerman verdict was announced while they were together: not guilty.
Out of that moment of collective trauma, they formed the BYP 100. Carruthers began devoting herself full-time to building an organization that would create a new vision of justice, one that didn’t depend on the courts, and that would bring a black feminist and queer lens to its work for racial and economic justice. “I wholeheartedly believe that if we were not together in that particular moment, this organization wouldn’t exist,” Carruthers said.
Ciara Taylor was in Jacksonville when the news broke. She watched on social media as hundreds of people Tweeted their grief. Calls to action came from students at her alma mater, and hundreds rallied at the Florida Capitol. She was political director for the Dream Defenders, who were at the time scattered across the state, organizing in different regions around the school-to-prison pipeline and racial profiling, issues they had seen at work in the story of Trayvon Martin.
In the intervening year, they had registered voters alongside Vote-Mob and the League of Women Voters. They had also committed civil disobedience outside the Boca Raton, Florida, presidential debate, demanding that the candidates speak on immigration and privately owned detention centers, police brutality, education, living wages, and criminalization of drugs—issues that had been largely missing from the campaign season. Taylor found the voting work frustrating. Many people, she said, were simply turned off by the entire process, feeling disempowered. “Nobody wants to vote,” Nelini Stamp agreed. “People are saying no, you’re not representing me, the electoral system in this country has been broken for a while. It was born broken.”
But although people didn’t want to vote, and turnout remained low, more and more people seemed willing to come out for big protests. In New York, before she’d moved to Florida, Stamp helped organize a massive silent march—a tactic first used by the NAACP in 1917 to protest lynchings in East St. Louis—against stop-and-frisk tactics. It brought together labor unions like 1199 SEIU, the NAACP, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), elected officials, community activists, and occupiers, who flooded Fifth Avenue in opposition to the policy. To Stamp, the fact that the mainstream organizations were willing to take part in an unpermitted march down a street where protests were usually not allowed represented a step forward.45
Alicia Garza had been an activist since she was twelve, at first around sex education and reproductive justice, and then in college around issues of race and class. In 2013 she took a job with the National Domestic Workers Alliance, organizing a group of mostly women workers who were still held back by the connections of their work with slavery and their racist exclusion from the New Deal. At previous moments in her lifetime, activism had surged around police violence, and in particular, around the killings of Amadou Diallo and Sean Bell and the beating of Rodney King. Garza, along with Patrisse Cullors and Opal Tometi, also longtime organizers, wanted to create something that would look different from the activism of generations past, where black organizing was often led by charismatic men of the church. After the Zimmerman verdict, they formed Black Lives Matter, initially as a set of online platforms meant to connect people to offline actions.
Around the nation, social-media-amplified anger and grief fueled protests. The Dream Defenders decided to do something more dramatic than a rally or a march. At a rally in Jacksonville—for Trayvon Martin and Jordan Davis, who had died in that city—they announced that they would be heading to the Capitol. “We couldn’t really give people much more information than that. Partly because of security, partly because we didn’t really know what we were going to do,” Taylor laughed.
The Dream Defenders planned to demand a meeting with Governor Rick Scott to discuss the Stand Your Ground law, the school-to-prison pipeline, and racial profiling. Inside the Capitol, a receptionist told them the governor was unavailable, but they refused to leave. “When night came, there was a decision, do we leave or do we stay? We said we’ll stay,” Taylor said. “We didn’t have food, water, things to sleep on. Next thing you know people who were with us, older people from our community, were just like, ‘I’m going to buy you food and I’m going to buy you all water.’ This woman came with sleeping bags. We understood the love that we had for our community, but I don’t think we really understood the love our community had for the work that we were doing.”
There was technically no law, at that point, that said they couldn’t stay. On the third day, Taylor had to leave to go back to Jacksonville for a meeting, and that was the night that Governor Scott arrived. He showed the protesters his boots, which were adorned with the Confederate flag alongside the US flag, and told them there was nothing he could do. He suggested they organize a prayer vigil.46
Some of them may have prayed. But rather than leaving the decision to God or the governor, the Dream Defenders found a law that allowed citizens to petition lawmakers for a special session. They began organizing a letter-writing campaign to call for such a session and for lawmakers to pass “Trayvon’s Law,” which would amend the Stand Your Ground law, eliminate zero-tolerance policies, and end racial profiling. They also met with the Florida Department of Law Enforcement. During that time, they maintained a presence in the Capitol rotunda and in the hallway outside Scott’s office, using the space as a training ground, giving workshops and building support. The actor Harry Belafonte joined them for a rally.
The Capitol guards, Taylor said, would try to drive them out, leaving the lights on at night, turning on loud music suddenly while they tried to sleep, or preventing people from bringing in supplies. Republican lawmakers refused to vote for the Dream Defenders’ special session, instead passing a law against people staying in the Capitol in the future—nicknamed the “Dream Defender law.” But the Dream Defenders called a “People’s Session,” inviting members of the community to vote on the policies that the legislators refused to vote on, and left with their heads high—on their terms, not Rick Scott’s.
To Stamp, it had been a question of when, not if, a movement would go viral in the same way Occupy had. She knew the energy around stop-and-frisk and Trayvon would at some point turn into something more concrete. While not everyone surrounding the new racial justice movement was willing or able to risk arrest, the Dream Defenders’ Capitol occupation was a symbol of a new militancy, a willingness to move beyond the boundaries of electoral politics. Activists held public spaces that for them held symbolic meaning while allowing them to disrupt business as usual—what John Lewis, when I spoke with him in the summer of 2013 as the Dream Defenders were still in the Capitol, called “finding a way to get in the way. Finding a way to get in trouble, good trouble, necessary trouble.”
To Alicia Garza, what was new in that moment was “a real emphasis on leaderfull events, that have multiple leaders and that also aren’t reliant on the charismatic leader to lead the masses to victory.” The groups that emerged in the wake of Trayvon Martin’s death often did have directors, founders, people with titles and official positions, but they still encouraged others to step up and organize actions and to expand their networks. They used social media not just to inform people about their actions but to share tactics and strategies, so that the work the Dream Defenders did in Florida or that the BYP 100 did in Chicago could be replicated elsewhere.
In 2013, Malaya Davis was recovering from the presidential elections. A student at Wright State University in Dayton, Ohio, she’d grown up in Cleveland very aware of her own race and class position. She had begun organizing with other black students, became president of the NAACP on campus, and then discovered the Ohio Student Association (OSA). The organization, which was born out of the successful fight against Ohio governor John Kasich’s antiunion bill and the local Occupy movement, used language that seemed to fill a gap she had been missing in her own work. “Many oppressed people, we’re told that power is something that we don’t want to have, because we see it as something that is manipulative and something that is top-down—power over,” she said. “I never had a real, intentional conversation about power with other people, and how power with folks and power with resources can build the type of things that we want.”
OSA members had worked with the Dream Defenders and other student organizers to put on the National Student Power Convergence in the summer of 2012 in Columbus, Ohio. Kirin Kanakkanatt, project director at that convergence, joined the Florida Capitol occupation. She was part of a loose network of activists working on racial and economic justice that was coalescing. In the summer of 2013, just two weeks after the Dream Defenders left the Florida Capitol, many of them planned to attend the 50th Anniversary March on Washington and to be part of the actions around that event. The young organizers held a march on the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), the conservative bill mill that had pushed Stand Your Ground model bills in several states, in conjunction with the anniversary commemoration, and umi selah of the Dream Defenders was scheduled to speak at the official march.
But at the last minute, selah and Sophia Campos from United We Dream were cut from the program—denied even the two minutes each had been allotted. To Davis, the omission was ridiculous. “We are talking about the fiftieth anniversary of the March on Washington and the entire time we were just commemorating the fifty years, as if there was no possibility that the next fifty years could even happen.” The Dream Defenders released selah’s speech online and encouraged young people to record their own two minutes. The clips of young black and brown people speaking about their work—their value to a movement that is happening now, that didn’t end fifty years ago—resonated across the Internet and embodied a tension that would continue between the young activists (and quite a few movement elders who supported their work) and those who had gotten used to positions of power and a performative way of acting that had long ceased to produce results.
In the wake of the march, Nelini Stamp said, young activists decided to celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of Freedom Summer not with “pomp and circumstance,” but with action. Members of BYP 100, of Dream Defenders, of OSA, United We Dream, and others came together to plan a network for actions. Freedom Side was born out of that meeting, a coalition of groups and individual activists of color who were committed to the fight for racial justice. “Together,” their statement read, “we defiantly claim that our lives matter.”
Kanakkanatt, who had just taken a job as field coordinator at LGBT organization GetEQUAL, helped craft their first statement, and she had conversations with some members of the group who had done little work with queer and transgender people. The important thing, she said, was that everyone came to Freedom Side with a spirit of openness and learning, an understanding that “we’re fighting for these different political agendas, but actually what we’re fighting for is for each of us to love each other fiercely.” Malaya Davis agreed: “Solidarity is a verb.”
Stamp left her job at the Working Families Party once again to be the coordinator for Freedom Side full-time, and they put together four anchor actions, in Mississippi, Florida, Ohio, and Texas. “The idea was for all of us to show up to each other’s fights,” she said, to model what “deep solidarity” might look like. They convened throughout the year, and many of them traveled to different states to support each other. Freedom Side allowed groups to coordinate, but also left them space to do different types of work, according to Charlene Carruthers. “It makes movement work more intersectional. And more open for many people to enter in different ways.”
Direct action and disruption remained central to the movement. “We call it ‘Stopping business as usual,’” Alicia Garza said. “It forces people to say ‘Where do I stand? I don’t get to be wishy-washy about this. I can’t continue on with my life until I decide which side I am on.’” It is a declaration that the current system is intolerable and must be changed, and a demonstration of a different kind of power, a power that comes from a group of people acting together, challenging traditional figures of authority.
In July 2014, a Freedom Side group went to Nashville, Tennessee, to hold an action at the National Governors Association meeting, to challenge those governors about the criminalization of young people of color. That was the first time Malaya Davis had ever been arrested. “It shifted reality for me and for a lot of us in this work at that point,” Davis said. They had not planned on being arrested, and so the larger network had to jump into action to react, to raise funds. “There was a graphic made within thirty minutes of us being detained. It was awesome. We were able to bring resources together and get five folks out of jail within six hours,” she said.
Only a few days after Davis and the others got out of jail, on July 17, the news came that Eric Garner had been killed by a New York City police officer. Two weeks after that, on August 5, John Crawford III was shot by police in a Beavercreek, Ohio, Walmart, and just four days later, August 9, Michael Brown was shot and left for four hours in the street in Ferguson, Missouri. The response of young people in Ferguson was explosive, but it helped that there were networks in place of people who could help support them.
Davis and OSA began organizing actions to demand that police turn over the surveillance tapes from the Walmart store to Crawford’s family. The videos, like the video of Eric Garner in New York, became central to the struggle, but also something of a double-edged sword. Videos existed of Garner’s death, and of Crawford’s death, but the officers in both cases were not indicted; meanwhile, the repeated exposure to videos of black people dying was both traumatic and desensitizing. Davis said, “If we allowed ourselves to react emotionally and physically and all these ways that a human being should react to these horrific instances, we would drive ourselves crazy.”
The videos did serve, though, to remind people that racism was not just a southern problem, not just a Florida or Mississippi story. Historically, Davis pointed out, Ohio was the “safe state,” a free state. “Folks who escaped slavery and migrated from the South, once you got to Ohio you were safe,” she said. But every state in the nation was touched by slavery’s reach and retains a history of racism. “Ohio has never been a safe space for people of color and for black people,” Davis said. “Racism is something that we know transcends a geographic area of the country.”
With the existing networks in place, it was easy for organizers to put out guidelines and templates for action, to host conference calls, and to create an initial list of demands. Those demands ranged from the specific—arrest or fire police officers who kill—to the broad-ranging, even revolutionary—end capitalism and white supremacy. To Nelini Stamp, having the smaller, more winnable demands was necessary to keep people moving forward, and backing up those demands with action created space for the bigger ones, what Robin D. G. Kelley called “transformative demands.” Transformative demands attend to a specific crisis but then are ratcheted up to question the logic of the system itself—the system, in this case, of white supremacy. BYP 100, in the spring of 2016, released an “Agenda to Build Black Futures” that was an excellent example of such demands. The agenda included a demand to pass the Employment Non-Discrimination Act and for investigation by the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau of predatory mortgage lending; it also included reparations for slavery, mass incarceration, and redlining. It included a guaranteed living income regardless of employment. “I think we need to be very clear about what it is that we want. We want freedom, but what does that really mean?” Malaya Davis said. “If we can get to the point where we are naming and can explain the things that we want, then we can better figure out how we are going to get there.”47
Challenging that system means ending the violence, whether it comes from the state in the form of police officers or from racist vigilantes like Dylann Roof. But it also means fighting for economic justice, as BYP 100 did with its Black Work Matters campaign and its Agenda to Build Black Futures. “When we think about economic justice, the Fight for $15, any workers’ rights struggle,” Carruthers said, “it is essential that racial justice and also gender justice is central to the analysis and also how folks attack their organizing.” Nelini Stamp underscored the necessity of understanding white supremacy, capitalism, and patriarchy as intertwined systems that could also stand alone. The movement for black lives stressed the “white supremacy” part, but it was also acutely aware of how these systems intersect, and how black women like Rekia Boyd, shot in 2012 in Chicago by an off-duty police officer who was deemed “beyond reckless” by a judge, and black transgender women, like Islan Nettles, beaten to death in 2013 in Harlem while she was out walking with friends, were caught at the intersections.48
The networks that had begun after Trayvon Martin’s death expanded to become something different altogether. From its beginnings as an online platform, Alicia Garza said, Black Lives Matter became an organizing network of local chapters—there were twenty-six of them as of 2015—“with a really radical analysis and a commitment to praxis in a way that I feel like I haven’t seen in a really long time. Every single one of those chapters is moving a campaign on the ground that has clear demands and a clear target, analysis of how to build power.”
The Dream Defenders, too, reorganized, going from a chapter model mostly based on college campuses to a more community-focused approach. Ciara Taylor’s title became “director of political consciousness.” She learned from traveling, studying movements in countries from Brazil to Palestine, and began to push for a way to talk about politics that went beyond the binary of Democrats and Republicans. “We’re really trying to figure out how to develop our own organizing model for change,” she said. “We’re trying to make sure that we are eradicating any semblance of oppression from our means, and bringing people to a true place of understanding these issues and thereby being able to move forward, in collective strategy, where we’re not having a few people dictate the direction of the movement.”
After scaling the flagpole and taking down the Confederate flag in South Carolina, Bree Newsome put out a statement stating her lineage as an activist, beginning in North Carolina with Moral Mondays. She had joined the Dream Defenders in Florida and marched with the Ohio Students Association in the streets. She recalled her ancestors, sold in the slave market in Charleston. “This action required collective courage just as this movement requires collective courage,” she said, thanking the group of people who planned and supported the action. It was a striking display of the values of the movement that trained her.49
It was necessary, Taylor said, to keep breaking down barriers that prevent more Bree Newsomes from taking action and stepping up to lead, barriers that include internalized sexism and racism as well as external pressures. Taylor said: “Until we address those barriers, until we address the unconscious behaviors, we’re not going to be able to win, because you can’t fight for justice and freedom and liberation if you don’t believe you deserve it in the first place.”