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Anti-Racist Teaching During the Pandemic

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Anti-Racist Teaching During the Pandemic

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Webinar by Rethinking Schools

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Anti-Racist Teaching During the Pandemic: Lessons from The New Teacher Book

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How to Talk About Racism and Police with Kids

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How to Talk About Racism and Police with Kids

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The Atlantic

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Schools do students a disservice when they fail to teach them about difficult issues.

Camilo Hunica

Editor's Note: In 1988, a teacher most commonly had 15 years of experience. In recent years, that number is closer to just three years leading a classroom. The "On Teaching" series focuses on the wisdom of veteran teachers.
On a Friday afternoon in early June, educators from a community-education project called Abundant Beginnings held an online workshop for kids between the ages of 3 and 5 and their families. My own preschool-age child was 30 minutes away, at her grandmother's house, but I tuned into the San Francisco Bay Area group's Zoom call. This was a week after protests against police violence had spread from Minneapolis across the nation, and I needed help. I'd shown my daughter photos of protesters, but I struggled to answer the questions that came next about why the police had killed George Floyd. For that, I needed the guidance of skilled educators.

Early in the workshop, two facilitators used simple words to describe a protest scene. They were in conversation, modeling age-appropriate language. Soon, we were introduced to the "white-supremacy fairy." This fairy, we were told, is known to land on shoulders, including, sometimes, those of police. "It's telling them white people are better than other people," one facilitator said. "They're whispering into the police officer's ear, and their boss's ear, and their boss's boss's ear. That boss is called the system. And they're telling them to do the wrong thing."

Across the country, young children are turning to the adults in their lives to help make sense of racism and policing. The uprisings sparked by Floyd's death kicked off in May, when many schools had already shut down for the summer, and much of the work of explaining this movement has fallen to families. But as schools prepare to reopen, conversations about police violence may move to classrooms-both real and virtual.

Howard Stevenson, the Constance Clayton Professor of Urban Education at the University of Pennsylvania, helps educators and families address race with children. Families of color have long sought him out as they confront race-based inequities around discipline and curriculum at school, he says. But this summer's protests have led to a significant uptick in requests from white families and educators. "Since George Floyd died there has not been a week yet when I haven't spoken to a new school," Stevenson told me in mid-August. "For us it's been nonstop." Adults often have to examine their own assumptions and biases before they can facilitate conversations about police violence, he said-especially given that 79 percent of public K-12 teachers are white.

For students, too, prior experience of police violence will differ vastly between homes, schools, and communities. Some may have witnessed a family member's negative run-in with police, or live in a neighborhood that's regularly patrolled. "In a low-income community, school is not the place where young people are learning about the police," says Micia Mosely, founding director of the Black Teacher Project, a leadership-development program based in Oakland, California. Some students have had bad experiences with the police themselves, even within their schools; the viral footage of 6-year-old Kaia Rolle being restrained by police and removed from her Orlando grade school in February was a reminder that many administrators partner with law enforcement, sometimes to discipline terrified children.

Teaching all young children about police violence requires some understanding of structural racism. Educators have to reject any instinct to lie or sugarcoat, says Francie Latour, who co-directs Wee the People, a Boston-based social-justice project for kids between the ages of 4 and 12. Her organization offers a workshop called "What Is Racism?" to schools in the city and its suburbs, some of which have student bodies that are largely Black and brown and some of which are predominantly white. The workshop is used with children as young as kindergartners. In it, the facilitators start by challenging an idea that many young children have-that racism simply means being unkind to someone because they're Black.

Instead, Latour tells them, "It's a big unfairness in the world, and our job is to get really good at noticing the many ways that racism shows up, because sometimes it's hard to see." Sometimes it's about having a freedom denied because you're Black. It can also mean having some doors open effortlessly because you're white. The group reads a book called Milo's Museum, about a Black child who goes to a museum and notices the lack of cultural contributions from people who look like her. It's a tool that helps young people understand that racism can be embedded in institutions and culture. "Before we read the book, we challenge kids, 'Okay, we've got our binoculars on. See if you can tell us who is racist to Milo,'" Latour told me. "They struggle with it because that's all they've been taught: It's a deliberate action by a bad person."

Latour also talks with children about how historical events set the stage for where we are today. She and her co-director explain the racial hierarchy that 15th-century Europeans created to justify slavery. Kids understand sorting, and they understand lies, she said, so they get it when they are taught that people from Africa were categorized as being less than human, despite those categories having no basis in fact. "We're in the business of telling kids the truth," Latour said. "It's absolutely possible to speak with kids honestly about things that we find deeply uncomfortable."

Even in the earliest grades, young people have the building blocks they need to understand what adults might perceive to be complex social forces. In Latour's workshops, facilitators ask children to share something that's happened in the past week that they thought was unfair. Every hand shoots up. "Kids have a hardwired, innate sense of fairness," Latour said. "It's the job of adults in kids' lives to connect that strong sense of fairness to issues of justice in the world." Children can also weave ideas about sameness and difference into their play. Dena Simmons, assistant director of the Yale Center for Emotional Intelligence, models how the topic could be introduced to kids: "'Let's talk about different textures. Let's talk about different patterns,'" she offers as examples. "Differences don't need to be bad," she told me. "They can make the interaction even richer."

Even more complex ideas can be introduced with concrete examples. Latour uses a bicycle to explain systemic racism, pointing out that handlebars, pedals, brakes, and wheels all work together to make it move. "You can show a child a picture of a bike and all of its different parts and say, 'When we say system it's a fancy word for lots of things that work together to do one thing,'" Latour said. The racism embedded in our culture and institutions can be harder to spot than the components of a bike. She tells children, "The reason it's so hard to see is there are lots of different parts of our lives that are working together to keep this lie going, this lie that being white is better."

Adding joy and a sense of agency helps kids absorb weighty messages, these educators said. Some stressed the importance of emphasizing the beauty and pleasure in being Black, so that young people don't associate the problem of police violence or racism with Blackness itself. It can also involve music and movement: The Abundant Beginnings workshop was led in part by a musician called Teacher Aunty Monica from the Bay Area music and storytelling program BoomShake, whose songs and drum-supported chants were interspersed throughout the dialogue. At one point, the facilitators' conversation shifted from police and white supremacy to talk of how family members and neighbors can keep each other safe, and a chant drove home the lesson: "We keep us safe!" The pivot away from the problem and toward a solution offered an age-appropriate lesson in alternatives to policing.

Still, it can be tough to discuss serious topics with children, especially in a complex way that works for both students and their families. Liz Kleinrock, who taught for seven years at a public charter school in Los Angeles, told me she addressed racism and policing with her fourth-grade students in the fall of 2016. Over the summer, there'd been two high-profile police killings of Black people, Alton Sterling in Baton Rouge and Philando Castile in the Twin Cities.

Kleinrock tried to get her students to move beyond simplistic statements such as "All lives matter" and to understand why such a declaration was potentially hurtful, particularly to the handful of Black students in class. But sometimes the nuance she encouraged got lost on the way home. She said she heard from the mother of a student who had a police officer in his family. The child's takeaway from class had been that all police are bad. Kleinrock explained that her message had been about bias and abuse of power, and the parent was eventually satisfied. But the exchange helped Kleinrock see that her students needed an opportunity to reflect back to her what they were hearing. "The next day I had to go in and re-teach part of it to make sure kids weren't walking away with these blanket statements," she said.

Stevenson, the University of Pennsylvania professor, said it's never too early to start these discussions. Adults can make the conversation age appropriate by approaching it as they would any other complex topic, such as unsafe touch, strangers as a potential threat, or what to do in case of a fire. "I would rather prepare them early for things and scaffold it," Stevenson said, referring to how educators craft lessons so that students learn progressively more complex information or skills over time. "You don't have to say everything" in the first conversation.

Talking to students about the basics of racism and policing early on can help them develop complex thinking, and that, in turn, will help them understand tricky issues-like those related to the criminal-justice system-with nuance. Last year, Wee the People hosted a workshop called "What Are Jails For?" in an effort to get families talking about mass incarceration. Facilitators asked kids about the purpose of jails, and got responses about superheroes and "bad guys." Then the leaders displayed mug shots of Martin Luther King Jr. and Rosa Parks. Upon seeing the photos, the kids wondered why these "good guys" had been taken to jail, a place they believed was reserved for people guilty of committing a crime. When given the opportunity, children learn to hold contradictions.

Schools do students a disservice when they fail to teach them the messy truth about this country's history and how it shapes the present, Latour said. The world got to be this way because people made it so-and when educators don't communicate that to young people, they limit students' ability to imagine something better. "They can't unmake it or remake it if they don't see that it's made."
This article is part of our project "On Teaching," which is supported by grants from the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, the Spencer Foundation, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, and the Panta Rhea Foundation.

We want to hear what you think about this article. Submit a letter to the editor or write to letters@theatlantic.com.

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How to Talk to Kids About Racism and Police

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Schools do students a disservice when they fail to teach them about difficult issues. Editor's Note: In 1988, a teacher most commonly had 15 years of experience. In recent years, that number is closer to just three years leading a classroom. The "On Teaching" series focuses on the wisdom of veteran teachers.

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Compiled by the New York Times

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Putting the demonstrations into a larger context, with help from The Times and other news and educational organizations.

Protests over the killing of George Floyd in New York City on June 1. Related Opinion Credit... Todd Heisler/The New York Times

Updated, June 8
"The anger is different this time. After years of Americans being killed by the police - more than 1,000 per year, for as long as statistics exist - something has changed over the past week," begins the June 2 "Morning" newsletter. It continues:

The gruesome video of a Minneapolis police officer kneeling on George Floyd's neck plays a role. So does a pandemic that's disproportionately killing African-Americans. And so do the angry, racialized politics that President Trump encourages.

Here are some of the voices from the protests, which have included many people who say they've never protested before:

"In every city, there's a George Floyd," said Michael Sampson II, 30, of Jacksonville, Fla.

"It could be my father, my brother, my uncle, my cousin, my friend," said Victoria Sloan, 27, of Brooklyn. "It makes me angry."

"I'm speaking for everybody, all my kinfolk, all my brothers and sisters who've gotten beaten up by police," said Cory Thomas, 40, who said the police beat him when he was a teenager in Brooklyn. "I don't condone the violence," or the looting, he said, "but at the end of the day, no 14-year-old should be beat up by police."

Teachers know that this news and the issues around it need to be addressed. But for many, the academic year has just ended, and even those still officially in school are teaching remotely. So how do we help our students process and respond to what is going on, understand its complex causes - and strive for solutions?

We don't have any definitive answers to that difficult question, but we do have some resources we hope can help put this news, which continues to break, into a larger context. Each section below is written directly to teenagers, and we've chosen the richest, most student-friendly articles, Op-Eds, videos, photos, graphs and podcasts we could find, from The Times and elsewhere.

We also have a place for teenagers from anywhere in the world to share their thoughts: Our Student Opinion forum "What Is Your Reaction to the Days of Protest That Have Followed the Death of George Floyd?" Many have contributed to a thoughtful discussion about everything from the purpose of protests and the role of policing in our communities to how deeply ingrained racism is within us and within our society. We welcome your students to the conversation, too.

We know this is just a start, and we hope you'll add your ideas, or suggest resources we're missing. How are you addressing this news with your students and children? Why? Tell us in the comments, or write to us at LNFeedback@nytimes.com.

Sections of this Teaching and Learning Resource

In the video above, three New York Times national correspondents who have been reporting from protests around the country provide their insights in a live discussion. Learn more here.

As you follow breaking news about George Floyd, the protests happening all over the country and the world, the Trump administration's response and more, you might choose from among the resources below - some are fairly simple, others are more complex and immersive - to help understand it in a larger context.

1. The Anti-Defamation League: In a recent edition of their "Table Talk: Family Conversations about Current Events" series, the A.D.L. explores this moment in terms of systemic racism:

Racism is defined as: "the marginalization and/or oppression of people of color based on a socially constructed racial hierarchy that privileges white people." Racism shows up in all aspects of our lives and society: in interpersonal communication, through discriminatory policies and practices, in biased language, and in our laws and institutions (e.g., education, media, employment, government and the criminal justice system).

Many see Floyd's death as an example of systemic racism, referring to the way race disadvantages people of color in the criminal justice system. African-American and Latinx men are disproportionately represented in all levels of the criminal justice system, from arrest to sentencing to death row. Moreover, research shows that African-American people are 2.5 times more likely to be killed by police than white people.

2. Kareem Abdul-Jabbar: In a much-shared Op-Ed in the Los Angeles Times, " Don't understand the protests? What you're seeing is people pushed to the edge," Kareem Abdul-Jabbar explains:

The black community is used to the institutional racism inherent in education, the justice system and jobs. And even though we do all the conventional things to raise public and political awareness - write articulate and insightful pieces in the Atlantic, explain the continued devastation on CNN, support candidates who promise change - the needle hardly budges.

But COVID-19 has been slamming the consequences of all that home as we die at a significantly higher rate than whites, are the first to lose our jobs, and watch helplessly as Republicans try to keep us from voting. Just as the slimy underbelly of institutional racism is being exposed, it feels like hunting season is open on blacks. If there was any doubt, President Trump's recent tweets confirm the national zeitgeist as he calls protesters "thugs" and looters fair game to be shot.

3. Trevor Noah: If you learn better by listening than by reading, Trevor Noah talks about the "dominoes" of racial injustice and police brutality, and how the contract between society and black Americans has been broken time and time again. Listen to his "Daily Social Distancing Show" entitled " George Floyd, Minneapolis Protests, Ahmaud Arbery & Amy Cooper. "

4. Times Photos and Interviews: "A protest is an act of desperation and defiance. But why do it if not for the belief, however modest, that the voices in the street will be heard?" writes John Branch in the collection of images and interviews headlined "In Every City There's a George Floyd: Portraits of Protest." In this piece you can hear from everyday people about why they are protesting now.

5. The 1619 Project: To make much deeper connections between this moment and American history, The New York Times 1619 Project offers a series of articles, poetry, fiction and multimedia created to observe the 400th anniversary of the beginning of American slavery. To go with it, the Pulitzer Center has created a free curriculum that shows teachers how to use a project that "aims to reframe the country's history, understanding 1619 as our true founding, and placing the consequences of slavery and the contributions of black Americans at the very center of the story we tell ourselves about who we are."

Think About the Protests and Yourself: We know there is a lot to think about here - yet at the same time these resources only scratch the surface. It might be helpful to step back at this point and think, talk or write about how this topic connects with your own life, your family, the communities you are part of, and the people you care about. What experiences with race or racism have you had? How has systemic racism been a part of your family's experience?

If you'd like some examples, check out " First Encounters With Racism," a piece for which the Times Race/Related team partnered with Youth Radio to ask teenagers across the country, "What is your earliest experience dealing with race?" We also have a related lesson plan that suggests additional questions and activities.

Reflect on any of what you've read or seen via a journal entry, a conversation with a friend, classmate or family member or even a work of visual art. Another idea? Create a "found poem" by remixing the words in any of the articles in this post, or in coverage of all related news. This guide can teach you how, step by step, but you can also look at how winners of our long-running Found Poem Student Contest have done it in the past. For instance, Ryan Nguyen's " Nothing Less than Heroic" or Bridget Smith's " When You Were 15 Years Old."

And, of course, you are always invited to contribute your thoughts to our forum for teenagers, where a discussion of all these issues is in progress.

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A Conversation With My Black Son

In this short documentary, parents reveal their struggles with telling their black sons that they may be targets of racial profiling by the police.

My father's conversation with me was daily. My grandfather talked to me as a black man from Augusta, Georgia growing up in the Deep South. It's probably Rob, my older brother, had this conversation. But then it's more of like, you know... "Wear a condom. Do this." It's like man - it's like little man lessons. When a cop pulls you over - When you get pulled over, not if you get pulled over. At some point you will get pulled over, and here is how you act. As a young black man growing up in New York, I've had a few run ins with the police and being completely innocent. So people to pull us out of the car, throw us on the floor - it's in February, so it's like snow and slush and stuff on the ground - put their knees in our back, put the guns to our head. As I'm putting my hands on the steering wheel so I don't make the police nervous, I realize how nervous I was. And then I realized my children were nervous. The thing that people say is you have to talk to him before he experiences racism himself. But when is that? He is going to turn into a large, scary black man. And that is - that's not who he is, but that's how he will be perceived. I know what this kid is going to be. He's going to look like him. I know what he's going to look like when he's - I'm a large, scary, black man? You are a large, scary, black man. O.K.? That's a problem. That's a problem. I am not large, nor scary. I can't do anything with that. I'm short. Anyway, go ahead. It's frightening. And I'm being very light when I use the word frightening. If something goes wrong, your first line of defense - your parents not being there - is to go to the police. If you're Caucasian. So I mean, still - That's what you teach your children. Unfortunately, it can't work for black children, right? It doesn't mean that every police officer is inherently a bad person. But what it does mean is that the police force, that institution, does not look out for your best interests. There's this unspoken code of white race - of racism and white supremacy that says that my life does not matter. You can put your hands up and say - and cooperate and say that I'm choking and still be killed. And then there's no repercussions. It's maddening. I get so frustrated and angry about having to prepare my kids for something that they're not responsible for. These are conversations that people of other races do not have to have with their children. The conversation with him was really just, look, you're a beautiful young boy. Being an African-American is a wonderful thing. It's a wonderful blessing. You have come from great people, but it's also a hard thing. In America, because of your skin color, as a black boy and as a black man, we are going to be dealing with a lot of danger. Under no circumstance are you to talk to the police if you're arrested until I get there. Do what they say. Don't get into any arguments. Make sure your hands are out of your pockets so they can see. These are the questions you can ask. This is who to call. This is what happens if this bad thing - it's not like, please, master, don't whip me. No. It's like, excuse me, sir, what is your badge number? I'm going to film this. If you want police brutality to stop, if you want police to treat you like a human being, then you have to see yourself as a human being. You have every right in this world that anyone else does. What I love about you, as my son, is I remember when we thought about having you and knowing that we wanted you, and watching you grow. You are the Mohammad Ali. You are the Malcolm X. You are the Martin Luther King. You are an amazing young man, and the future is yours. And I will do my best to make sure you're safe. That's it. I love you. [music]

In this short documentary, parents reveal their struggles with telling their black sons that they may be targets of racial profiling by the police.

George Floyd's death is only the most recent case of a long history of black Americans being brutalized or killed by law enforcement officers, who rarely if ever face consequences for their actions. Before Mr. Floyd it was Breonna Taylor, Laquan McDonald, Eric Garner, Michael Brown, Sandra Bland, Tamir Rice - the list goes on.

Bryan Stevenson writes in an essay for The 1619 Project that central to this pattern is the legacy of slavery.

After emancipation, black people, once seen as less than fully human "slaves," were seen as less than fully human "criminals." The provisional governor of South Carolina declared in 1865 that they had to be "restrained from theft, idleness, vagrancy and crime." Laws governing slavery were replaced with Black Codes governing free black people - making the criminal-justice system central to new strategies of racial control.

Today, Mr. Stevenson argues, the racial nature of policing persists:

Hundreds of years after the arrival of enslaved Africans, a presumption of danger and criminality still follows black people everywhere. New language has emerged for the noncrimes that have replaced the Black Codes: driving while black, sleeping while black, sitting in a coffee shop while black. All reflect incidents in which African-Americans were mistreated, assaulted or arrested for conduct that would be ignored if they were white. In schools, black kids are suspended and expelled at rates that vastly exceed the punishment of white children for the same behavior.

Read the rest of Mr. Stevenson's essay, then choose one or more of the following activities to think about the role of police in our society.

Analyze Graphics: These charts from 2017 show what happened to officers involved in 13 cases of police-involved deaths of African-Americans. Study the charts then respond to the following questions:

1. What do you notice?
2. What do you wonder?
3. What is going on in this chart? What does it tell you about police accountability in the United States?
4. What are some possible explanations for this data?

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'It's Unbelievable That We Have to Keep Doing This': Protesters March to the White House

Thousands gathered in Washington, D.C., on Saturday to protest George Floyd's death, racism and police brutality. From speeches to line dances, here's what we saw and whom we met.

"What do you want?" "Justice!" "When do you want it?" "Now!" "What do you want?" "Justice!" "When do you want it?" "Now!" "No justice, no peace! No justice, no peace! No racist police!" "For the mothers! For the mothers! For the mothers." "My son wasn't given a chance to live. I have a chance to live, so I will risk whatever it takes to say his name. Marquis Brown! Say my son's name: Marquis Brown! Say my son's name: Marquis Brown! I don't know all of their names, but what I do tell you is, I stand for all the mothers out here who lost their sons to police brutality." "How do you spell racist? How do you spell racist?" "Black lives matter! Black lives matter! Black lives matter!" "Justice! Now! Justice! Now! Justice! It's unbelievable that we have to keep doing this. It's embarrassing for our nation. And if we have to be violent, we have to be violent, but I definitely roll with peace. Because they say a Covid virus, you know, is supposed to keep us in the house - that's not going to keep anyone in the house when people are being killed, when people are being slaughtered." "Don't shoot!" "Don't shoot!" "We appreciate you all, man. We appreciate you all. Get us some water. DJ [unclear], back to action!" "Take your knee off our necks!" "Take your knee off our necks!" "Take your knee off our necks!" "Take your knee off our necks!" "Take your knee off our necks!" "Justice. Systemic racism is really like a knee on the back of your neck." "Hands up!" "Don't shoot!" "Hands up!" "Don't shoot!" "Somebody could steal my car, take my money - I won't be calling the police. I never have, I never will. Even with my son as a police officer, I need to fix my problems. And my biggest problem now is racism in this country, so that's why I'm out here trying to fix it." "Does your son know that you're here today?" "Umm - I think he does. As a father and a black man, I know that when he's driving in a car and he's not in uniform, he will be treated as a black man before he's treated as the police. Pulling out his badge could be the end of his life because they think it's a gun, so - and I think he's aware of that, but I hope he knows. It's so good to see so many white people here. I'm glad I came." "If we don't get it -" "Shut it down!" "If we don't get it -" "Shut it down!" "If you don't get it -" "Shut it down!" "Veterans for -" "Black lives matter!" "Veterans for -" "Black lives matter!" "As a group of veterans, we served our country - we will not stop serving our country even after our duties are done. I did serve in the Air Force, and I feel that the world needs to know that veterans are here to support black lives as well. It doesn't matter to me what else is going on in my life. This is what's going on in my life." "Me and my best friend were walking after protesting and then I heard drums. I'm from Zambia. I'm African. I'm a dancer. So once I hear drums, that's my call. It's an outlet for me. I still have to hold it together in the workplace and pretend like - not pretend, but not be able to show it, that it's hurting me and affecting me and my family and those around me." "Hands up!" "Don't shoot!" "Don't shoot!" "Hands up! Don't shoot! Hands up! Don't shoot! Hands up! Don't shoot!"

Thousands gathered in Washington, D.C., on Saturday to protest George Floyd's death, racism and police brutality. From speeches to line dances, here's what we saw and whom we met. Credit Credit... Emily Rhyne/The New York Times

At the core of the First Amendment is our right to assemble and protest. However, not all Americans view this right the same way: some argue that peaceful protests are the only way to create social change, while others do not believe protesting is an effective means of change at all. In the midst of the protests following George Floyd's death, some have criticized protesters for creating chaos, others say the violence is instigated by outside extremist groups, and many see police initiating violence at the protests.

In response to our Student Opinion question, " What Is Your Reaction to the Days of Protest That Have Followed the Death of George Floyd?" several students expressed confusion and uncertainty about violence at some protests. One student commented:

Scrolling through Instagram, all I can see is people either defending or against the use of violence. I understand both of their points, the ones defending the violence are sick and tired with all the police brutality against African Americans ... The one against it are sick and tired about the looting, the riots, the fires, and how it hurt small business owners.

In " Destructive Power of Despair," Charles M. Blow focuses specifically on the history of violence in the United States and its connection to the protests today:

We can bemoan the violence that has attended some of these protests, but we must also recognize that to have to live in a world, in a society, in which you feel that your very life is constantly under threat because of the color of your skin is also a form of violence.

It is a daily, ambient, gnawing violence. It is the kind that makes a grown man's shoulder draw up and his jaws clench whenever officers approach, even when there has been no offense or infraction.

It is the kind that forces mothers down to pray whenever a child is out late, pleading to the gods for his or her safe return.

It is the kind that makes a child think to write a parent's phone number on their skin when they sense trouble brewing, just in case.

This is also violence.

Read the rest of Mr. Blow's essay, then choose one or more of the activities below to consider what role protesting has in our society.

React to the George Floyd Protests: Scroll through this collection of photos of the protests from across the country, or this series of photos headlined " Bird's Eye View of Protests Across the U.S. and Around the World. " What do you notice? What do you wonder? Which photos stand out to you most and why? Taken together, what do these images say about the United States at this moment? What images from your own camera roll could you add to this collection right now? Might they tell a piece of the story that mainstream media has missed?

Remember Your Own Experiences: Think about your own participation in specific protests past or present. What was your experience like? Do you think that protest helped to bring about meaningful change? What lessons did you take away from it? Why?

Analyze Protests in History: Make a list of protests from throughout history, whether in the United States or around the world. For each one, identify what led to the protest, what actions were taken, and what the outcomes were. (For a few ideas, see our lesson plan on moments in history when students have turned to activism and affected change.)

Then reflect: Do you think protests can effect change? What role have young people played in these movements? Do you believe the current protests will make a difference? Why or why not?

Consider the Role of the Police: Countless videos have shown police officers using batons, tear gas, pepper spray and rubber bullets on protesters, bystanders and journalists, often without warning or seemingly unprovoked. A few others have shown officers marching and kneeling alongside protesters. In " For Police Officers, Demonstrations Take a Toll and Test Duty," The Times quotes a supervisor in a police department in St. Louis who says, "We feel like we're pawns in a game right now. It's almost like there's an agenda and we're being used on both sides, the left and the right, to further that agenda." What is your reaction to the police's use of violence? What role do you think the police themselves should play in protests against police brutality? What responsibility do they have to citizens in this moment?

Reflect: Is It "Different This Time"?: We began this piece with a quote from The Times, "The anger is different this time. After years of Americans being killed by the police - more than 1,000 per year, for as long as statistics exist - something has changed over the past week." A week later, on June 7, The Times published a piece headlined " Other Protests Flare and Fade. Why This Movement Already Seems Different," that reports that "the massive gatherings for racial justice across the country and now the world have achieved a scale and level of momentum not seen in decades" and analyzes why.

Yet in " Allies, Don't Fail Us Again," Times Op-Ed columnist Charles Blow points out that many white people have been moved by the current movement - as they were by the civil rights movement in the 1960's -but wonders, how will they respond when true equality threatens their privilege?

Do you think things are different this time? Why or why not? Do you think these protests will bring about meaningful change? What do you hope will happen as a result? And, to pose the two questions Mr. Blow asks at the end of his column, "How will they respond when civil rights gets personal and it's about them and not just punishing the white man who pressed his knee into George Floyd's neck? How will they respond when true equality threatens their privilege, when it actually starts to cost them something?"

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When a nation's people are reeling with grief and rage, our government representatives - from City Council members up to the president of the United States - have a role to play. What should leadership look like during a crisis like this one?

In " Past Presidents Faced Police Brutality and Protests. They Handled It Differently," Maggie Astor and Zach Montague compare how four past presidents handled similar situations with President Trump's response:

It is a bleak reality of American history that each of the past four presidents faced the same crisis President Trump is facing now: The police just killed or seriously injured a black man, and the city where it happened is reeling with grief and rage.

They did not all respond the same way. They did not all respond "effectively," either, if that is measured by whether they calmed the unrest. But none responded the way Mr. Trump has: by issuing an overtly violent ultimatum to protesters.

"When the looting starts, the shooting starts," Mr. Trump tweeted just before 1 a.m. on Friday, threatening to deploy the National Guard to Minneapolis after explosive protests in response to the death of George Floyd, whom a white police officer pinned to the ground, knee on neck, for more than eight minutes.

Consider the Role of the President: What role would you want the president of the United States to play during this crisis? Do you think President Trump is currently fulfilling this role? Why, or why not? What would you want him to say or do in this moment? Collect images, quotes, tweets or other evidence to help support your position.

In my opinion, I think that a great leader should always be helpful and try to help their community. Firstly, they must have clarity which means that they are clear and concise at all times there is no question of their vision and what needs to be accomplished. Next, they must have courage to help others and to maintain that pose to being a great leader to others. Having passion is also a key to being a great leader, not just to show others but to also inspire others. Lastly, you must have humility to being a loyal person and giving back to our world today.

Do you agree? Make a list of the qualities of leadership you value most. Then submit your own comment.

Recognize Great Leaders: What actions or words from other leaders, like governors, mayors and community activists, have you admired? Select an excerpt from a speech, a video clip or an image featuring one of these leaders and explain why it resonated with you.

A free press is central to democracy. Indeed, freedom of the press - the ability to report the news without censorship from the government - is enshrined in our Constitution, protected under the First Amendment.

However, while reporting on the protests in Minneapolis and elsewhere in the United States, journalists have found themselves under threat.

In " Police Target Journalists as Trump Blames 'Lamestream Media' for Protests," Marc Tracy and Rachel Abrams write:

Many reporters, photographers and press advocates said the treatment of journalists by police officers in recent days reflected an erosion of trust in the news media that has seeped into law enforcement under President Trump, who has deemed critical coverage of his administration "fake news" and has frequently labeled some news organizations and journalists with variants of the phrase " enemies of the people. "

"This story, in particular, it seems journalists are really being targeted by the police," Ms. Davidson said. "That's not something I have experienced before to this degree."

It is common in autocratic countries for journalists to be arrested during demonstrations and riots, but rare in the United States, where freedom of the press is guaranteed by the First Amendment. In a sign that police officers would not follow the customary hands-off approach, Minnesota State Patrol officers arrested a CNN reporting team live on the air on Friday. That same day, a TV reporter in Louisville, Ky., was hit by a pepper ball by an officer who appeared to be aiming at her while she covered the protest on live television.

In " To Be Black and a Journalist at This Moment," a piece from The Associated Press, Amanda Barrett writes:

Part of me wants to go off and join the fight. To put aside my journalistic reserve and give full voice to my anger, my disappointment that my country doesn't always live up to its lofty ideals of equality and justice. To build a brighter future like it seemed on "Star Trek," where races, nationalities and even species lived together in mutual respect and Lt. Uhura's presence as a respected, competent black officer assured little Amanda of her place among them.

But I'm doing my part right where I am. I'm telling stories that help readers understand the world around them. I'm sharing the voices of the unheard and holding those in power accountable. Just as important, I am working to make our newsrooms more accurately reflect the communities we cover and to make our storytelling and our decision-making more inclusive.

My voice is the voice of facts and context. My voice is the hope that they can bring the understanding and, eventually, the equality that my country's founding documents promise.

Read one or both of these articles. Then, reflect on the media's role in this moment with the activities below.

Define the Role of Journalism Now: If you've never thought much about the role journalism plays in society in general, consider it now, via one or more of these questions: Do we still need journalists if every citizen with a phone can report the news as it breaks? What is different about the job professional reporters do? To what extent do you think it's important for the press to be able to freely report what is happening? What role can journalism play in this moment - and what responsibilities come with that role? What influence does the media have on the way the public understands what is happening in these protests?

As you consider any or all of these, collect examples of reporting that you think is doing an excellent job of capturing the news right now, but also collect reporting you find problematic or lacking for any reason.

Compare TikTok and The Times: In a call-in to a live interview with the young adult author Jason Reynolds, 17-year-old Cameron noted that in the media the protests looked very violent, but on his TikTok feed, they appeared largely peaceful. Have you had this experience?

Compare what you see on social media to what you've seen from mainstream news sources. How are they similar? How are they different? What do you think could account for these differences? Consider whose experiences are included and whose are left out. What does this activity tell you about the values and limitations of each kind of media?

Question Media Choices: What bias or stereotyping have you witnessed in media coverage, whether in choices of words, images, headlines, interviews or anything else? How do you think that may have affected perception of the events and their meaning? Examine the language and images different news outlets are using to describe what is happening. What message does this language send about the protesters, police and others?

For example, many took issue with The New York Times front-page headline in the first edition published on June 2. Many felt that "As Chaos Spread, Trump Vows to 'End It Now' did not "come close" to accurately reporting the news that night, as President Trump first made a speech threatening to send the military to bring the protests under control - then walked to a church and posed for photos after the police used smoke, flash grenades and some kind of chemical spray to clear the area of peaceful protesters.

In addition, readers challenged passive-voice grammatical constructions on that same front page like "Protests in 140 cities bring five deaths." The Poynter Institute asks, "Does the passive voice downplay police aggression?" in its piece " The New York Times was accused of siding with police because of ill-placed passive voice." What do you think?

Finally, just after this resource was originally published on June 3, an Op-Ed piece by a United States senator, Tom Cotton, went online. Headlined " Send in the Troops," it called for a military response to civic unrest in American cities, and infuriated many both outside and inside the Times. By the end of the week, James Bennet, the editor of the Times Opinion section (which is separate from the newsroom), had resigned. Though there is not the space here to fully examine what happened and why, you might scan the 2,000-plus reader comments on the Op-Ed itself to better understand the debate, then read " Inside the Revolts Erupting in America's Big Newsrooms" to learn more about the context, which asks, What is the role of journalism today? As the column puts it: "Now, as America is wrestling with the surging of a moment that began [with Ferguson] in August 2014, its biggest newsrooms are trying to find common ground between a tradition that aims to persuade the widest possible audience that its reporting is neutral and journalists who believe that fairness on issues from race to Donald Trump requires clear moral calls."

Report the News Yourself: What kind of piece could you report about an aspect of these protests or the issues it raises for you or your community? What form would your reporting take? Where might you post or send this piece based on the audience you'd like to reach? Here are some student journalist resources for covering protests safely and sensitively from The Poynter Institute to help. And if you would like some inspiration, check out " A High School Journalist Dug Into Suspensions of Black Students. What She Found Won an Award. "

What do you know - or think you know - about the death of George Floyd and the protests that have followed? From what sources are you getting your information - social media, cable news, newspapers, your friends or family? Have you heard any conspiracy theories or fallen for any hoaxes? What are the dangers of doing so?

In " Misinformation About George Floyd Protests Surges on Social Media," Davey Alba explains why this moment is ripe for disinformation:

"The combination of evolving events, sustained attention and, most of all, deep existing divisions make this moment a perfect storm for disinformation," said Graham Brookie, director of the Atlantic Council's Digital Forensic Research Lab. "All of it is toxic, and make our very real challenges and divisions harder to address."

The collision of racial tensions and political polarization during the coronavirus pandemic has supersized the misinformation, researchers said. Much of it is being shared by the conspiracy group QAnon and far-right commentators as well as by those on the left, Mr. Brookie said.

President Trump himself has stoked the divisive information. Over the past few days, he posted on Twitter that antifa was a "Terrorist Organization" and urged the public to show up for a "MAGA Night" counterprotest at the White House.

Along with that, people are experiencing high levels of fear, uncertainty and anger, said Claire Wardle, executive director of First Draft, an organization that fights online disinformation. That creates "the worst possible context for a healthy information environment," she said.

Practice Media Literacy: Whenever you encounter something that seems dubious, read laterally to evaluate the source of the information you're viewing. Then you might fact-check the message's claims using a fact checker like FactCheck.org or Snopes.com.

Get a Healthier News Diet: Don't just read The New York Times or your social media feed. Assess the reliability of your sources using tools like Media Bias/Fact Check or the Interactive Media Bias Chart. Here's what teenagers told us about what happened when they did exercises like this to create their own healthy "media diets."

1. Who created this message?
2. What creative techniques are used to attract my attention?
3. How might different people understand this message differently than me?
4. What values, lifestyles and points of view are represented in, or omitted from, this message?
5. Why is this message being sent?

By this point, you've likely explored some of the many resources about racism, policing, protesting and the media we've posted above, and you might be left with questions about what this all means for you. Where do you stand? What can you do? What is your role in making positive change?

Madeleine from Californiashared some ideas in response to our Student Opinion question about the George Floyd protests:

The death of George Floyd has forced the American people to look systemic racism in the eye. We are the next generation and it is our duty to not only educate ourselves but each other and our parents...It all starts with education, the power of knowledge takes you places and soon many of our generation will gain the power to vote. If we want change, we need to get educated first. That also means as a generation we need to wake up and look privilege in the eye. It's not just about white privilege anymore. As an Asian American I can recognize that I do not face the same type of struggles that my fellow POC face. Asian Americans have fought hard to get where we are today, and it is our duty to help bring every POC up with us.

Some refer to this work as practicing "antiracism." In " Being Antiracist,"the National Museum of African-American History and Culture explains that "being racist or antiracist is not about who you are; it is about what you do."

When we choose to be antiracist, we become actively conscious about race and racism and take actions to end racial inequities in our daily lives. Being antiracist is believing that racism is everyone's problem, and we all have a role to play in stopping it.

You might read the rest of the article to learn more about antiracism and what it might look like for you. Then, try one of the activities below to put what you've learned into action.

For Teachers, From Around the Web

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Teaching Ideas and Resources to Help Students Make Sense of the George Floyd Protests

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Putting the demonstrations into a larger context, with help from The Times and other news and educational organizations. Updated, June 8 "The anger is different this time. After years of Americans being killed by the police - more than 1,000 per year, for as long as statistics exist - something has changed over the past week," begins the June 2 "Morning" newsletter.

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Companion Curriculum on History of Minneapolis Police

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Companion Curriculum on History of Minneapolis Police

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by Educator Akeia Gross

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This is a great resource for educators, with videos and a curriculum guide, with an emphasis on connecting history with events happening today.

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Today, we have the opportunity to change the way that African-American history is taught in schools across the country. Stories of grit, resilience and determination should remind us all that it is as important as ever to understand and learn from the past. Through digital education we can provide an immersive learning environment that brings the real world into the classroom. Partners have the opportunity to:

Provide a digital education resource in African-American History directly to schools

Private-label 306 to inspire, amplify, and uplift the student voice

Build future leaders by uncovering past movements and role models

Showcase commitment by supporting skills and proficiencies in the Common Core State Standards

Magnify exposure among teachers, students, and select communities

Engage your community and inspire today's youth to become tomorrow's leaders.

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Today, we have the opportunity to change the way that African-American history is taught in schools across the country. Stories of grit, resilience and determination should remind us all that it is as important as ever to understand and learn from the past.

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Institute of the Black World 21st Century

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Institute of the Black World 21st Century

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Institute of the Black World 21st Century

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Institute of the Black World 21st Century (IBW, IBW21)

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Institute of the Black World 21st Century is an organization committed to enhancing the capacity of Black communities globally to achieve cultural, social, economic and political equality

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Our collection of educator resources includes a wide range of flexible materials. You will find resources that support teaching a complex moment in history or addressing today's breaking news.

Facing History students are 94% more likely than other students to report that their class motivated them to learn.

93% of Facing History students agreed that it is important to work for positive social change.

Current Events in the Classroom

Our current events resources help teachers lead effective and engaging discussions on today's news.
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"I can trust the materials to be easy to access, implement, and provide a way to engage students on sensitive topics."

Teaching Strategies

Our student-centered teaching strategies improve literacy skills, nurture critical thinking, and create a respectful classroom climate. You can implement these strategies with any academic content.
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Collections, Units, & Toolkits

Our collections, units, and toolkits provide you with a range of options to introduce students to themes that are relevant to their lives.
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Lessons & Mini-Lessons

Our lessons and mini-lessons include primary sources and news sources to support their head, heart, and conscience.
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- Facing History Educator Reflecting on Our Reconstruction Unit

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Find compelling classroom resources, learn new teaching methods, meet standards, and make a difference in the lives of your students.

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Classroom Resources | Black History and Culture | PBS

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Let PBS LearningMedia connect you to a special collection of educational resources spotlighting Black artists, educators, and innovators that have shaped our nation. Get started now with the featured resources below.

Looking for more? Create your FREE account on pbslearningmedia.org and get instant-access to over 100,000 PreK-12 videos, lesson plans, games, and more!

Download the Free App

Your purchase supports PBS and helps make our programming possible.

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Classroom Resources | Black History and Culture | PBS

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Let PBS LearningMedia connect you to a special collection of educational resources spotlighting Black artists, educators, and innovators that have shaped our nation. Get started now with the featured resources below. Looking for more? Create your FREE account on pbslearningmedia.org and get instant-access to over 100,000 PreK-12 videos, lesson plans, games, and more!

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Interactive by Critical Resistance

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Critical Resistance: Beyond the Prison Industrial Complex 1998 Conference

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Students don't enter our classrooms as blank slates. When it comes to the civil rights movement, we often have to help our students unlearn what they think they know while we're teaching them what actually happened. The people were more complex, the strategies more complicated and the stakes more dangerous than we like to remember. In this episode, historian Nishani Frazier and social studies teacher Adam Sanchez demonstrate the value of teaching the movement from the grassroots up.

Teaching the civil rights movement accurately and effectively requires deconstructing the myths and misconceptions around it. Most people are familiar with a very specific version of the movement that exaggerates government support and denies the existence and persistence of racism outside the South. Julian Bond called this the "Master Narrative." It celebrates sanitized icons and downplays grassroots organizing. And it overhypes nonviolence while disparaging self-defense and Black Power. In this episode, we talk with historian Nishani Frazier and social studies teacher Adam Sanchez about how to separate fact from fiction in your civil rights teaching.

The systems that enabled and perpetuated African and Indigenous enslavement in what is now the U.S. have much in common, and their histories tell us a great deal about the present. Professors Bethany Jay and Steven Oliver join us to talk about connections between the first two seasons and how to teach them, and we preview what's to come in season three.

In this special call-in episode, listeners share their stories and questions from throughout season 2-including teaching remotely, working with families and stakeholders, and incorporating social justice into subjects like math and science. As educators, we're strongest when we support each other. And you'll hear great suggestions from fellow teachers, like these resources we discuss from Fairfax County Public Schools in Virginia.

It's time for our first call-in show! We know things are chaotic for you and every other educator right now. We feel it too, so this seems like the perfect time to talk. Pick up the phone and dial 888-59-STORY (888-597-8679). Our lines are open until Sunday night, April 19. Teaching hard history is even harder right now, so let's talk about resources you can use if you're teaching virtually. Ask us your questions; tell us your stories. And let us know how you're doing.

Indian Removal was a brutal and complicated effort that textbooks often simplify. It is also inseparably related to slavery. Enslavers seeking profit drove demand for Indigenous lands, displacing hundreds of thousands of Indigenous people. Some of these Indigenous people participated in chattel slavery. Focusing on the Chickasaw and Choctaw nations, this episode pulls the lens back to show how Removal and enslavement must be taught together. This story must be told if we're going to understand the full hard history of American enslavement.

The Americas were built on the lands, labor and lives of Indigenous peoples. Despite being erased from history textbooks after the so-called first Thanksgiving, Indigenous peoples did not disappear. Colonial settlers relied on the cooperation, exploitation and forced labor of their Native neighbors to survive and thrive in what became North America. Focusing on New England, historian Margaret Newell introduces us to the Charter Generation of systematically enslaved people across this continent.

From 1936 to 1938, the Federal Writers' Project collected stories from people who had been enslaved. The WPA Slave Narrative Collection at the Library of Congress is a valuable resource; these oral histories are also problematic. Interpreting these narratives within literary and historical context, students can develop primary source literacy. Historian Cynthia Lynn Lyerly outlines unique insights these texts can add to your curriculum.

To better understand the United States' past and present, we need to better understand Indigenous identities-and classrooms play a huge role. This starts with examining what's missing from our social studies, history, civics and government curricula. Throughout this episode, we reference the K-5 Framework for Teaching Hard History as we shed light on key topics like sovereignty, land and erasure.

Educators can no longer ignore our country's history of Indigenous enslavement. Our students need a fuller understanding of the pivotal history of slavery to comprehend the present and develop a vision for our nation's future. In this mid-season recap, we highlight key lessons about this consequential part of American history-along with teaching strategies and resources-through the voices of leading scholars and educators featured so far.

Throughout the 17th, 18th and 19th centuries, the forced labor and bondage of Indigenous peoples was integral to the economic and political history of what became the Southwestern United States. Historian and author Andrés Reséndez outlines the significance of silver mining, Indigenous enslavement and resistance in the history of New Mexico and Latin America. We examine how, as white settlers moved west, so-called "free soil" states like California continued to institutionalize coerced labor.
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A hundred years before the first ship carrying enslaved Africans arrived in Virginia, Europeans introduced the commercial practice of enslavement in "The New World." And for the next 400 years, millions of Indigenous people throughout the Americas were enslaved through several forms of forced labor and bondage. Historian and author Andrés Reséndez calls this "The Other Slavery," and his work is changing our understanding of the transatlantic slave trade.
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Andrés Reséndez is the author of The Other Slavery: The Uncovered Story of Indian Enslavement in America. His work has changed conventional wisdom about the institution of slavery in the Atlantic world. Over the next two episodes, host Hasan Kwame Jeffries and Reséndez will discuss key turning points in this history-exploring how it expands our understanding of the transatlantic slave trade and the lasting legacy of colonialism, which continues to reverberate in our communities. Be sure to join us.
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Each autumn, Thanksgiving brings a disturbing amount of inaccurate information and troubling myths into classrooms across the United States. Most students don't learn much about the history of Native nations-and even less about Indigenous peoples today. Dr. Debbie Reese explains what to look for and what to avoid (or teach with a critical lens) when selecting children's books by and about Indigenous people. She also recommends specific books to counter common misconceptions in your classroom.
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Children's books are often the primary way young students are exposed to the history of American slavery. But many books about slavery sugarcoat oppression. Professor Ebony Elizabeth Thomas examines what we should consider when it comes to how children's books portray African Americans and Indigenous people, their cultures and the effects of enslavement. She also explains why it's crucial to create "a balance of narratives" when selecting books about marginalized and underrepresented communities.
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For elementary teachers approaching the topic of slavery, it can be tempting to focus only on heroes and avoid explaining oppression. But teachers' omissions speak as loudly as what they choose to include. And what children learn in the early grades has broad consequences for the rest of their education. Dr. Kate Shuster guides us through the new Teaching Hard History K-5 framework from Teaching Tolerance. We also learn how four elementary teachers are beginning to use it in their classrooms.
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Understanding Indigenous enslavement expands our conception of slavery in what is now the United States. It spread across the entire continent and affected millions of people of different backgrounds. If we define slavery too narrowly, we can fail to see its persistence over time and even its modern-day permutations. Historian Christina Snyder examines the Civil War, Lincoln and emancipation with Indigenous people in mind.
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Millions of Indigenous people lived in North America before European colonial powers invaded. Along with an insatiable desire for free labor, Europeans brought a system of slavery that significantly differed from the historical practices of enslavement among Native nations. Historian Christina Snyder tells the story of what happened when these worlds collided. European concepts of bondage transformed the way Native nations interacted with each other, resulted in the enslavement and death of millions of Indigenous people, and sparked widespread resistance by Native nations.
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The Smithsonian's Eduardo Díaz and Renée Gokey discuss the importance of learning about Indigenous enslavement. And Teaching Tolerance Director Maureen Costello explains all of the program's classroom resources available for teaching this history, including a first-of-its-kind K-5 framework.
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We're turning our attention to the enslavement of Indigenous people, spending more time with teachers in the classroom and adding support for K-5 educators. Tune in next week for more advice about teaching the history and long legacy of American slavery.
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Historian Bethany Jay returns - answering questions from educators across the country. Host Hasan Kwame Jeffries and the co-editor of Understanding and Teaching American Slavery confront teacher anxieties and counter misconceptions in our season finale.
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From elementary to high school, YA literature can introduce fundamental themes and information about slavery, especially when paired with primary sources. John H. Bickford shows how to capitalize on the strengths and weaknesses of trade books about slavery.
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Using the present to explore the past. Tamara Spears and Jordan Lanfair suggest a Social Studies unit about Resistance & Kanye West, and a set of English Language Arts lessons examining holidays to understand the legacy of American slavery.
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How it's done. Tamara Spears teaches middle school Social Studies in New York and Jordan Lanfair is a high school English Language Arts teacher in Chicago. Each has been developing additional lessons about slavery for years. They share their experiences.
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Over the next few episodes, we're bringing Season One to a close. Tune in for stories from the classroom, guidance for elementary teachers and language arts classes. And answers to questions from listeners like you.
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Enslavement didn't end with Emancipation. Historian James Brewer Stewart discusses modern-day slavery happening across the world-and right here in the U.S.-showing educators how to connect the past with the present.
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A listener's question leads to a meaningful moment. And now we want more! Take a listen, then email podcast@tolerance.org to tell us your story about teaching hard history for an upcoming, special episode.
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At James Madison's Montpelier, the legacy of enslaved people isn't silenced-and their descendants have a voice. Christian Cotz, Price Thomas and Dr. Patrice Preston Grimes explain how that happened, and why it's important.
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In the United States, justice was never blind. Historian Paul Finkelman goes beyond legal jargon to illustrate how slavery was entangled with the opinions of the Court-and encoded into the Constitution itself.
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Constitutional historian Paul Finkelman explains the deeply racist bargains the founding fathers struck in order to unify the country under one document and discusses what students need to know about how slavery defined America after the Revolution.
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Film historian Ron Briley returns with more documentary, feature film and miniseries suggestions for history and English instructors. From Ken Burns to Black Panther, this episode offers background and strategies for incorporating pop culture into classroom lessons.
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Film has long shaped our nation's historical memory, for good and bad. Film historian Ron Briley offers ways to responsibly use films in the classroom to reframe the typical narrative of American slavery and Reconstruction.
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Most students leave school thinking enslaved people lived like characters in Gone With the Wind. Dr. Deirdre Cooper Owens reveals the remarkable diversity of lived experiences within slavery and explains the gap between what scholars and students know.
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To see a more complete picture of the experience of enslaved people, you have to redefine resistance. Dr. Kenneth S. Greenberg offers teachers a lens to help students see the ways in which enslaved people fought back against the brutality of slavery.
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Students learning about slavery often ask, "Why didn't enslaved people just run away or revolt?" Lindsay Anne Randall offers a lesson in "Process Drama"-a method teachers can use to answer this question, build empathy and offer perspective.
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In many ways, the U.S. has fallen short of its ideals. How can we explain this to students-particularly in the context of discussing slavery? Professor Steven Thurston Oliver has this advice for teachers: Face your fears.
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Follow the money. Dr. Christy Clark-Pujara explains why American slavery couldn't have existed without a national commercial infrastructure that supported and benefited from the labor of enslaved people.
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Dr. Bethany Jay is back to talk about teaching the end of the Civil War, and how enslaved people's participation in the war helped subvert the institution of slavery.
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What really caused the Civil War? In this episode, Salem State University Professor Bethany Jay offers tips for teaching lesser-known history that clarifies this question and cuts through our cloudy national understanding of the Confederacy.
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What we don't know about American history hurts us all. Teaching Hard History begins with the long and brutal legacy of chattel slavery and reaches through the victories of and violent responses to the civil rights movement to the present day.

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Great for understanding how Ella Baker's role and style has influenced today's movement.

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In recent years, groups in many different parts of the country-from North Carolina to Virginia to Maryland to New York-have lobbied local governments to commemorate a woman who was almost universally revered within the civil rights movement, but is less familiar to most Americans today: Ella Baker.

While well-known figures such as Martin Luther King Jr. deserve to be honored, the life of Ella Baker highlights a different model of leadership and gives insight into the long and patient work of building social movements. While King is justly remembered as a powerful preacher and rousing orator, a political strategist and practitioner of nonviolent direct action, Baker calls attention to a more specific role: that of the organizer.

Baker had a hand in building many of the most important organizations of the civil rights movement. She defied traditional gender roles of the time and elevated the often-unseen work of women to advance efforts for change. She believed in deprioritizing charismatic leadership from above and instead empowering local participants to take charge of their own struggles for freedom.

This lesson consists of two readings that shed light on the life and legacy of Ella Baker. The first offers a brief biography, starting with Baker's early life in North Carolina and ending with an overview of her work in the civil rights movement of the 1960s. The second reading discusses Baker's views on leadership, highlighting her commitment to honoring the contributions of women in the movement. Questions for discussion follow each reading. (See pdf versions of both readings )

Black Lives Matter's "leaderful" and feminist organizing style reflects the legacy of Ella Baker. Photo by Johnny Silvercloud.

Introduction

Ask students: Have you ever heard of Ella Josephine Baker? What do you know of her?

Elicit or explain that Ella Baker was an organizer at the center of the civil rights movement, as well as movements that followed. She had a very different style of leadership that is affecting social movements today.

Today we'll learn about and discuss Ella Baker and her "group centered" leadership style.

Reading One
Ella Josephine Baker: A Brief Biography

In recent years, groups in many different parts of the country-from North Carolina to Virginia to Maryland to New York-have lobbied local governments to commemorate a woman who was almost universally revered within the civil rights movement, but is less familiar to most Americans today: Ella Baker.

While well-known figures such as Martin Luther King Jr. deserve to be honored, the life of Ella Baker highlights a different model of leadership and gives insight into the long and patient work of building social movements. While King is justly remembered as a powerful preacher and rousing orator, a political strategist and practitioner of nonviolent direct action, Baker calls attention to a more specific role: that of the organizer.

Baker had a hand in building many of the most important organizations of the civil rights movement. She defied traditional gender roles of the time and elevated the contributions of women. She believed in deprioritizing charismatic leadership from above and instead empowering local participants to take charge of their own struggles for freedom.

To understand Ella Baker's life and work, it is important to understand her origins. Peter Dreier, a distinguished professor of political science at Occidental College, related the beginning of Baker's story in an article for the Huffington Post:

Born in 1903, Baker grew up in rural North Carolina not far from where her grandparents had been slaves. As a girl, Baker listened to her grandmother tell stories about slave revolts. Her mother, a former teacher and deeply religious, tutored Ella at home and coached her in public speaking. As a child, Ella was part of a supportive and tightly knit black community, where friends, relatives, and neighbors helped each other out. Her grandfather mortgaged the family farm to help feed families in need. For high school, Baker's parents sent her to the boarding school affiliated with Shaw University. She remained at Shaw for college, edited the student newspaper, and graduated as class valedictorian in 1927.

Then she moved to Harlem. Financial hardship forced Baker to set aside her dream of getting a graduate degree in sociology. Despite her college education, her race and gender limited her job prospects, and she wound up waiting on tables and working in a factory. She began to write articles for the American West Indian News and in 1932 found a job as an editorial assistant and office manager for the Negro National News.

The suffering brought on by the Depression troubled her deeply. Harlem was a hotbed of radical activism, and Baker soon got involved in local groups working on behalf of tenants and consumers. In 1931 she organized the Young Negroes' Cooperative League and became its national director. The group sponsored cooperative buying clubs and grocery stores both to reduce prices and to bring people together for collective action. In her next job, paid for by the New Deal's Works Progress Administration, she organized consumer cooperatives among housing project residents. She taught adult literacy and consumer education, often with a focus on young women and housewives.

https://www.huffpost.com/entry/ella-baker-ferguson-and-b_b_6368394

In a January 20 article for the New York Times, Barbara Ransby, historian and author of Ella Baker and the Black Freedom Movement, continued Baker's story. Ransby wrote:

Baker was a field secretary and director of branches for the NAACP in the 1940s, and she traveled throughout the Jim Crow South, organizing against discrimination and recruiting people to the Civil Rights Movement. She worked alongside King and others in the Southern Christian Leadership Council in the 1950s and was a mentor to the young activists who founded the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee in 1960. SNCC went on to lead the "Freedom Rides," in which participants risked life and limb to desegregate interstate transportation....

Baker was a strategist, organizer and mother to the movement whose political acumen, humble leadership style and razor sharp political insights were legendary. It's a reflection of our selective amnesia that few people know her name.

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/20/opinion/martin-luther-king-ella-baker.html

Baker lived into the 1980s and contributed steadily to social movements for more than five decades. But perhaps one of her most significant contributions came in the spring of 1960.

That fall, young African American students had begun placing orders at segregated lunch counters and refusing to leave when they were denied service, creating a crisis for the Jim Crow order. The tactic quickly spread. Soon the sit-ins were producing hundreds of arrests, drawing national attention, and sometimes sparking enraged responses from racist onlookers.

Baker recognized the importance of absorbing the energy generated by this wave of civil disobedience. As the website Civil Rights Women Leaders of the Carolinas explains:

Ella organized a meeting for student activists to congregate at Shaw University, her alma mater, in the summer of 1960. She aimed to bring student groups from throughout the South together and have them accomplish more than disjointed efforts, and over 300 students attended the first meeting. From this meeting, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) was born.

The creation of SNCC exemplified Ella's desire to not just lead a movement, but to create group-based leadership. As she noted, "I had always considered that my role was to facilitate" and SNCC allowed her to do just that. She trained students to fight for social activism themselves, and to travel the rural South spreading these messages of change. She acquired the nickname Fundi from her leadership at SNCC; a Swahili word meaning a person who masters a craft with the help of the community, practices it, then teaches it to the next generation....

SNCC continued to meet and grow.... In 1964, SNCC held the Freedom Summer, which was an effort to focus national attention on the racism in Mississippi, and to register black voters in the state.

https://ncwomenofcivilrights.wordpress.com/ella-baker/the-sclc-and-the-birth-of-sncc/

Also in 1964, SNCC and Baker helped organize the appearance of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party at the 1964 Democratic Party Convention in Atlantic City, where the group challenged the legitimacy of its state's all-white official delegation.

Ella Baker continued to mentor and directly influence dozens of activists throughout her life, especially young people. By the time of her death in 1986, she was a beloved figure, renowned for her dedication to justice and her belief in the power of everyday working people to create change.

How much of the material in this reading was new to you, and how much was already familiar? Do you have any questions about what you read?

What about Ella Baker's early life do you think had an impact on her future political activism?

Baker had an important role in mentoring young people. According to the reading, what were some examples of this focus? Why do you think she might have made this a priority?

SNCC, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, was a student-led organization that had a profound impact on the civil rights movement as a whole. In what ways have you seen student groups in recent years take the lead on highlighting issues of public concern?

1. What questions might you ask Ella Baker if you had the chance to talk to her? Is there more you'd like to know about her experiences?

2. What type of insights do you think Baker might have offered into today's politics?

Reading Two
Ella Baker's Legacy: A Different Model of Leadership

As a community organizer, Ella Baker brought a different style of leadership to the civil rights movement-one that contrasted with the traditional model that celebrated a few charismatic individuals. Baker believed in deemphasizing top organizational figureheads and instead cultivating the abilities of everyday people to collectively join together and take action. She upheld the idea that organizations should be run by those most impacted by the problems the organization is trying to solve.

In a June 12, 2015 article in Colorlines, Barbara Ransby discussed Baker's approach to leadership:

Although she objected to the top-down, predominately male leadership structures that were typical of groups like the Southern Christian Leadership Council (SCLC) and the NAACP in the 1950s and '60s, she realized the necessity for grounded, community-based leader-organizers such as sharecropper Fannie Lou Hamer and Cleveland, Mississippi-based local organizer Amzie Moore. Baker was not against leadership. She was opposed to hierarchical leadership that disempowered the masses and further privileged the already privileged.

When Oprah Winfrey complained that recent protests against police violence lack leadership, she was describing [Martin Luther King's] style of leading, or at least the way in which the King legacy has been most widely branded: the reverend as the strong, all-knowing, slightly imperfect but still not-like-us type of leader.

Baker represented a different leadership tradition altogether. She combined the generic concept of leadership- "a process of social influence in which a person can enlist the aid and support of others in the accomplishment of a common task"-and a confidence in the wisdom of ordinary people to define their problems and imagine solutions. Baker helped everyday people channel and congeal their collective power to resist oppression and fight for sustainable, transformative change....

That collective effort required leaders who were accountable to one another and were not singular. There were many organizers in groups such as SNCC who modeled Baker's brand of what sociologist Charles Payne has called "group-centered leadership."

Rather than someone with a fancy title standing at a podium speaking for or to the people, group-centered leaders are at the center of many concentric circles. They strengthen the group, forge consensus and negotiate a way forward. That kind of leadership is impactful, democratic, and, I would argue, more radical and sustainable, than the alternatives.
https://www.colorlines.com/articles/ella-taught-me-shattering-myth-leaderless-movement

Another way in which Baker's leadership style contrasted with the norm within many civil rights organizations was her emphasis on valuing the contributions of women. Baker was opinionated and outspoken, even when social norms held that women should be quiet and deferential. At both the SCLC and NAACP, she protested the fact that formal power rested in the hands of men, who almost exclusively were given top offices, while women were relegated to support roles.

Congressperson John Lewis, himself a prominent civil rights activist, wrote in his memoir Walking with the Wind: "Long before people began using the term 'male chauvinism,' Ella Baker was describing it and denouncing it in the civil rights movement, and she was right. There were very, very few women getting credit for their work, and even fewer emerged into leadership positions."

In a January 16, 2017 article for Time magazine, journalist Julie Scelfo notes that the prevalence of sexism, even within the movement, may be one reason that Baker is less well-known today than she might be otherwise:

Despite her level of experience and proven track record, [Martin Luther King, Jr.] had difficulty allowing a woman's decisions to trump his own, and her idea was that the organization should devote its resources more to promoting and enabling its overall mission rather than celebrating a charismatic leader. Wyatt Tee Walker, an early SCLC board member, told the filmmaker Joanne Grant that the ministers' refusal to follow Baker's advice was in practice with the era's norms. "This was before the days of women's liberation," he says in the 1981 film Fundi: The Story of Ella Baker ....

Despite Baker's gifts for leadership and oratory, the SCLC pastors, intent on preserving their patriarchal hierarchy, refused to allow her to share in their prestige.
https://time.com/4633460/mlk-day-ella-baker/

Scelfo goes on to discuss another reason why Ella Baker may be less well-known and widely celebrated today than some other civil rights activists:

Baker spent years of her life performing the essential-but far from glamorous-act of listening, a crucial first step in helping beleaguered Blacks develop enough self-worth to demand being treated with dignity in an environment where they had every reason to fear brutality and economic reprisal from their white neighbors. She also understood group dynamics and how to empower people to join forces, a delicate task that involves responding to a wide array of human feelings.

A narrative about this kind of work is inherently less dramatic and far more complicated than, say, the tale of a discreet act of bravery on a bus. But great leaders have recognized for centuries that high emotional intelligence, or the ability to recognize and respond to other people's feelings, is central to successfully influencing them.
https://time.com/4633460/mlk-day-ella-baker/

Baker possessed this type of intelligence and infused it into her approach to organizing. In doing so, she paved the way for many young people and women to grow in their own leadership.

Today, her legacy can be seen in organizations like Black Lives Matter, which promote a "leaderful" and feminist style of organizing. Because of this, Baker not only helped change the world, she changed how people went about changing the world.

How much of the material in this reading was new to you, and how much was already familiar? Do you have any questions about what you read?

Did your perspective of the civil right movement change due to this reading? If so, how?

In what ways has sexism affected how we remember the civil rights movement? What were some ways that Ella Baker tried to intervene to highlight the work contributed by women?

What do you think about Ella Baker's style of leadership? What positives do you see? Are there any potential negatives you can think of? Explain your position.

1. Ella Baker believed that everyday people should be empowered to lead their own struggles against issues that directly affect them. Do you think this idea is relevant today? If so, how?

2. Think about the changes you think we need to see in this society. Do you think this change will be brought about only if great leaders emerge to make it happen?

3. Do you share some of Ella Baker's qualities, such as the ability to listen to others closely? Understand group dynamics? Encourage people to join forces? How might your talents be put to use to make positive change in the world?

Research assistance provided by Akin Olla.

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Celebrating Ella Baker and Her "Group-Centered Leadership"

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In recent years, groups in many different parts of the country-from North Carolina to Virginia to Maryland to New York-have lobbied local governments to commemorate a woman who was almost universally revered within the civil rights movement, but is less familiar to most Americans today: Ella Baker.

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Early Childhood and Elementary Resources 

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Early Childhood and Elementary Resources 

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Collected for BLM at School Week of Action by DC Area Educators for Social Justice

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Freedom Reads: Anti-Bias Book Talks

Freedom Reads: Anti-Bias Book Talk is part anti-bias training, part book review. Each short segment explores anti-bias books for home and the classroom with the goal to strengthen parents' and teachers' anti-bias, anti-racism lens and their ability to critically analyze children's media.

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Black Lives Matter - Early Childhood and Elementary Resources - D.C. Area Educators for Social Justice

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Freedom Reads: Anti-Bias Book Talk is part anti-bias training, part book review. Each short segment explores anti-bias books for home and the classroom with the goal to strengthen parents' and teachers' anti-bias, anti-racism lens and their ability to critically analyze children's media.

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InterAction's virtual Counter-Narrative Workshops for young BIPOC 

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InterAction's virtual Counter-Narrative Workshops for young BIPOC 

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Please feel free to e-mail  me directly if you're interested in any of our racial justice workshops iliana@interactioninc.org

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We understand that young people of color are inundated with negative stereotypes, images and myths. Not only can these have harmful impacts on their social and emotional health, but when we allow them to continue, it perpetuates racism, sexism, and other forms of oppression within our communities.
We need to support our young people of color (YPOC) to build up the strength to resist the misrepresentations about who they are and who they will become.

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We understand that young people of color are inundated with negative stereotypes, images and myths. Not only can these have harmful impacts on their social and emotional health, but when we allow them to continue, it perpetuates racism, sexism, and other forms of oppression within our communities.

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This is a great resource for primary source learning. Lessons for all history subjects and lessons to introduce primary source learning. Easily differentiated for students who need more support or a challenge.

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History Lessons | Stanford History Education Group

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This curriculum teaches students how to investigate historical questions by employing reading strategies such as sourcing, contextualizing, corroborating, and close reading. Instead of memorizing historical facts, students evaluate the trustworthiness of multiple perspectives on historical issues and learn to make historical claims backed by documentary evidence.

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Use this document to help bring intentionality/focus in the coming school year around the 7 practices we discussed.

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"Forty Acres and a Mule" by Oscar Brown, Jr.

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"Forty Acres and a Mule" by Oscar Brown, Jr.

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Great song for helping to frame discussions around Special Field Order 15 and the current call for reparations for the descendants of enslaved Africans in America

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Discover and share books you love on Goodreads.

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Binti by Nnedi Okorafor

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Her name is Binti, and she is the first of the Himba people ever to be offered a place at Oomza University, the finest institution of hig...

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Brother, Sister, Leader: The Official Curriculum of The Brotherhood/Sister Sol

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Brother, Sister, Leader: The Official Curriculum of The Brotherhood/Sister Sol

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Brother, Sister, Leader: The Official Curriculum of The Brotherhood/Sister Sol

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🎥 Watch: "Legacy" https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=sCNHUze6Eak @BroSis512's short film with youth organizers fighting for change in #Harlem these past 25 years & their #Legacy. Shout out to @YaraMej on the beautiful photography 📸 & @PeaceLumi on the editing👨🏻‍💻 Please watch & share 🙏🏽♥️ #BroSis25 https://twitter.com/brosis512/status/1291481340936966154

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Culture, Literacy, and Learning: Taking Bloom in the Midst of the Whirlwind by Carol D. Lee

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Culture, Literacy, and Learning: Taking Bloom in the Midst of the Whirlwind by Carol D. Lee

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Finally - a book on urban literature education that puts its own theories into practice. I've never read of a pedagogical approach that I would agree with in its entirety, but Lee comes fairly close. Particularly useful is that she provides readers with transcripts and classroom examples that illustrate her approach & allow us to track student growth throughout her project. ...more

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Finally - a book on urban literature education that puts its own theories into practice. I've never read of a pedagogical approach that I would agree with in its entirety, but Lee comes fairly close. Particularly useful is that she provides readers with transcripts and classroom examples that illustrate her approach & allow us to track student growth throughout her project.

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Creating the Opportunity to Learn: Moving from Research to Practice to Close the Achievement Gap by A. Wade Boykin & Pedro Noguera

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Creating the Opportunity to Learn: Moving from Research to Practice to Close the Achievement Gap by A. Wade Boykin & Pedro Noguera

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A. Wade Boykin & Pedro Noguera Table of Contents

Reviews | Video | About the Authors

About This Book
"Unless we believe that those who have more are inherently superior to those who have less, we should be troubled by the fact that patterns of achievement are often fairly predictable, particularly with respect to students' race and class."
In Creating the Opportunity to Learn, Wade Boykin and Pedro Noguera help navigate the turbid waters of evidence-based methodologies and chart a course toward closing (and eliminating) the academic achievement gap. Turning a critical eye to current and recent research, the authors present a comprehensive view of the achievement gap and advocate for strategies that contribute to the success of all children.

Boykin and Noguera maintain that it is possible to close the achievement gap by abandoning failed strategies, learning from successful schools, and simply doing more of what the research shows is most effective. Success is founded on equity, but equity involves more than simply ensuring students have equal access to education; equity also entails a focus on outcomes and results.

If we want to bring about significant improvements in those outcomes, we have to do more to address the context in which learning takes place. In short, we must create schools where a child's race or class is no longer a predictor for how well he or she might perform.
See the book's table of contents and read excerpts
Reviewsand Testimonials
"Unlike some researchers who only speak in professorial language when bringing up suggestions about their work, this duo prefers to clearly define and explicate these rather complex ideas in a clear and concise manner. ...
"As education researchers well versed in speaking to communities, Boykin and Noguera's Creating the Opportunity to Learn makes for a pleasant and informative read that accurately builds the bridge between the research to educators."

-Jose Luis Vilson, Middle school math teacher,
coach, and data analyst, New York, N.Y.

Book Details

Are You a Member?

Aboutthe Authors

A. WADE BOYKIN is a professor and director of the graduate program in the Department of Psychology at Howard University. He is also the executive director of the Capstone Institute at Howard University, formally known as the Center for Research on the Education of Students Placed At Risk. Dr. Boykin has done extensive work in the area of research methodology; the interface of culture, context, motivation, and cognition; black child development; and academic achievement in the American social context. He is coeditor of Research Directions of Black Psychologists, which was a finalist for the American Psychological Association's Book of the Year.
Read more
PEDRO A. NOGUERA, Ph.D., is the Peter L. Agnew Professor of Education at New York University. He holds tenured faculty appointments in the departments of Teaching and Learning and Humanities and Social Sciences at the Steinhardt School of Culture, Education and Development and in the Department of Sociology at New York University. He is also the executive director of the Metropolitan Center for Urban Education and the codirector of the Institute for the Study of Globalization and Education in Metropolitan Settings.
Read more
diversity

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ASCD Book: Creating the Opportunity to Learn

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A. Wade Boykin & Pedro Noguera Table of Contents Reviews | Video | About the Authors "Unless we believe that those who have more are inherently superior to those who have less, we should be troubled by the fact that patterns of achievement are often fairly predictable, particularly with respect to students' race and class."

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A growing resource for learning about anti-racism, and supporting the people & organizations doing important work for the Black Lives Matter movement.

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A beautiful novel about the repercussions of the slave trade from the 18th century to present day. From Ghana to the United States, the reader watches the lives of two sisters and the generations that follow unfold.

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WBEZ (Chicago's NPR station) investigation into how Chase Bank, among others, continue to inflict redlining practices on Chicago's West and South sides

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Chicago's Latino communities do not see much more lending than the city's black neighborhoods.

But some home ownership advocates working in Latino neighborhoods say they feel they're up against a bigger threat than weak lending - rising home prices and property taxes. In fact, homeownership counselors at the nonprofit LUCHA, in Humboldt Park, said if they were to see lending amounts increase in Latino neighborhoods, that might signal higher home prices and gentrification, which they say is making it harder for longtime neighborhood residents to purchase property.

At The Resurrection Project in the historically Latino Pilsen neighborhood, homeownership counselor Lizette Carretero said it can be hard to recognize lending disparities from the trenches.

"It goes unseen," said Carretero, who said advocates have lots of ideas about how banks might improve their lending record in Latino communities and "transfer those dollars over to the neighborhoods that need them." She suggests lending to DACA recipients, offering significant down payment assistance and making it easier to get rehab loans so families could purchase "as-is" properties that need fixing up.

Lenders respond

Lenders contacted by WBEZ declined to give on-the-record interviews for this story, but a number sent written statements, and some took issue with WBEZ's analysis.

"Guaranteed Rate made more loans in minority neighborhoods during the seven-year period covered by this story than any other lender," a spokesperson for the online lender wrote. "Chicago is our home, and we are serving our entire community."

A Chase home lending spokesperson did not offer a reason why the bank's black-white lending disparity is so much wider than even the industry as a whole. She said Chase has doubled its homebuyer grants on the South and West sides and is expanding access to low down payment loans. She also pointed to the bank's support for affordable housing. "Every Chicagoan should have equal access to the opportunity of homeownership, and we all have work to do for this to happen," the spokeswoman wrote.

Bank of America said the analysis failed to provide a full picture of its home mortgage lending since it excluded refinance loans, which accounted for 57% of its lending in Chicago in the years analyzed. A spokeswoman said refinances helped keep people in their homes. Bank of America's lending disparities were less when it came to refinancing, but the bank still had more disparate lending than the industry as a whole. WBEZ excluded refinance loans from our analysis to avoid double counting capital flows.

Like Chase, Bank of America also pointed to work with local nonprofits to promote homebuyer education and counseling, and highlighted grants that pay for closing costs and help with down payments.

Wells Fargo pointed out it recently received the highest possible rating from the federal government for its performance under the Community Reinvestment Act. Lenders are graded on different benchmarks under that law than what WBEZ used in its analysis.

Overall, banks pointed out that higher home prices in white areas mean there are more dollars lent there. Lenders criticized WBEZ for failing to compare demand for loans and borrower qualifications across white, black and Latino neighborhoods.

The fallout in neighborhoods

Community residents say the disparate lending has tangible and pernicious impacts on their day-to-day lives.

"First of all, you impact the number of homeowners who live here," said Asiaha Butler, executive director of the Resident Association of Greater Englewood (RAGE). And for Butler, homeowners are key to turning around the community's struggle with poverty, crime, abandoned buildings and vacant lots. "Getting people to really look at Englewood as a place to invest, and to purchase properties that are here and available - we have a lot of homes that could be renovated or owner occupied."

RAGE started a " Buy the Block " campaign to encourage residents to become property owners - and community interest has been strong; she's packed meeting rooms with potential buyers. But Butler said big banks seem disinterested.

"We have banks here. Chase is here. Bank of America is here. U.S. Bank is here," Butler said. Yet over the last seven years, across Englewood and West Englewood - communities spanning six square miles in the heart of Chicago's South Side - those three major banks collectively made just 33 home purchase loans.

"It kills me because you have a room full of 150 people willing to do what they have to do to purchase property in Englewood," Butler said. "They can't get a loan to do that, because of their ZIP code, because of their race. ... How can I promote that, if our lenders are not on the same side?"

Good income, good credit, good assets - no loan

Our findings show that stark lending disparities affect even middle-class black communities.

Sims Fears, the director of the Greater Chatham Initiative, organizes trolley tours that wind through her historic South Side community of stately brick two-flats and bungalows to highlight homes for sale. The trolleys are typically packed with people eager to buy in Chatham.

But in late 2018, Sims Fears got her own rude lesson in lending when she put in an offer to buy the former home of "Mr. Cub," Ernie Banks. The 3,500-square-foot bungalow with wraparound front windows sits on a quiet corner at 82nd and Rhodes. The living room features built-in shelves backed with red felt where the baseball great displayed his trophies.

The property needed work. The windows wouldn't open, lights didn't turn on. Sims Fears talked the seller down to $160,000.

But when she went to get a bank loan, she ran into problems, even though Sims Fears and her husband have good incomes, credit scores and assets. They planned on doing $200,000 worth of work on the house.

That's when appraisers calculated that even with all-new electricity, plumbing, windows, air conditioning, a modern kitchen and a mother-in-law suite, the remodeled house would be worth only $300,000 - shockingly low.

Sims Fears believes there's one reason for that, the same reason red lines were drawn around neighborhoods back in the late 1930s - the house is in a majority-black neighborhood. The low appraisal meant Sims Fears couldn't borrow the money she needed to do the repairs and upgrades, even though she could easily afford the loan.

Her lender told her she had one option: go back to the seller and talk them down further.

"So it's like they were saying, 'OK, so this house - this 3,500-square-foot, three-bedroom house - is only worth $100,000,'" she said.

It was a moral question for Sims Fears. Here she is, neighborhood booster, telling folks to buy into this historic black neighborhood, invest, build wealth for your family. Now, she felt like the system was telling her to steal the wealth another family had built up.

"And I said, 'Well, I'm not going to do that. I'll make up the difference.'"

So Sims Fears took $60,000 from her family's savings and put it into the house to get the loan.

"Just to close," said Sims Fears.

Studies have concluded that homes in black neighborhoods are consistently under-valued - which affects the amount of money buyers can get from lenders, and often whether they can purchase at all in a particular neighborhood. If Sims Fears hadn't put her own money into the deal, she may not have been able to get the home. It's unlikely it would have passed inspection in its original "as-is" state - another reason banks give for not lending.

Zeke Morris said what Sims Fears experienced is not unusual. "The house that Nedra lives in - put that house at 4000 north, that house is worth $1.2 million, easily - the very same house," said Morris, who oversees two dozen realtors at EXIT Strategy Realty on the South Side. He estimates that in 30% to 40% of cases where the buyer and seller come to an agreement on price on Chicago's South Side, appraisers determine the home is worth less, and the bank won't lend at the agreed-upon price.

"And a lot of times those deals - they die as a result of that," Morris said.

Sims Fears is a particularly savvy observer in all this. She served as an assistant commissioner for housing under Mayor Harold Washington in the 1980s. And she worked for Fannie Mae in the 2000s, developing loan products to fit the needs of lower-income communities across 10 states in the Midwest. She said that's what financial institutions need to do for Chicago neighborhoods: come up with loans that work better for Chicago's black and Latino neighborhoods. She'd like to see loans based on borrower qualifications, not home values - loans that require less money down, smaller loans, loans that allow for significant rehab.

She said banks need to "look at their disparities and how they can make it up."

But Sims Fears also sees a role here for the city.

She said Chicago needs to see its housing stock as part of the city's infrastructure - like sewer pipes or roads. Something that needs to be invested in.

She said Chicago needs to see its housing stock as part of the city's infrastructure - like sewer pipes or roads. Something that needs to be invested in.

That could take lots of forms, Sims Fears said. What about equity insurance in black neighborhoods so homeowners can be sure their homes won't go below a certain value? Or a pool of rehab money for people whose homes - because of depressed property values - need more repairs than the structures are supposedly worth.

Why no lending?

Discrimination in lending can take place without anyone intending to discriminate, said Lauren Nolan, who has researched mortgage lending in Chicago for the Woodstock Institute, a group founded 40 years ago in part to watchdog these very lending numbers.

"We don't have the same level, necessarily, of the overt discrimination that we saw during the redlining era. What we're seeing now is more systemic racism," she said. "It is, in some respects, a new form of redlining - de facto."

"What we're seeing now is more systemic racism. ... It is, in some respects, a new form of redlining - de facto."
Lauren Nolan, mortgage lending researcher

Nolan said the Community Reinvestment Act, the federal law meant to force banks to lend in all communities, needs to be strengthened. Currently, 98% of banks get passing grades under the act, according to the National Community Reinvestment Coalition, which works to end discrimination in lending. Banks are not judged by the metrics WBEZ and City Bureau examined in this analysis.

Experts say past discrimination fuels today's inequities.

"These patterns that we're seeing today are a product of that history of disinvestment," said Geoff Smith, executive director of the Institute for Housing Studies at DePaul University.

The fact that banks denied loans in African American neighborhoods previously means properties there need significant rehab, said Smith. That depresses home values today and makes it difficult to get a loan on properties across entire neighborhoods, even for qualified buyers.

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Home Loans in Chicago: One Dollar To White Neighborhoods, 12 Cents To Black

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In Chicago, lenders have invested more into a single white neighborhood than all the black neighborhoods combined. Call it modern-day redlining.

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Ted Talk by Beverly Daniel TatuM: Is My Skin Brown Because I Drank Chocolate Milk?   

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Ted Talk by Beverly Daniel TatuM: Is My Skin Brown Because I Drank Chocolate Milk?   

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This video has really helped me begin the conversation about race with very young children.

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Is My Skin Brown Because I Drank Chocolate Milk? | Beverly Daniel Tatum | TEDxStanford

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Not technically a documentary, but a great film and book.

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The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks: The Lacks Family Legacy (HBO)

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Great Graphic Novel - I Am Alfonso Jones

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Great Graphic Novel - I Am Alfonso Jones

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Also listed under recommended fiction.

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By Tony Medina
Illustrated by Stacey Robinson, John Jennings

Alfonso Jones can't wait to play the role of Hamlet in his school's hip-hop rendition of the classic Shakespearean play. He also wants to let his best friend, Danetta, know how he really feels about her. But as he is buying his first suit, an off-duty police officer mistakes a clothes hanger for a gun, and he shoots Alfonso.

When Alfonso wakes up in the afterlife, he's on a ghost train guided by well-known victims of police shootings, who teach him what he needs to know about this subterranean spiritual world. Meanwhile, Alfonso's family and friends struggle with their grief and seek justice for Alfonso in the streets. As they confront their new realities, both Alfonso and those he loves realize the work that lies ahead in the fight for justice.

In the first graphic novel for young readers to focus on police brutality and the Black Lives Matter movement, as in Hamlet, the dead shall speak-and the living yield even more surprises.

Foreword by Bryan Stevenson, Executive Director of the Equal Justice Initiative and author of Just Mercy
Read the Foreword by Bryan Stevenson and Tony Medina's Author's Note. Book Trailer: I Am Alfonso Jones
Check out Tony Medina's article in the National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE) Journal, Language Arts, titled, "Alfonso Jones Matters." This is a personal narrative detailing Tony's construction of a protagonist for a graphic novel that captures the quest for justice at the heart of the Black Lives Matter movement.

About the Creators

Tony Medina - Author

is the author of six beloved books for young readers, as well as multiple volumes of poetry for adults. A Pushcart Prize-nominated poet and a professor of creative writing at Howard University, Dr. Medina is a two-time winner of the Paterson Prize for Books for Young People. He lives in the Washington, DC area.

Stacey Robinson

is an assistant professor of graphic design at the University of Illinois and an Arthur Schomburg Fellow with an MFA from the University at Buffalo. As part of the collaborative team "Black Kirby" with John Jennings, he creates graphic novels, gallery exhibitions, and lectures that deconstruct the work of artist Jack Kirby to re-imagine Black resistance spaces inspired by hip-hop, religion, the arts, and sciences. Robinson lives in Illinois.

John Jennings

co-edited the Eisner-nominated anthology The Blacker the Ink. He is a professor of media and cultural studies at the University of California, Riverside, and the Nasir Jones Hiphop Fellowship at Harvard's Hutchins Center for African & African American Research. Jennings lives in California.

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By Tony MedinaIllustrated by Stacey Robinson, John Jennings Alfonso Jones can't wait to play the role of Hamlet in his school's hip-hop rendition of the classic Shakespearean play. He also wants to let his best friend, Danetta, know how he really feels about her.

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The Brutal History Of The Texas Rangers 

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The Brutal History Of The Texas Rangers 

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Interview with Doug Swanson, author of Cult of Glory

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subscribe to Fresh Air podcast

subscribe to Fresh Air podcast

Their exploits are portrayed in countless movies and TV shows, but author Doug Swanson says the law enforcement agency has a dark history of abuse and officially-sanctioned racial oppression - including burning villages, hunting runaway slaves and murdering Mexicans and Mexican-Americans. Swanson's book is 'Cult of Glory.'

Jazz critic Kevin Whitehead looks at what he calls the "stock jazz-movie ending," a basic plot element subject to many variations.

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The Brutal History Of The Texas Rangers : Fresh Air

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Their exploits are portrayed in countless movies and TV shows, but author Doug Swanson says the law enforcement agency has a dark history of abuse and officially-sanctioned racial oppression - including burning villages, hunting runaway slaves and murdering Mexicans and Mexican-Americans. Swanson's book is 'Cult of Glory.'

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Police Used to Remove People from Land in Louisville, KY

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Police Used to Remove People from Land in Louisville, KY

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A history of police being used to protect land and also remove people from land is a direct throughline to now:  Breonna Taylor's neighborhood is actively being regentrified by the city of Louisville. The police are targeting residents on her street and neighborhood, attempting to disrupt these residences and their lives.

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We Investigated Breonna Taylor's Lawyer's Latest Allegations

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Stories from Survivors of Historical Trauma. Trailer film that examines loss and resiliency from generations of oppression and trauma

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Dodging Bullets - A Documentary Film on Historical Trauma

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Dodging Bullets—A Documentary Film about  Historical Trauma — Official Trailer

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Culturally Responsive Teaching and Learning: Master Teacher Project

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Culturally Responsive Teaching and Learning: Master Teacher Project

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A remarkable (and FREE) resource.

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Thanks to the support of the Kauffman Foundation, BetterLesson partnered with 22 teachers and school leaders based in Kansas City and the surrounding counties who implement CRTL best practices in their classrooms to capture and share their effective practices.

While eradicating racism from our educational institutions seems like a daunting task, there is work that can be done within the walls of a school or classroom. Research has shown there are many teaching and professional development strategies that can lead teachers of all genders and races to treat students more equitably and maximize the learning of students who have historically been most underserved by our education system.

In order to help close the race- and ethnicity-based opportunity and achievement gaps in education, we are providing teachers with culturally responsive strategies, tools, and resources to ensure their classrooms maximize the learning of all students, and in particular those that have historically been most marginalized by our education system.

These culturally responsive strategies, tools, and resources are equally important for teachers who teach mostly white students. The best CRTL approaches will teach all students to be racially conscious, equity-minded, anti-bias, and anti-racist.

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Culturally Responsive Teaching and Learning: Master Teacher Project

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Thanks to the support of the Kauffman Foundation, BetterLesson partnered with 22 teachers and school leaders based in Kansas City and the surrounding counties who implement CRTL best practices in their classrooms to capture and share their effective practices.

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“Nice White Parents” is a new podcast from Serial Productions, a New York Times Company, about the 60-year relationship between white parents and the public school down the block.

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Episode One: The Book of Statuses (Published 2020)

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From Serial and The New York Times: “Nice White Parents” looks at the 60-year relationship between white parents and the public school down the block.

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Graphic: Diversity, Belonging, Inclusion, Equity

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Graphic: Diversity, Belonging, Inclusion, Equity

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DEEP exists to create space and experiences that foster conversations around equity and dismantling systemic oppression and racism in pursuit of advancing equitable outcomes for ALL.

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Disruptive Equity Education Project | Intentional. Impactful. Insightful. Inspirational.

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Disruptive Equity Education Project Intentional. Impactful. Insightful. Inspirational. Learn How Envisioning cultures grounded in equity where all individuals are seen, heard, respected and valued. DEEP exists to create space and experiences that foster conversations around equity and dismantling systemic oppression and racism in pursuit of advancing equitable outcomes for ALL.

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Witness- an activist's guide to archiving

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Witness- an activist's guide to archiving

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WITNESS Program Director Sam Gregory's report and work on deepfakes has continued to get traction with mentions in CNN, The Washington Post, Fortune, and MIT Technology Review.

WITNESS and Berkeley Copwatch are excited to announce the release of a new set of tools and guidance to support community-based police accountability groups in collecting, organizing and storing documentation of police encounters.

Setting criteria for content removal is a good start, but the platform must do more to address simpler forms of media manipulation.

Top

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WITNESS: Documenting Human Rights with Video

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WITNESS Program Director Sam Gregory's report and work on deepfakes has continued to get traction with mentions in CNN, The Washington Post, Fortune, and MIT Technology Review. WITNESS and Berkeley Copwatch are excited to announce the release of a new set of tools and guidance to support community-based police accountability groups in collecting, organizing and storing documentation of police encounters.

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Using Photographs to Teach Social Justice

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Using Photographs to Teach Social Justice

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Students like photographs. They're visual and engaging, so they make great learning tools. Photographs are an excellent way to capture the spirit of an event or idea. However, learning how to interpret photographs can be challenging. These lessons will help students learn to think about photos more deeply. In addition, the lessons will expand students' knowledge of social justice issues. They can be used to supplement another lesson or readings, or they can stand alone.

Each lesson in the series builds background knowledge about a particular social justice issue and addresses at least one English language arts skill. The lesson objectives also promote critical thinking skills. Here are some of the issues and skills addressed in the lessons:

understand that people experience injustices

understand why and how people take action to address injustice

recognize how experiences are shaped by membership in groups defined by race, gender, socioeconomic status, culture, ethnicity, ability

recognize how the historical moment and the social context shape experience

develop empathy for people whose experiences differ from their own.

They should also help students "read" photographs by getting them to:

describe what they see in a photograph;

understand that photographs are not merely reflections of reality, but mediated images that convey many meanings;

see that photographs have both denotative meanings (those that are literal) and connotative meanings (those that are constructed through individual and collective associations);

understand the importance of the context in which a photograph was taken, and determine how specific photographs fit into the context in which they were taken;

identify the mood of a photograph and determine what elements contribute to creating that mood;

analyze color, light and shadow, and how they contribute to a photograph's meanings;

analyze the composition of photographs, including how photographers shape meaning by choosing how to crop images;

identify a photograph's point of view.

How do photographs convey meaning? How do viewers contribute to constructing that meaning?

How are photographs similar to and different from other kinds of communication?

What role can photographs play in revealing injustice? What role can they play in encouraging people to take action against injustice?

How do photographs show activism and activists?

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Using Photographs to Teach Social Justice

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Teaching Tolerance provides free resources to educators-teachers, administrators, counselors and other practitioners-who work with children from kindergarten through high school. Educators use our materials to supplement the curriculum, to inform their practices, and to create civil and inclusive school communities where children are respected, valued and welcome participants.

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Free Downloadable Poster Art

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Fertile Ground

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Is There Racial Inequality at Your School?

Based on civil rights data released by the U.S. Department of Education, ProPublica has built an interactive database to examine racial disparities in educational opportunities and school discipline. Look up more than 96,000 individual public and charter schools and 17,000 districts to see how they compare with their counterparts. | About Our Data | Related Story Local Stories

This database was last updated in October 2018, and its latest data is from the 2015-16 school year. Researchers can find more recent data at the U.S. Department of Education's Civil Rights Data Collection site.

School districts where White students are more likely to be in an Advanced Placement class or gifted and talented program, compared with Black students.

Note: When unified school districts do not exist, we display secondary school districts. In districts where there are too few students of a specific group to calculate a measure, we omitted the result.

Nationally, White students are 1.8 times as likely as Black students to be in an Advanced Placement class.

Compare student access to opportunities and discipline on average, across states. Click on each state for full details.

State

Nonwhite Students

Students Who Get Free/Reduced-Price Lunch

High School Graduation Rate

Opportunity (White students are this number of times as likely to be in an AP class, compared with Black students)

Discipline (Black students are this number of times as likely to be suspended, compared with White students)

State

Nonwhite Students

Students Who Get Free/Reduced-Price Lunch

High School Graduation Rate

Opportunity (White students are this number of times as likely to be in an AP class, compared with Hispanic students)

Discipline (Hispanic students are this number of times as likely to be suspended, compared with White students)

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Is there racial inequality at your school? Based on civil rights data released by the U.S. Department of Education, ProPublica built an interactive database to examine racial disparities in educational opportunities and school discipline. Look up more than 96,000 individual public and charter schools and 17,000 school districts to see how they compare.

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James Baldwin

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Let's begin by saying that we are living through a very dangerous time. Everyone in this room is in one way or another aware of that. We are in a revolutionary situation, no matter how unpopular that word has become in this country. The society in which we live is desperately menaced, not by Khrushchev, but from within. To any citizen of this country who figures himself as responsible - and particularly those of you who deal with the minds and hearts of young people - must be prepared to "go for broke." Or to put it another way, you must understand that in the attempt to correct so many generations of bad faith and cruelty, when it is operating not only in the classroom but in society, you will meet the most fantastic, the most brutal, and the most determined resistance. There is no point in pretending that this won't happen.

Since I am talking to schoolteachers and I am not a teacher myself, and in some ways am fairly easily intimidated, I beg you to let me leave that and go back to what I think to be the entire purpose of education in the first place. It would seem to me that when a child is born, if I'm the child's parent, it is my obligation and my high duty to civilize that child. Man is a social animal. He cannot exist without a society. A society, in turn, depends on certain things which everyone within that society takes for granted. Now the crucial paradox which confronts us here is that the whole process of education occurs within a social framework and is designed to perpetuate the aims of society. Thus, for example, the boys and girls who were born during the era of the Third Reich, when educated to the purposes of the Third Reich, became barbarians. The paradox of education is precisely this - that as one begins to become conscious one begins to examine the society in which he is being educated. The purpose of education, finally, is to create in a person the ability to look at the world for himself, to make his own decisions, to say to himself this is black or this is white, to decide for himself whether there is a God in heaven or not. To ask questions of the universe, and then learn to live with those questions, is the way he achieves his own identity. But no society is really anxious to have that kind of person around. What societies really, ideally, want is a citizenry which will simply obey the rules of society. If a society succeeds in this, that society is about to perish. The obligation of anyone who thinks of himself as responsible is to examine society and try to change it and to fight it - at no matter what risk. This is the only hope society has. This is the only way societies change.

Now, if what I have tried to sketch has any validity, it becomes thoroughly clear, at least to me, that any Negro who is born in this country and undergoes the American educational system runs the risk of becoming schizophrenic. On the one hand he is born in the shadow of the stars and stripes and he is assured it represents a nation which has never lost a war. He pledges allegiance to that flag which guarantees "liberty and justice for all." He is part of a country in which anyone can become president, and so forth. But on the other hand he is also assured by his country and his countrymen that he has never contributed anything to civilization-that his past is nothing more than a record of humiliations gladly endured. He is assumed by the republic that he, his father, his mother, and his ancestors were happy, shiftless, watermelon-eating darkies who loved Mr. Charlie and Miss Ann, that the value he has as a black man is proven by one thing only - his devotion to white people. If you think I am exaggerating, examine the myths which proliferate in this country about Negroes.

All this enters the child's consciousness much sooner than we as adults would like to think it does. As adults, we are easily fooled because we are so anxious to be fooled. But children are very different. Children, not yet aware that it is dangerous to look too deeply at anything, look at everything, look at each other, and draw their own conclusions. They don't have the vocabulary to express what they see, and we, their elders, know how to intimidate them very easily and very soon. But a black child, looking at the world around him, though he cannot know quite what to make of it, is aware that there is a reason why his mother works so hard, why his father is always on edge. He is aware that there is some reason why, if he sits down in the front of the bus, his father or mother slaps him and drags him to the back of the bus. He is aware that there is some terrible weight on his parents' shoulders which menaces him. And it isn't long - in fact it begins when he is in school - before he discovers the shape of his oppression.

Let us say that the child is seven years old and I am his father, and I decide to take him to the zoo, or to Madison Square Garden, or to the U.N. Building, or to any of the tremendous monuments we find all over New York. We get into a bus and we go from where I live on 131st Street and Seventh Avenue downtown through the park and we get in New York City, which is not Harlem. Now, where the boy lives - even if it is a housing project - is in an undesirable neighborhood. If he lives in one of those housing projects of which everyone in New York is so proud, he has at the front door, if not closer, the pimps, the whores, the junkies - in a word, the danger of life in the ghetto. And the child knows this, though he doesn't know why.

I still remember my first sight of New York. It was really another city when I was born - where I was born. We looked down over the Park Avenue streetcar tracks. It was Park Avenue, but I didn't know what Park Avenue meant downtown. The Park Avenue I grew up on, which is still standing, is dark and dirty. No one would dream of opening a Tiffany's on that Park Avenue, and when you go downtown you discover that you are literally in the white world. It is rich - or at least it looks rich. It is clean - because they collect garbage downtown. There are doormen. People walk about as though they owned where they are - and indeed they do. And it's a great shock. It's very hard to relate yourself to this. You don't know what it means. You know - you know instinctively - that none of this is for you. You know this before you are told. And who is it for and who is paying for it? And why isn't it for you?

Later on when you become a grocery boy or messenger and you try to enter one of those buildings a man says, "Go to the back door." Still later, if you happen by some odd chance to have a friend in one of those buildings, the man says, "Where's your package?" Now this by no means is the core of the matter. What I'm trying to get at is that by the time the Negro child has had, effectively, almost all the doors of opportunity slammed in his face, and there are very few things he can do about it. He can more or less accept it with an absolutely inarticulate and dangerous rage inside - all the more dangerous because it is never expressed. It is precisely those silent people whom white people see every day of their lives - I mean your porter and your maid, who never say anything more than "Yes Sir" and "No, Ma'am." They will tell you it's raining if that is what you want to hear, and they will tell you the sun is shining if that is what you want to hear. They really hate you-really hate you because in their eyes (and they're right) you stand between them and life. I want to come back to that in a moment. It is the most sinister of the facts, I think, which we now face.

There is something else the Negro child can do, to. Every street boy - and I was a street boy, so I know - looking at the society which has produced him, looking at the standards of that society which are not honored by anybody, looking at your churches and the government and the politicians, understand that this structure is operated for someone else's benefit - not for his. And there's no reason in it for him. If he is really cunning, really ruthless, really strong - and many of us are - he becomes a kind of criminal. He becomes a kind of criminal because that's the only way he can live. Harlem and every ghetto in this city - every ghetto in this country - is full of people who live outside the law. They wouldn't dream of calling a policeman. They wouldn't, for a moment, listen to any of those professions of which we are so proud on the Fourth of July. They have turned away from this country forever and totally. They live by their wits and really long to see the day when the entire structure comes down.

The point of all this is that black men were brought here as a source of cheap labor. They were indispensable to the economy. In order to justify the fact that men were treated as though they were animals, the white republic had to brainwash itself into believing that they were, indeed, animals and deserved to be treated like animals. Therefor it is almost impossible for any Negro child to discover anything about his actual history. The reason is that this "animal," once he suspects his own worth, once he starts believing that he is a man, has begun to attack the entire power structure. This is why America has spent such a long time keeping the Negro in his place. What I am trying to suggest to you is that it was not an accident, it was not an act of God, it was not done by well-meaning people muddling into something which they didn't understand. It was a deliberate policy hammered into place in order to make money from black flesh. And now, in 1963, because we have never faced this fact, we are in intolerable trouble.

The Reconstruction, as I read the evidence, was a bargain between the North and South to this effect: "We've liberated them from the land - and delivered them to the bosses." When we left Mississippi to come North we did not come to freedom. We came to the bottom of the labor market, and we are still there. Even the Depression of the 1930s failed to make a dent in Negroes' relationship to white workers in the labor unions. Even today, so brainwashed is this republic that people seriously ask in what they suppose to be good faith, "What does the Negro want?" I've heard a great many asinine questions in my life, but that is perhaps the most asinine and perhaps the most insulting. But the point here is that people who ask that question, thinking that they ask it in good faith, are really the victims of this conspiracy to make Negroes believe they are less than human.

In order for me to live, I decided very early that some mistake had been made somewhere. I was not a "nigger" even though you called me one. But if I was a "nigger" in your eyes, there was something about you - there was something you needed. I had to realize when I was very young that I was none of those things I was told I was. I was not, for example, happy. I never touched a watermelon for all kinds of reasons that had been invented by white people, and I knew enough about life by this time to understand that whatever you invent, whatever you project, is you! So where we are now is that a whole country of people believe I'm a "nigger," and I don't, and the battle's on! Because if I am not what I've been told I am, then it means that you're not what you thought you were either! And that is the crisis.

It is not really a "Negro revolution" that is upsetting the country. What is upsetting the country is a sense of its own identity. If, for example, one managed to change the curriculum in all the schools so that Negroes learned more about themselves and their real contributions to this culture, you would be liberating not only Negroes, you'd be liberating white people who know nothing about their own history. And the reason is that if you are compelled to lie about one aspect of anybody's history, you must lie about it all. If you have to lie about my real role here, if you have to pretend that I hoed all that cotton just because I loved you, then you have done something to yourself. You are mad.

Now let's go back a minute. I talked earlier about those silent people - the porter and the maid - who, as I said, don't look up at the sky if you ask them if it is raining, but look into your face. My ancestors and I were very well-trained. We understood very early that this was not a Christian nation. It didn't matter what you said or how often you went to church. My father and my mother and my grandfather and my grandmother knew that Christians didn't act this way. It was a simple as that. And if that was so there was no point in dealing with white people in terms of their own moral professions, for they were not going to honor them. What one did was to turn away, smiling all the time, and tell white people what they wanted to hear. But people always accuse you of reckless talk when you say this.

All this means that there are in this country tremendous reservoirs of bitterness which have never been able to find an outlet, but may find an outlet soon. It means that well-meaning white liberals place themselves in great danger when they try to deal with Negroes as though they were missionaries. It means, in brief, that a great price is demanded to liberate all those silent people so that they can breathe for the first time and tell you what they think of you. And a price is demanded to liberate all those white children - some of them near forty - who have never grown up, and who never will grow up, because they have no sense of their identity.

What passes for identity in America is a series of myths about one's heroic ancestors. It's astounding to me, for example, that so many people really appear to believe that the country was founded by a band of heroes who wanted to be free. That happens not to be true. What happened was that some people left Europe because they couldn't stay there any longer and had to go someplace else to make it. That's all. They were hungry, they were poor, they were convicts. Those who were making it in England, for example, did not get on the Mayflower. That's how the country was settled. Not by Gary Cooper. Yet we have a whole race of people, a whole republic, who believe the myths to the point where even today they select political representatives, as far as I can tell, by how closely they resemble Gary Cooper. Now this is dangerously infantile, and it shows in every level of national life. When I was living in Europe, for example, one of the worst revelations to me was the way Americans walked around Europe buying this and buying that and insulting everybody - not even out of malice, just because they didn't know any better. Well, that is the way they have always treated me. They weren't cruel; they just didn't know you were alive. They didn't know you had any feelings.

What I am trying to suggest here is that in the doing of all this for 100 years or more, it is the American white man who has long since lost his grip on reality. In some peculiar way, having created this myth about Negroes, and the myth about his own history, he created myths about the world so that, for example, he was astounded that some people could prefer Castro, astounded that there are people in the world who don't go into hiding when they hear the word "Communism," astounded that Communism is one of the realities of the twentieth century which we will not overcome by pretending that it does not exist. The political level in this country now, on the part of people who should know better, is abysmal.

The Bible says somewhere that where there is no vision the people perish. I don't think anyone can doubt that in this country today we are menaced - intolerably menaced - by a lack of vision.

It is inconceivable that a sovereign people should continue, as we do so abjectly, to say, "I can't do anything about it. It's the government." The government is the creation of the people. It is responsible to the people. And the people are responsible for it. No American has the right to allow the present government to say, when Negro children are being bombed and hosed and shot and beaten all over the Deep South, that there is nothing we can do about it. There must have been a day in this country's life when the bombing of the children in Sunday School would have created a public uproar and endangered the life of a Governor Wallace. It happened here and there was no public uproar.

I began by saying that one of the paradoxes of education was that precisely at the point when you begin to develop a conscience, you must find yourself at war with your society. It is your responsibility to change society if you think of yourself as an educated person. And on the basis of the evidence - the moral and political evidence - one is compelled to say that this is a backward society. Now if I were a teacher in this school, or any Negro school, and I was dealing with Negro children, who were in my care only a few hours of every day and would then return to their homes and to the streets, children who have an apprehension of their future which with every hour grows grimmer and darker, I would try to teach them - I would try to make them know - that those streets, those houses, those dangers, those agonies by which they are surrounded, are criminal. I would try to make each child know that these things are the result of a criminal conspiracy to destroy him. I would teach him that if he intends to get to be a man, he must at once decide that his is stronger than this conspiracy and they he must never make his peace with it. And that one of his weapons for refusing to make his peace with it and for destroying it depends on what he decides he is worth. I would teach him that there are currently very few standards in this country which are worth a man's respect. That it is up to him to change these standards for the sake of the life and the health of the country. I would suggest to him that the popular culture - as represented, for example, on television and in comic books and in movies - is based on fantasies created by very ill people, and he must be aware that these are fantasies that have nothing to do with reality. I would teach him that the press he reads is not as free as it says it is - and that he can do something about that, too. I would try to make him know that just as American history is longer, larger, more various, more beautiful and more terrible than anything anyone has ever said about it, so is the world larger, more daring, more beautiful and more terrible, but principally larger - and that it belongs to him. I would teach him that he doesn't have to be bound by the expediencies of any given administration, any given policy, any given morality; that he has the right and the necessity to examine everything. I would try to show him that one has not learned anything about Castro when one says, "He is a Communist." This is a way of his not learning something about Castro, something about Cuba, something, in time, about the world. I would suggest to him that his is living, at the moment, in an enormous province. America is not the world and if America is going to become a nation, she must find a way - and this child must help her to find a way to use the tremendous potential and tremendous energy which this child represents. If this country does not find a way to use that energy, it will be destroyed by that energy.

Delivered on October 16, 1963, as "The Negro Child-His Self-Image ", published in The Saturday Review, December 21, 1963, reprinted in The Price of the Ticket, Collected Non-Fiction 1948-1985, Saint Martins 1985.

James Baldwin (Aug. 2, 1924 - Dec. 1, 1987) was a novelist, essayist, playwright, poet, and social critic.

Born in Harlem, Baldwin was a "witness to the truth" about racism and homophobia through his novels, plays, essays, and poetry including Go Tell It on the Mountain (1953), Notes of a Native Son (1955), Giovanni's Room (1956), Nobody Knows My Name (1961), Another Country (1962), The Fire Next Time (1963), If Beale Street Could Talk (1974), and The Evidence of Things Not Seen (1985). Baldwin was active as a writer, speaker, and ally of the southern Civil Rights Movement. He participated in the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, Freedom Day in Selma in 1963, and the 1965 Selma to Montgomery March.

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A Talk to Teachers - Zinn Education Project

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Article. By James Baldwin. October 16, 1963. Baldwin addresses the challenges of education to prepare children to grapple with the myths and realities of U.S. history.

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by Bryan Stevenson

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Just Mercy (Adapted for Young Adults): A True Story of the Fight for Justice

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The young adult adaptation of Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption by Bryan Stevenson. Winner of Carnegie Medal for Nonfiction, the NAACP Image Award for Nonfiction, and a Books for a Better Life Award. A No. 1 New York Times bestseller.

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An Indigenous People's History of the United States for Young People

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An Indigenous People's History of the United States for Young People

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Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz,Debbie Reese,Jean Mendoza

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2019 Best-Of Lists: Best YA Nonfiction of 2019 (Kirkus Reviews) · Best Nonfiction of 2019 (School Library Journal) · Best Books for Teens (New York Public Library) · Best Informational Books for Older Readers (Chicago Public Library)

Spanning more than 400 years, this classic bottom-up history examines the legacy of Indigenous peoples' resistance, resilience, and steadfast fight against imperialism.

Going beyond the story of America as a country "discovered" by a few brave men in the "New World," Indigenous human rights advocate Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz reveals the roles that settler colonialism and policies of American Indian genocide played in forming our national identity.

The original academic text is fully adapted by renowned curriculum experts Debbie Reese and Jean Mendoza, for middle-grade and young adult readers to include discussion topics, archival images, original maps, recommendations for further reading, and other materials to encourage students, teachers, and general readers to think critically about their own place in history.

About the Series

The ReVisioning History for Young People series offers fresh perspectives on familiar narratives told from the viewpoint of marginalized communities with middle-grade and young adults in mind. Consisting of accessibly written history books written by notable scholars and adapted by education experts, the series reconstructs and reinterprets America's past from pre-1492 to the present for a new generation of readers.

"An important corrective to conventional narratives of our nation's history . . . . An accessible, engaging, and necessary addition to school libraries and classrooms. An excellent read, dismantling American mythologies and fostering critical reasoning about history and current events."
- Kirkus Reviews, Starred Review

"This adaptation of An Indigenous Peoples' History of the United States (2014) should be required reading for all middle and high schoolers-and their teachers . . . . There is much to commend here: the lack of sugar-coating, the debunking of origin stories, the linking between ideology and actions, the well-placed connections between events past and present, the quotes from British colonizers and American presidents that leave no doubt as to their violent intentions . . . . The resistance continues, and this book urges all readers to consider their own roles, whether as bystanders or upstanders."
- Booklist, Starred Review

"Dunbar-Ortiz's narrative history is clear, and the adapters give readers ample evidence and perspective to help them to engage with the text. A highly informative book for libraries serving high school students."
- School Library Journal, Starred Review

"Gripping, tightly written, and packed with facts traditional textbooks and historical accounts neglect to cover."
- Shelf Awareness

"Wide-ranging and politically engaged . . . a valuable resource."
- The Horn Book

"This is a desperately needed corrective to existing histories for young people, and its combination of breadth and passion will spur both reflection and emotion."
- The Bulletin of the Center for Children's Books

"This is the book I wish I'd had when I started teaching. An Indigenous Peoples' History of the United States for Young People represents a fundamental challenge to the textbooks that celebrate 'liberty,' 'freedom,' and the 'rise of the American nation' but fail to recognize the humanity-or often even the existence-of the Indigenous peoples who were here first, and are still here. Our students will see the history of this country much more clearly when we put Indigenous people's lives at the center."
-Bill Bigelow, curriculum editor, Rethinking Schools, and codirector, Zinn Education Project

A Note to Readers

INTRODUCTION
This Land

CHAPTER ONE
Follow the Corn

CHAPTER TWO
Culture of Conquest

CHAPTER THREE
Cult of the Covenant

CHAPTER FOUR
Bloody Footprints

CHAPTER FIVE
The Birth of a Nation

CHAPTER SIX
Jefferson, Jackson, and the Pursuit of Indigenous Homelands

CHAPTER SEVEN
Sea to Shining Sea

CHAPTER EIGHT
Indigenous Lands Become "Indian Country"

CHAPTER NINE
The Persistence of Sovereignty

CHAPTER TEN
Indigenous Action, Indigenous Rights

CONCLUSION
"Water Is Life": Indigenous Resistance in the Twenty-First Century

For Further Reading
Some Books We Recommend
Notes
Image Credits
Index

"Go 4th and read," Albany Times-Union, recommended the book for Independence Day reading

"What Teachers Should Learn From the Murder of George Floyd," Education Week, book referenced in blog piece

"History Remixed: How Young Adult Authors Are Revisioning History," School Library Journal, book mentioned and authors quoted in piece

"Awards List," In the Margins, selected for the "ITM 2020 Top Ten List" and the "Nonfiction Recommendation List"

"Serving Up the 2020 Youth Media Awards," KidLit These Days/BookRiot, book included in 2020 Youth Media Awards episode

"AILA announces 2020 American Indian Youth Literature Awards," American Indian Library Association, book selected as a 2020 Honor Title for the Youth Award in the Young Adult category

"Children's Publishers Choose Their Favorite Reads of 2019," Publishers Weekly, included in feature

"The Best Books for Young Readers of 2019," The Educator's Playbook (UPenn Graduate School of Education), listed in "Best Books for Young Readers in 2019" roundup

"Best YA Nonfiction of 2019," Kirkus Reviews, listed in best of YA nonfiction roundup

"6 Things Every Non-Native Should Do On Thanksgiving," HuffPost, book referenced in piece

"'I Was Teaching a Lot of Misconceptions.' The Way American Kids Are Learning About the 'First Thanksgiving' Is Changing," TIME, book mentioned in piece about teaching the history of Thanksgiving

"Best Books for Teens," New York Public Library, listed in 2019 outstanding young adult titles

"Best Informational Books Older Readers of 2019," Chicago Public Library, listed in best-of reading roundup for older readers

"3 More Must-Read YA Books by Indigenous Authors," BookRiot, included in YA books by Indigenous authors reading roundup

"12 Books by Indigenous Writers to Read this Indigenous Peoples Day," Literary Hub, listed in Indigenous Peoples' Day reading roundup

"Indigenous Peoples' Day, Scientific Knowledge, & the Teachings of Plants," Pluralism, Pragmatism, and Progressivism (a Patheos blog), quoted and mentioned in piece

"Rethinking US History through an Indigenous Lens," School Library Journal, review and analysis

"An Indigenous Peoples' History of the U.S. - THS - 09/11/19," KODX (Seattle), recorded and livestreamed Seattle Town Hall event

"Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz: An Indigenous Peoples' History of the United States for Young People," The Stranger (Seattle), announcement about Town Hall event

"Look Ahead: The hottest Seattle events for September 2019," Seattle Times, Third Place Books event announcement

"Diversity-Focused Publishing," Kidlit These Days (a BookRiot podcast), book discussed in podcast episode

"Dismantling the Historical Frameworks that Fuel Hate: One Example," Nonprofit Quarterly, write-up on the book

"Rewriting the Indigenous stories for children," Indian Country Today, interview with the adapters

"Book of the Week: An Indigenous Peoples' History of the United States for Young People," Cooperative Center for Children's Books (blog), listed as Book of the Week

"Why We Need Better Children's History Books," History News Network, op-ed

"#ColorlinesReads: 6 Books That Complicate the Idea of 'Independence,'" Colorlines, included in reading roundup

"For Further Reading: New Native Histories of North America," Beyond the Spectacle (University of Kent blog), included in reading roundup

"Lit Hub's Most Anticipated Books of Summer," Literary Hub, listed in reading roundup

"Appendix D. 2019 YA Forecast Part 2," Hazel&Katniss&Harry&Starr, podcast interview highlights book

"Beacon Press Set to Publish Radical Histories for Teens," Publishers Weekly, feature

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this classic bottom-up history examines the legacy of indigenous peoples' resistance

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and steadfast fight against imperialism.

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An Indigenous Peoples' History of the United States for Young People

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2019 Best-Of Lists: Best YA Nonfiction of 2019 (Kirkus Reviews) · Best Nonfiction of 2019 (School Library Journal) · Best Books for Teens (New York Public Library) · Best Informational Books for Older Readers (Chicago Public Library) Spanning more than 400 years, this classic bottom-up history examines the legacy of Indigenous peoples' resistance, resilience, and steadfast fight against imperialism.

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Stamped: Racism, Antiracism, and You: A Remix of Stamped from the Beginning

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Stamped: Racism, Antiracism, and You: A Remix of Stamped from the Beginning

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Jason Reynolds and Ibram X. Kendi

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Stamped: Racism, Antiracism, and You: A Remix of the National Book Award-Winning Stamped from the Beginning a book by Jason Reynolds and Ibram X. Kendi

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This crucial, empowering, #1 New York Times bestselling exploration of racism--and antiracism--in America makes critical ideas accessible for teen readers, adapted from Ibram X. Kendi’s National Book Award-winning Stamped from the Beginning. This is NOT a history book. This is a book about the here…

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Carol Anderson

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One Person, No Vote (YA Edition) — Carol Anderson

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Official Website for Historian, Educator, and Author Carol Anderson

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Lies My Teacher Told Me: Young Readers’ Edition

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Lies My Teacher Told Me: Young Readers’ Edition

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James Loewen

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Lies My Teacher Told Me: Young Readers’ Edition | The New Press

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Lies My Teacher Told Me is one of the most important—and successful—history books of our time. Having sold nearly two million copies, the book won an American Book Award and the Oliver Cromwell Cox Award for Distinguished Anti-Racist Scholarship. Now Rebecca Stefoff, the acclaimed nonfiction childre…

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Curriculum Guide

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Lesson Plans for Stamped: Racism, Antiracism, and You

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Lesson Plans for Stamped: Racism, Antiracism, and You

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By Zinn Education Project

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We are thrilled that teachers across the country are meeting, collaborating, and building curriculum based on Stamped: Racism, Antiracism, and You, by Jason Reynolds and Ibram X. Kendi. This YA book is based on Kendi's 2016 Stamped from the Beginning.

Both books center the lives of key individuals to help readers sort out both the origins of racist ideas and to differentiate between segregationist, assimilationist, and antiracist positions. These individuals - Cotton Mather, Thomas Jefferson, William Lloyd Garrison, W. E. B. Du Bois, and Angela Davis - offer examples that we're happy students will encounter in the project of antiracist education.

We hope educators supplement these texts with an equally rich people's history of racism and antiracism. Toward that effort, we have suggested lessons that complement key chapters and moments in Reynolds' and Kendi's Stamped. In most cases, we'd recommend doing these lessons before having students listen or read the chapter, since many of our activities leave the "what really happened" unanswered until the end.

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People's History Lessons for Stamped: Racism, Antiracism, and You - Zinn Education Project

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We are thrilled that teachers across the country are meeting, collaborating, and building curriculum based on Stamped: Racism, Antiracism, and You , by Jason Reynolds and Ibram X. Kendi. This YA book is based on Kendi's 2016 Stamped from the Beginning .

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The Pandemic Is the Right Time to Defund the Police

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The Pandemic Is the Right Time to Defund the Police

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Melissa Gira Grant

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The pandemic has slowed much American police work, but police are still working. "As of May 17, 375 people had been shot and killed by on-duty police officers in 2020-about the same rate as other recent years despite the coronavirus pandemic," Wesley Lowery, who helped track killings at The Washington Post, observed on Tuesday. Just a day before, a 46-year-old black man named George Floyd was killed by a white Minneapolis police officer who pinned him to the ground, kneeling on his neck for five minutes. Floyd's last words were captured in a video on Facebook: " Don't kill me" and "I cannot breathe." Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey swiftly fired the four officers involved and has called for criminal charges.

For all of the promises made post-Ferguson, after ( now former) Officer Darren Wilson shot and killed Michael Brown nearly six years ago, police continue to kill at an undisturbed pace. Each year, police on duty claim the lives of between 900 and 1,100 people, according to the Police Integrity Research Group at Bowling Green State, with fewer than eight, on average, resulting in indictments and even fewer convictions. "The only Minneapolis police officer to be convicted in an on-duty, fatal shooting was Mohamed Noor, who shot and killed Justine Ruszczyk in 2017," reports Minnesota Public Radio. "Noor is black. Ruszczyk was white."

While police kill, their unions rally to their defense. Before Mayor Frey fired the officers involved in Floyd's death, the Minneapolis Police Federation, the local police union, had openly defied him over his barring officers from attending " warrior" trainings, which encourage officers to regard their job as if they were engaged in military combat. One representative course is called " On Killing." These are less a training than an immersion in an alternate reality, in which, as Craig Atkinson, director of the police militarization documentary Do Not Resist, described it, "every single traffic stop could be, might be, the last stop you ever make in your life."

Mayors like Frey, as well as city councils, at least on paper have power over the police. But even when oversight is exercised, police continue to kill and keep their jobs. Now some cities are being urged to take a broader view: to shrink the police force altogether through the power of the budget, particularly at a moment when so many other social programs and essential services are at risk of being cut during a pandemic.

In the summer of 2019, New York Police Department (NYPD) Commissioner James O'Neill fired the officer who killed Eric Garner-who died while being crushed by police attempting to arrest him, while he repeated, "I can't breathe." In response to the officer's termination, police threatened a slowdown in protest, as they did five years earlier, after Garner's death, when protesters took to the streets. Arrests and summons dropped, and so, too, did reports of major crimes. Less policing made the city no less safe. Without meaning to, police provided a case study for police reform advocates.

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The Pandemic Is the Right Time to Defund the Police

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The pandemic has slowed much American police work, but police are still working. "As of May 17, 375 people had been shot and killed by on-duty police officers in 2020-about the same rate as other recent years despite the coronavirus pandemic," Wesley Lowery, who helped track killings at The Washington Post, observed on Tuesday.

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A message from your facilitator, Elizabeth!

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An incredible visual interactive honoring the struggle for Voting Rights in Selma and the work that must be done today to ensure voting equality. Created by the Hutchins Center for African and African American Research.

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A visual history of The Civil Rights Movement leading to The Voting Rights Act of 1965.

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Curated by the Zinn Education Project (ZEP), this invaluable archive of lessons and resources on social movement history can be explored by theme, time period and/or type. ZEP is a collaboration between Rethinking Schools and Teaching for Change.

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The Zinn Education Project is my compass in a sea of corporate textbooks, packaged common core curriculum and standardized testing. My entire curriculum is based on lessons that can be found on the Zinn Education Project.

High School Social Studies Teacher, Portland, Ore.

Your support is needed to help more students learn people's history. 100% of Zinn Education Project funding comes from individuals like you. Donate today.

By Ursula Wolfe-Rocca

From voter ID laws to voter-roll purges, gerrymandering to poll closures to the deadly in-person voting conditions during a pandemic, the right to vote is under attack and the stakes are high. It is critical that students learn about the fight for voting rights, past and present.

Nov. 30, 1924: Shirley Chisholm Born...

Teaching About the Violence in Palestine and Israel...

I can UNDERSTAND pessimism, but I don't BELIEVE in it. It's not simply a matter of faith, but of historical EVIDENCE. Not overwhelming evidence, just enough to give HOPE, because for hope we don't need certainty, only POSSIBILITY.

-Howard Zinn

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Zinn Education Project: Teaching People's History

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The Zinn Education Project promotes and supports the teaching of people's history in middle and high school classrooms across the country. Based on the lens of history highlighted in Howard Zinn's best-selling book A People's History of the United States, the website offers free, downloadable lessons and articles organized by theme, time period, and reading level.

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Teaching the Legacy of Lynching in the US

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Teaching the Legacy of Lynching in the US

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Developed by the Equal Justice Initiative (EJI), this is a vast collection of lesson plans based on the EJI’s reports Lynching in America and Slavery in America.

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Meet Medgar Evers: An Introduction to the Southern Freedom Movemet

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Meet Medgar Evers: An Introduction to the Southern Freedom Movemet

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This interactive lesson created by Teaching for Change introduces us to Medgar Evers’ work as field secretary of the Mississippi NAACP. This lesson is a part of a larger collection from Putting the Movement Back Into Civil Rights Teaching. Teaching for Change will release the newest version of this incredible resource  in 2020. In the meantime, check out selected lessons online right now!

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Medgar Wiley Evers was one of Mississippi's most impassioned activists, orators, and visionaries for equality and against brutality.

Teaching for Change prepared an interactive lesson to introduce students to his work and inspire them to learn more. The lesson is also designed as a pre-reading activity, providing an overview for students of the people, places, and issues in Evers' life.

Brief Background

Born July 2, 1925, in Decatur, Mississippi, Evers was one of four children born to James and Jesse Evers. Evers spent the most time with older brother Charles, whom he idolized because Charles protected him, taught him to fish, swim, hunt, box, wrestle, and to think about the world and their segregated schooling. In addition, Evers saw and witnessed acts of raw violence against Blacks; his parents and brother could not shield him from the realities of a society built on racial discrimination.

Evers was inducted into the United States Army in 1942. Though typical at the time, racial segregation in the military only served to anger Evers. By the end of the war, Evers was among a generation of Black veterans committed "to return [home] fighting" for change. The initial "fight" for Evers was to register to vote as an affirmation of citizenship. In the summer of 1946, along with his brother, Charles, and several other Black veterans, Evers registered to vote at the Decatur city hall. But on Election Day, the veterans were prevented by angry whites from casting their ballots.

The experience only deepened Evers's conviction that the status quo in Mississippi had to change. By 1954, Evers began an 8-year career as the Mississippi state field secretary for the NAACP, including the creating of youth councils. His organizing and murder investigations doubled the number of NAACP members who boycotted and agitated for justice in Mississippi. Murdered in the driveway to his house in 1963, his murderer was not brought to justice until 1994. Thanks to Medgar Evers, the groundwork was laid for the Mississippi freedom and voting rights struggles of the 1960s and 1970s. Read more.

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Meet Medgar Evers: Introduction to the Southern Freedom Movement - Civil Rights Teaching

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Medgar Wiley Evers was one of Mississippi's most impassioned activists, orators, and visionaries for equality and against brutality. Teaching for Change prepared an interactive lesson to introduce students to his work and inspire them to learn more. The lesson is also designed as a pre-reading activity, providing an overview for students of the people, places, and issues in Evers' life.

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This project provides information and lesson plans for high school and college classes that the expanse of Rosa Parks’ political work and commitments and the breadth of the Black struggle for justice across the 20th century. This was developed by historian Say Burgin, renowned Parks biographer Jeanne Theoharis, and the Center for Humanities, Graduate Center, City University of New York (CUNY).

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Standing Up by Sitting Down: Student Sit Ins 1960

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Standing Up by Sitting Down: Student Sit Ins 1960

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Designed for younger students, this lesson is created by and based on an exhibit at the National Civil Rights Museum in Memphis, TN.

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Standing Up by Sitting Down a learning adventure created by the National Civil Rights Museum and sponsored by Verizon

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This reading about the 1968 Memphis Sanitation Workers Strike  is one of over 100 resources developed by Facing History and Ourselves on the Civil Rights Movement.  Out of all of their collection, we think the readings are easiest for anyone to complete at home. Also recommended in their resource readings is Why MLK Encouraged 225,000 Chicago Kids to Cut Class in 1963.

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By the 1960s, the walls of segregation were coming down in cities and towns across the nation. Many white and black Americans in Memphis took pride in the way their community had avoided the violence that accompanied integration in other places. Then on February 12, 1968, about 1000 of the city's 1100 sanitation workers went on strike. That strike soon revealed deep divisions within Memphis.

"The white community," writes journalist Joan Turner Beifuss, "saw 'issues,' either because it chose to or because it could not, in fact, see in any other way." One "issue" was whether government workers ought be unionized. Another was financial. Where would the city get the money to pay the raises? Still another focused on whether the workers were being "manipulated" by "outside agitators." To most African Americans, the strike had little to do with balanced budgets, union organizing, or interference from outsiders. In their eyes, the strike was about dignity and respect. That is why the strikers wore signs reading "I AM A MAN." The pay for a sanitation worker in 1968 was $1.80 per hour. Even those who worked full time were eligible for food stamps. Yet the jobs the workers performed were not only essential to the community but also dangerous. Not long before the strikes began, two men were crushed to death in a garbage packer on one of the trucks.

The Ministers Association, a group of black and white religious leaders in Memphis, tried and failed to bring the two sides together. When the talks broke down, African Americans organized daily marches up and down Main Street. On February 23, violence erupted in the city for the first time. Who was responsible? The police claimed marchers rocked a police car. The strikers insisted that the car crossed into their lane and brushed against a marcher. No one knows what really sparked the incident. What is known is that the police responded by spraying Mace into the faces of the marchers, including a number of ministers. As a result, tension mounted in an already tense city.

By early March, the police were arresting strikers and their supporters for sitting in at City Hall and keeping replacement workers from moving garbage trucks. On March 18, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. arrived in the city to show his support for the workers. At a rally, he told the workers, "Our society must come to respect the sanitation worker. He is as significant as the physician, for if he doesn't do his job, disease is rampant." On March 28, King returned to Memphis to lead over 5000 people on a march through the city. Twenty minutes after it began, a group of young African Americans began breaking windows and looting stores. The police immediately moved in with tear gas and nightsticks. The marchers scattered, running for shelter. As a result of the violence, a curfew was imposed on the city and over 3,800 National Guardsmen arrived in Memphis to keep order.

King and two Memphis ministers, James M. Lawson and H. Ralph Jackson, held a press conference later that day. They expressed sorrow that a small group had disrupted the march. They also vowed that the protests would continue until a settlement was reached. The next day National Guardsmen escorted the marchers as they walked up and down Main Street. One later recalled, "I wore that ['I AM A MAN'] sign front and back. We had to go through all that just to be treated half-way fair. Somebody has to suffer for some good for somebody else. Anything good, there's somebody who suffered for it."

On April 3, as the strike dragged on, King came back to Memphis to lead yet another march. But before it could take place, a white assassin shot and killed the civil rights leader. The next day, April 5, 300 black and white members of the Ministers Association and the Interdenominational Ministerial Alliance marched from St. Mary's Cathedral to City Hall. Rabbi James A. Wax spoke to the mayor on behalf of the two groups:

What we come here for this morning, sir, is to appeal to you out of the fervor of our hearts that this city shall be ruled with justice, and justice for all. I realize we live in a society of law and order. We must have laws. But I would remind you most respectfully, sir, that there are laws that are greater than the laws of Memphis and Tennessee--the laws of God.

The following day the President of the United States sent a federal negotiator to help settle the strike. This time, the two sides reached agreement on every issue but one. The last obstacle to a settlement was the demand for an immediate pay raise. Negotiators recommended a raise of ten cents an hour effective May 1, 1968 with an additional five cents per hour on September 1. The union accepted the proposal. City leaders were willing to go along with it but claimed they did not have enough money in the current budget to pay the raises. They were short by about $558,000. As negotiations once again came to a standstill, a private citizen offered a solution. Abe Plough, a Jewish philanthropist and businessman, offered to contribute the money for the raises provided that his name not be made public. The people involved agreed, but in time his identity became common knowledge.

While the two sides worked out the final details of a settlement, a number of people in Memphis decided that it was time for them to speak out. They formed a citizens group called "Memphis Cares" and sponsored an assembly on April 7 at Crump Stadium. About 7000 people applauded as black and white Americans voiced their concerns and expressed their support for the following statement:

We live in Memphis. It has been a good city, but far from perfect--much less perfect than many of us realized. Something happened here which laid bare a side of our common life to which all too many of us had been blind. We . . . solemnly, in the presence of God and of one another, pledge Ourselves . . . to the building of a city where people can trust one another, respect one another and respond to the needs of one another.

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By the 1960s, the walls of segregation were coming down in cities and towns across the nation. Many white and black Americans in Memphis took pride in the way their community had avoided the violence that accompanied integration in other places. Then on February 12, 1968, about 1000 of the city's 1100 sanitation workers went on strike.

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Disband, Disempower, Disarm: Amplifying the Theory and Practice of Police Abolition

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Disband, Disempower, Disarm: Amplifying the Theory and Practice of Police Abolition

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Critical Criminology

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McDowell and Fernandez - 2018 - ‘Disband, Disempower, and Disarm’ Amplifying the .pdf

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Legal scholarship on the Movement for Black Lives policy platform, “A Vision for Black Lives: Policy Demands for Black Power, Freedom, and Justice.”

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76 Pages Posted: 1 Nov 2017 Last revised: 25 Jul 2018

Date Written: July 25, 2018

Abstract

In this Article, I consider the contemporary law reform project of a radical social movement seeking to transform the state: specifically, the Movement for Black Lives policy platform, "A Vision for Black Lives: Policy Demands for Black Power, Freedom, and Justice." The Movement for Black Lives is the leading example of a contemporary racial justice movement with an intersectional politics including feminist and anti-capitalist commitments. The visions of such radical social movements offer an alternative epistemology for understanding and addressing structural inequality and injustice. By studying not only the critiques offered by radical social movements, but also their visions for transformative change, the edges of law scholarship can be expanded, a deeper set of critiques and a longer set of histories-of colonialism and settler colonialism, the Atlantic slave trade and mass incarceration-centered, and a bolder project of transformation forwarded. These visions should push legal scholars toward a broader frame for understanding how law, the market, and the state co-produce intersectional structural inequality, and toward agendas that focus not on building the power of law and law enforcement, but on transforming the state and society and building the power of marginalized communities. This shift would invigorate the social movements literature and bring new energy to scholarship on substantive areas of law, from criminal and immigration law to property and contract law.

To illustrate the creative potential of studying radical social movements, this Article considers policing the Vision for Black Lives with the Department of Justice's (DOJ) Ferguson and Baltimore reports. The Vision and DOJ reports offer alternate conceptualizations of the problem of policing and the appropriate approach to law reform. Reflective of liberal law reform projects on police, the DOJ reports identify policing as a fundamental tool of law and order that serves the collective interests of society, and locate the problems of police in their failure to adhere to constitutional law. As a remedy, the DOJ reports advocate for investing more resources in police: more trainings, better supervision, community policing. In contrast, the Vision identifies policing as a historical and violent force in Black communities underpinning a system of racial capitalism and limiting the possibilities of Black life. Here, law is central to the shape and legitimation of racialized violence and inequality. The Vision's reimagination of policing-rooted in Black history and Black intellectual traditions-transforms mainstream approaches to reform. The Vision demands shrinking the large footprint of policing, surveillance, and incarceration, and shifting resources into other social programs in Black communities: housing, health care, jobs, and schools. It focuses on building power in Black communities, and fundamentally transforming the relationship between government, market, and society. In forwarding an abolitionist imagination, the movement offers transformative, affirmative visions for change designed to address the structures of inequality-something legal scholarship has for far too long lacked.

Keywords: law reform, social movements, policing, police violence, mass incarceration, Black Lives Matter, Movement for Black Lives, racial capitalism, abolition

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76 Pages Posted: 1 Nov 2017 Last revised: 25 Jul 2018 Date Written: July 25, 2018 In this Article, I consider the contemporary law reform project of a radical social movement seeking to transform the state: specifically, the Movement for Black Lives policy platform, "A Vision for Black Lives: Policy Demands for Black Power, Freedom, and Justice."

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This interactive visualization shows the spread of racially-restrictive deeds across Hennepin County during the first half of the twentieth century.

Click on a racially covenanted lot to learn more about the property. Use the search button at the bottom of the map to look for a specific address.

** If you are having issues with any of the features on our map, try clearing your browser's cache and reloading the window **

Racial covenants were tools used by real estate developers to prevent people of color from buying or occupying property. Often just a few lines of text, these covenants were inserted into warranty deeds across the country. These real estate contracts were powerful tools for segregationists. Real estate developers and public officials used private property transactions to build a hidden system of American apartheid during the twentieth century.

Inspired by the idea that we cannot address the inequities of the present without an understanding of the past, Mapping Prejudice was created to expose the racist practices that reshaped the landscape of Minneapolis. People of color see how discriminatory practices cascade through their lives, erecting barriers that limit access to housing, credit, education, and wealth. But the resulting physical, emotional, and financial baggage has been harder to recognize for people who have not personally experienced racism. Mapping Prejudice seeks to make these burdens visible by locating them on a digital, interactive map. The project team was inspired by a desire to create the first-ever comprehensive map of racial covenants for an American community.

The project started in Minneapolis, where research revealed that the city was not always segregated. Covenants helped remake the racial landscape of the city. As racially-restrictive deeds spread, African Americans were pushed into small and increasingly circumscribed neighborhoods. Even as the number of black residents continued to climb, ever-larger swaths of the city became entirely white.

The project is based at the John Borchert Map Library at the University of Minnesota. From this base, our interdisciplinary team of community activists, students and scholars has mobilized community members to identify discriminatory deeds. Thanks to the enthusiastic support of the community, the Hennepin County map was finished early in 2020.

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This interactive visualization shows the spread of racially-restrictive deeds across Hennepin County during the first half of the twentieth century. Click on a racially covenanted lot to learn more about the property. Use the search button at the bottom of the map to look for a specific address.

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We waited a long time for those folks to do something to improve our schools, but they let us down and so we have decided to do the job ourselves. - Jefferson High School student, 1968

The quote above opens Jeanne Theoharis' chapter in A More Beautiful and Terrible History: The Uses and Misuses of Civil Rights History on young people in the Civil Rights Movement. That chapter also formed the basis for her People's Historians Online conversation with Rethinking Schools editor Jesse Hagopian on April 10, 2020.

This was the second in our series on the Black Freedom Struggle: From Reconstruction to the Civil Rights Movement.

About 150 people joined the discussion, including teachers, parents, students, historians, and community activists. Jeanne talked about the role of teenagers, including Barbara Johns, Claudette Colvin, and the students in the high school walkouts. She noted that many of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee activists were teenagers when they took on organizing in places that everyone else deemed impossible.

Contemporary Youth Activists

To highlight the ongoing role of young people, Jeanne and Jesse welcomed two contemporary high school activists: climate justice and educational equity activist Karma Selsey of New York City's Teens Take Charge and Jaeden Thomas, a member of Seattle's NAACP youth council. Selsey talked about a campaign to pressure the mayor to provide students access to enrichment opportunities over the summer. The petition was posted in the chat box and signatures poured in from the session participants. Thomas talked about the fight for ethnic studies in Seattle Public Schools and suggested people follow @Wastatenaacpyouth on Instagram.

Session Highlights in a Tweet Thread

This tweet thread by Ursula Wolfe-Rocca provides highlights and quotes from the session.

So lucky & excited to be learning abt the role of teenagers in the Civil Rights Movement from @JeanneTheoharis, historian & author & editor of many books, in conversation w/ my friend, fellow-teacher, activist, & @RethinkSchools editor, @JessedHagopian. https://t.co/0rDXD4qDs7

- Ursula Wolfe-Rocca (@LadyOfSardines) April 10, 2020

Reflections and Lessons Learned

Participants shared what they learned and appreciated about the session in their closing evaluation. Here are some examples:

I had no idea how much of an impact youth have had on the Civil Rights Movement. It was shocking since at school we only focus on big figures like Martin Luther King Jr.

Leaving the contributions of young people out of the narrative of history helps reinforce the idea that the youth of today are powerless against the injustices they experience and observe in the world.

I love all of the examples - both historical and contemporary - that were given to tell the story of how young people are leaders. It is also a very good reminder that teaching a full story is always better than teaching a moment.

I need to look for youth activists in the struggles I already cover. After hearing this, I'm sure that they are there. Then I need to pull those struggles through to today, even if briefly.

The most important thing I took away was actually knowing that there are so many other educators working towards the same goal with what resources we have!

This highlighted the need to make sure I am including ways for students to feel empowered even within my own classroom. It makes me want to push my own practice further and make sure students can have the space to advocate for themselves daily rather than at the end of the semester. Therefore, they know they can have their voices heard and they do have power.

It was so helpful to be reminded that struggle is a struggle and that young people have so often been leaders of change. Would be great to talk more with folks about how grown-ups can both support and get out of the way.

Two things: The first is Dr. Theoharris' point that many adults were in fact NOT on board with student activism or their methods during the Civil Rights era, and that despite this, students and young people organized and worked for change. This makes me really re-think how educators and adults guide/support youth activism today. The second takeaway was the way that CORE and SNCC had to collaborate to make the freedom rides successful - that adults would start out this project, but when faced with incredible violence, students would pick up the baton despite the known dangers is such a powerful story. Also, Jesse Hagopian facilitated the conversation masterfully, and I LOVED hearing from not just Jeanne Theoharris, but also Karma and Jaedon. Seamless transition from whole group to/from breakouts. Fantastic online session!

I think it worked really, really well. The balance of this critical history and hearing the voices of youth in the struggle today was perfect. Dr. Theoharris and Mr. Hagopian do such an amazing job of making history come alive and help us see how to share these important stories with our students. I also appreciated the opportunity to connect in the breakout, especially as I was lucky enough to be placed in a breakout with three young people and learn from them. (Shout out to Miles, Jessica, and Quinn!)

One of the most interesting things that I learned about today was how Northern and Western cities fed into the myth that Black and Latino students were inferior in school. They used this myth to perpetuate the inequities that existed between minority schools and white schools.

The entire conversation was a great reminder to include young people's actions as part of the CRM and not as something separate or only briefly touched on. Their history is our history and should be included in the movement at large not as a side note.

One important thing I learned today was how voices of youth have been historically silenced, even within the activist community. However, these same youth have ignored this critique and brought about meaningful change anyways. I plan to share this idea and the example of youth activism with my middle school students over the course of the next two weeks. I will do this as a way to provide historical examples of youth activism as they begin choosing independent projects to work on in our PBL classroom. This is exactly what I needed and the timing could not have been more relevant. I look forward to the next mini-course!

I loved the breakout sessions, it was a great way to require connections in a time when we are craving them. I liked the author's speaking session in the beginning which provided a good overview and enriched the later sessions. My favorite part was hearing from today's youth, both in the panel and breakout sessions. I didn't expect to see students in the chat and it was a great surprise! I will recommend that my students join the next mini-class.

This was an incredible session. It was informative and invigorating. I am looking forward to many more. Thank you for making this accessible.

I appreciate you all! Thank you for doing such important work! I hope that even after physical distancing is over, you will still offer these opportunities. It was really great to be in a breakout group with people with such different experiences and from all over the world.

Resources

Here are some of the resources shared by the presenters and also by participants in the chat box.

The Girl from the Tar Paper School: Barbara Rose Johns and the Advent of the Civil Rights Movement by Teri Kanefield.

Illustrated book about teenager Barbara Rose Johns, who led a student walk out to protest substandard conditions at a Virginia high school in 1951.

Mighty Times: The Children's March

This student friendly documentary from Teaching Tolerance tells the story of how the young people of Birmingham braved arrest, fire hoses, and police dogs in 1963 to end segregation.

And the Youth Shall Lead Us: Stories about Young People on the Frontlines of Social Movements Throughout U.S. History.

A compilation of stories by Teaching for Change of young activists from throughout U.S. history.

SNCC Digital Gateway

An online collection of historical materials, profiles, a timeline, a map, and stories on SNCC's voting rights organizing. Many of the profiles feature stories about teen activists.

Renee Gokey from the National Museum of the American Indian (NMAI) participated in the session and shared a story in the chat box of a young Native American activist who challenged school segregation before Brown v. Board. She was Alice Piper (June 7, 1908 - August 22, 1985), a Paiute (Nüümü) girl residing in Big Pine, California, who petitioned to attend the newly built Big Pine High School in 1923 and was denied entry due to her race. At that time, California educational law prohibited Native American children from attending a public school if a separate government run Indian school was established within three miles of the public school. Piper, along with six other Indian children, sued the district for the right to attend. [Renee Gokey also shared the key resource, Native Knowledge 360. Another child who, along with her family, challenged school segregation is Syliva Mendez.]

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People's Historians Online: Teenagers in the Civil Rights Movement - Zinn Education Project

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We waited a long time for those folks to do something to improve our schools, but they let us down and so we have decided to do the job ourselves. - Jefferson High School student, 1968 The quote above opens Jeanne Theoharis' chapter in A More Beautiful and Terrible History: The Uses and Misuses of Civil Rights History on young people in the Civil Rights Movement.

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Primary source assignment for Day 2 Breakout session

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Primary source assignment for Day 2 Breakout session

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Primary source Thursday evening assignment.MOV

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When Leigh Ann Erickson taught in Chicago and New York, she witnessed the effects of social injustice every day.

But the view from small town Iowa can be very different. That's why Erickson founded a social justice course, an African American literature course, and the CARE Conference at Mount Vernon High School. Through this curriculum, Erickson hopes to broaden her students' perspectives about income inequality, race, and the criminal justice system.

"Our system of oppression is just continually pushing down young people. Coming to Mount Vernon, I felt a great responsibility to do something with that knowledge," Erickson says. "My goal was to provide students with experiences that would help them build relationships with people who were different from them."

On this edition of Talk of Iowa, host Charity Nebbe talks with Erickson about the social justice course she designed for Mount Vernon students, what she's learned from teaching it, and how the course has changed over time. She's joined by Mount Vernon High School students Sam White and Alanah Malone, who share how the course has impacted them beyond the classroom.

"The course is based on Bryan Stevenson, who wrote Just Mercy," Erickson says. "He says that to achieve social justice there are four things that we must do: get close to whatever problem it is that we're trying to understand better, change the current narrative that surrounds that problem, give and receive hope, and be willing to be uncomfortable."

Her students, White and Malone, say the course has made it easier to speak up about the issues they care about.

"Knowledge is my defense, my weapon, when I'm speaking to people about my beliefs and what I think is right," Malone says. "I feel so much more comfortable getting in a conversation about capital punishment after reading Just Mercy."

This hour, Nebbe also talks with Jessica Welburn Paige, an assistant professor of sociology and African American studies at the University of Iowa. She says that students at the collegiate level often come to the classroom without ever having had conversations about injustice and oppression.

"When I get students from Iowa City and from other places around the state, a lot of students just haven't had the classroom experiences like we've heard about in Mount Vernon," she says. "While it's great that they've signed up for the classes that they're taking in college, these conversations need to be initiated before students make it to this level."

Erickson encourages other high school teachers to fill this gap by designing similar curriculum for their schools.

"The resources are there. I just think we need to boldly step into these spaces that feel uncomfortable and be willing to take risks and be willing to fail and learn from that," says Erickson.

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Classroom Conversations on Injustice and Oppression

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When Leigh Ann Erickson taught in Chicago and New York, she witnessed the effects of social injustice every day. But the view from small town Iowa can be very different. That's why Erickson founded a social justice course, an African American literature course, and the CARE Conference at Mount Vernon High School.

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Seminar host mia@freedomlifted.com

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she | her | hers | they | them | theirs

I am an educator, facilitator, and activist born and raised in the U.S. Deep South by a loving family. My people were entrepreneurs, Black church leaders, NAACP + SCLC members, mass meeting attendees, HBCU graduates, sharecroppers, and, five generations ago, enslaved people. My mother was trained in Project C and desegregated her junior high school at the age of 14. I grew up learning about the history of the Black Freedom Struggle in the US not in school, but from my parents and extended family in Alabama who shared their personal stories, and from the books they told me to read.

I believe my purpose is to help people learn history and use that knowledge to grow as social justice leaders. I thrive in spaces dedicated to sharing the stories of those who have actively resisted colonization and oppression, and whose movement-building efforts provide blueprints for a path forward, towards a more just world.

In my previous work as a public school teacher, founding director of the Chicago Freedom School and executive director of the Arcus Center for Social Justice Leadership at Kalamazoo College, I've been able to spend time with youth and adults working in various sectors on developing activist leadership with a historical lens. Inspired by these relationships and my family, I started Freedom Lifted in 2011 to provide social movement history education, primarily through travel experiences to Civil Rights sites in Alabama and Mississippi and trainings on power, identity, oppression and liberation.

Since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic and the 2020 uprising for racial justice, the scope of my work has expanded. I am now excited to focus my energy on launching Freedom Lifted Learning Labs, online courses for youth and adults that offer a historical context to today's most pressing social justice issues.

I am indebted to my ancestors and elders in my blood and chosen family who resisted and insisted on living with dignity and respect. All of my classes, facilitation work, and tours are dedicated to them.

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she | her | hers | they | them | theirs I am an educator, facilitator, and activist born and raised in the U.S. Deep South by a loving family. My people were entrepreneurs, Black church leaders, NAACP + SCLC members, mass meeting attendees, HBCU graduates, sharecroppers, and, five generations ago, enslaved people.

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Seminar Coordinator
shawn@freedomlifted.com

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Facilitator for Part 2

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About | Undone Consulting | United States

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Undone Consulting provides support with curriculum development that fosters equity in education.

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Facilitator for Part 3
Elizabeth@raymondwhittaker.com

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Elizabeth is a thought-leader, innovator, strategist and coach who believes in people and our power to build a just and equitable world. She is the founder of Raymond Whittaker Design, LLC a consulting firm committed to equity-leadership and organizational development.

With over 15 years of experience, she is known internationally for her warm, strategic and principled approach to leadership, coaching, institutional design and facilitation. Having trained and coached policy leaders, organizers, school and district leaders, philanthropists, non- profit professionals, political candidates and more, she centers her practice on deep listening, principled accountability, equity, integrity, empathy and impact.

Elizabeth has designed and implemented hundreds of programs, workshops, and trainings across the nation. Her work has spanned the globe, as she's lead social justice and diplomacy projects in West Africa, Southeast Asia, and Europe. She is a skilled facilitator with a unique ability to both meet participants where they are and inspire them to reach well beyond.

Elizabeth began her career in education as a teacher, curriculum designer, and later school principal. Being well-acquainted with the challenges schools faced, she thought it important to lend her voice to the policy landscape to help inform the practices that directly impacted school communities. That work led her to Leadership for Educational Equity, were she lead a national team dedicated to advancing the leadership of historically underrepresented communities in policy, advocacy, organizing and elected leadership. Elizabeth later journeyed to the Council of Michigan Foundations, where she lead the organization's state-driven public policy strategy development, supporting collaborative philanthropic responses to Michigan's most critical needs.

Recognized for her outstanding work in the education sector, in 2017 Elizabeth was named a Pahara NextGen Fellow, joining a cohort of 24 leaders across the nation recognized for their exemplary contributions and commitment to advancing equity in public education. In 2012 she was named a Leadership for Educational Equity Emerging Political Leaders fellow. Before returning to Detroit in 2009 to help lead one of the nation's oldest culturally responsive learning institutions, she worked in curriculum development at schools on Chicago's Southside, partnering with other scholars, activists, and teachers to train educators to teach issues of social justice with integrity.

Elizabeth is a trusted advocate and ally, and sits on several boards dedicated to advancing social justice. She is a graduate of Northwestern University, and is a Teach for America St. Louis alum. She is devoted mother, wife, writer, and bookworm who values love, honesty, justice, deep laughter and soulful vegetarian cooking.

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Meet Elizabeth - Raymond Whittaker Design, LLC

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Elizabeth is a thought-leader, innovator, strategist and coach who believes in people and our power to build a just and equitable world. She is the founder of Raymond Whittaker Design, LLC a consulting firm committed to equity-leadership and organizational development.

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New Georgia Encyclopedia

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Beginning in 1757 Georgia's colonial assembly required white landowners and residents to serve as slave patrols.

Asserting that slave insurrections must be prevented, the legislature stipulated in "An Act for Establishing and Regulating of Patrols" that groups "not exceeding seven" would work in districts twelve miles square. The statute, modeled on South Carolina's earlier patrol law, ordered white adults to ride the roads at night, stopping all slaves they encountered and making them prove that they were engaged in lawful activities. Patrollers required slaves to produce a pass, which stated their owner's name as well as where and when they were allowed to be away from the plantation and for how long. Patrols operated in Georgia until slavery was abolished at the end of the Civil War (1861-65).

Whites could hire substitutes to patrol for them; absentees were fined. Much of the burden of patrol duty fell to nonslaveholders, who often resented what they sometimes saw as service to the planter class. The Chatham County grand jury complained in the mid-1790s about the difficulty it faced in enforcing the patrol requirement. By the early nineteenth century it became necessary to pay people to perform what had been voluntary unpaid service. In 1819 Savannah's city watch received one dollar for every evening they served and shared in any reward for the forced return of fugitive slaves.

To disperse any nighttime meetings, patrollers visited places where slaves often gathered. Owners feared such gatherings allowed slaves to trade stolen goods for liquor and other forbidden items.

River patrols were organized in Savannah and Augusta to combat "midnight depredations" and to protect cargo, crops, and other materials piled along waterfront docks from slave theft. Religious meetings were also a favorite haunt of patrollers because they provided opportunities for socializing that attracted slaves. After 1792 Georgia law protected religious assemblies from being disturbed, but slaves and African Americans could not gather "under pretence of divine worship" contrary to the regulation of patrols. Paranoia over slave unrest after the Saint Domingue (later, Haiti) slave rebellion of 1791 led to a Savannah ordinance that no slaves could meet for religious services without a white preacher present.

Slave patrols had the legal right to enter, without warrant, the plantation grounds of any Georgian; they often searched the slave quarters and inspected slave homes, looking for stolen goods, missing slaves who had turned runaway, weapons that could be used in an insurrection, or evidence of literacy and education, including books, papers, and pens (teaching a slave to read was forbidden by Georgia law in the antebellum period). Enforcement was often more lax than the letter of the law suggested. For instance, in Greene County, in the heart of the plantation Black Belt, the grand jury complained about the laxity of the patrols and their failure to provide effective vigilance over the county's vast slave populace.

In towns and growing cities like Savannah, Macon, and Augusta, slave patrollers usually did their work on foot, and the men chosen as urban patrols were not always well-to-do. The responsibilities of city patrollers occasionally merged with those associated with modern-day policemen and firemen: patrollers investigated strange circumstances (moving lights in a warehouse at night, rowdy gatheringsin drinking dens, anyone who acted suspiciously). Indeed, urban patrollers preceded the advent of city policeman and fireman forces in virtually every southern town.

With the Civil War's outbreak in 1861, white Georgians feared the possibility that slaves would rebel or that enforcing discipline among slave communities would become more difficult. As a result, patrols, often in conjunction with home militia units, intensified their vigilance. Apprehension increased after U.S. president Abraham Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation went into effect in 1863, and the movement and behavior of slaves were more strictly regulated. In Atlanta, for example, patrols began arresting any blacks found on the streets after nine o'clock at night, whether or not they had passes. City authorities also prevented social gatherings of African Americans unless patrollers or policemen were present.

Although slave patrols ceased to function after the Civil War, they provided the blueprint for later activities of the Ku Klux Klan -a new means by which the white community sought to control the activities of freedmen and freedwomen during Reconstruction.

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Beginning in 1757 Georgia's colonial assembly required white landowners and residents to serve as slave patrols. Asserting that slave insurrections must be prevented, the legislature stipulated in "An Act for Establishing and Regulating of Patrols" that groups "not exceeding seven" would work in districts twelve miles square.

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Podcast with our Guest Speaker, Dr. Lisa Brock

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In this special Black Lives Matter mini series, we brought back one of our favorite radical intellectuals, activists and the acting Executive Director of the Arcus Center for Social Justice Leadership at Kalamazoo College, Dr. Lisa Brock to help us decipher the following questions/comments:

1. What's currently happening on the ground in Chicago?
2. Discuss current brutal killings Black people like George Floyd, Ahmad Arbury, Breonna Taylor, and countless others.
3. Shed light on the current ...

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Movements & Master Narratives with Lisa Brock. BLM Series #1 - The Radical Zone Podcast

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In this special Black Lives Matter mini series, we brought back one of our favorite radical intellectuals, activists and the acting Executive Director of the Arcus Center for Social Justice Leadership at Kalamazoo College, Dr. Lisa Brock to help us decipher the following questions/comments: 1. What's currently happening on the ground in Chicago?

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Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor and Adam Shatz

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Adam Shatz: Our guest today on the LRB podcast is Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor. Taylor is a professor of African American studies at Princeton and the author of Race for Profit: How Banks and the Real Estate Industry Undermined Black Homeownership, From #BlackLivesMatter to Black Liberation and How We Get Free: Black Feminism and the Combahee River Collective. As a contributing opinion writer for the New York Times and a columnist for thenewyorker.com she has emerged in the last few years as one of our most important commentators on the political economy of race, class, and gender in America. She's an activist intellectual, an academic who hasn't forgotten her background as an organiser, which gives her work not only its analytic power, but a rare urgency. When I see her byline, I put everything down because I want to know what she's thinking. Keeanga has been kind enough to take time out of her very packed schedule to discuss the extraordinary events in America and the world of the last few weeks, the uprising against police brutality and other forms of injustice that erupted after the killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis. We're also going to talk about the history that preceded this moment, a history to which her own work has been an acutely illuminating guide. Keeanga, welcome to the LRB podcast. Thanks so much for joining us.

Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor: Thank you. Very glad to be here.

AS: You're in Philadelphia. And I just read that Daniel Outlaw, the police commissioner in the city where you live, has announced a moratorium on the use of tear gas and apologised for its use in a protest in early June.

KYT: That's Danielle Outlaw, and she is the new police chief. I think she just got here in January. She and the mayor, Jim Kenney had a press conference yesterday. It was a very curious affair because they essentially admitted to lying weeks earlier. The police in Philadelphia shot tear gas at a peaceful demonstration that had taken over a highway, but it was an act of civil disobedience. And the police lied and said that people threw rocks at them and were threatening officers. And not only were there witnesses, also members of the clergy, also reporters who denied this, but there was also, as has been the case across the country, videotape - lots of visual evidence that this wasn't the case. And so the front page of the Philadelphia Inquirer today is that Outlaw - which is, of course, a brilliant last name for a police chief - says that it was unjustifiable to use tear gas, even though one would think that she and the mayor were involved in the decision-making process to decide to use tear gas, but that there also is a legacy of that kind of deflection in Philadelphia politics as well. Mayor Wilson Goode in 1985 was the first black mayor of Philadelphia when a bombing device was dropped on a house of an organisation called Move, which was a black counter-cultural group based in West Philadelphia. And the bombing killed 11 members of Move, including several children, and it destroyed four city blocks, and Wilson Goode also says he was not involved in the decision to drop a bomb there.

AS: I remember when the Move bombing took place because my mother is originally from Philadelphia, and Wilson Goode like Danielle Outlaw is African American, and this was of course held up as a sign that America was making enormous progress. There were all these black mayors who'd been elected starting in the 1970s, and yet the same kinds of brutality took place under their watch.

KYT: Absolutely. But Goode recently came out in an op-ed published in the Guardian and apologised yet again for this act that he also says he had nothing to do with. So in Philly people in charge apparently have nothing to do with the police acting in an outrageous, illegal and brutal fashion, but they have been forced to account publicly for that, I think because of the ferocity of the movement right now.

AS: Of the protests, yes, absolutely. And actually, when you mentioned this incident of tear gassing it reminds me of a quote from From #BlackLivesMatter to Black Liberation by the social psychologist Kenneth Clark, when he writes of urban revolts and says that we have to understand that the supposed lawlessness of these events is a response in fact to the lawlessness of the police.

KYT: Well, it's the lawlessness of the police, it's the dysfunction in effectiveness, unwillingness, or inability of the state in general to respond in meaningful ways to the sense of desperation, of hopelessness, of loss. And I think what is interesting about these uprisings and protests is that it's not confined just to African Americans, but it actually is representative of the feeling and the mood of a much broader and wider swath of the population, which makes it so dangerous to the political status quo.

AS: And we're going to talk about this, about the broad multi-racial dimension of the protest movement. But I want to start by quoting from a piece that you published in the New York Times on April 13th, a month into the Covid-19 crisis. And the piece appeared under the headline 'Do we need a new protest movement?' And you wrote:

Tens of millions of citizens sit at home awaiting meagre checks that may reach them by August. Countless people under the bewilderment of navigating call centres that often fail to connect them to unemployment benefits. Donations to food banks have fallen while need rises. The inept federal response slows the arrival of aid, forcing people to defy the social distancing necessary to keep the virus at bay. Under normal circumstances, such wanton disregard from the government might prompt protests, but these are far from normal circumstances. Instead, public demonstrations are almost impossible. So what can we do when it seems there is nothing we can do?

Now six weeks later, of course, everything changes. And the idea that mass demonstrations were obsolete because of Covid, which was an idea, actually, that was encouraged and promulgated by people like Bill Gates, was shattered. And so here you are. You've written extensively on questions of racism, class oppression, injustice for years, but it's not every day that anger over oppression explodes into a mass upheaval, particularly in the midst of a pandemic where people are afraid to be physically proximate to one another. So suddenly we're looking at the prospect of Trump unravelling, the racist-in-chief whose entire presidency was inspired by his hatred of the black president Barack Obama. So I'm wondering, this is a month before, this is in April. We were all wondering, will we ever be in the streets again? Were you surprised? Did the scale take you by surprise?

KYT: Oh, I was shocked. I'm still shocked. There was a march of hundreds of people in Philadelphia two days ago, to protest this racist Columbus discovering America. A statue in South Philly has become a flashpoint because the police, while they were tear gassing and attacking Black Lives Matter protesters, have coddled and supported these white thugs in South Philly armed with baseball bats, hammers and golf clubs who were poised to attack Black Lives Matter protesters. And so hundreds of people organised themselves to march on this statue to denounce racist vigilantism. And so, yes, I continue to be stunned by the longevity of the protest. This has been going on for a month now, and it is a welcome development. And I think that in some ways it's driven by the kind of ineptitude that I was describing in April. And I've heard several times now from young people who are at the centre of these protests that if we're going to die anyway from this pandemic, then I'd rather die fighting than die in my apartment alone. And I think the ineptitude from the state on the one hand, and then the brutality of the state on the other has left people feeling that there actually is no other alternative. There's nothing that we can really do, because even in some of the local elections we've seen people who identify with the movement, progressives challenging establishment Democrats, at least on the democratic side of these races.

AS: Look at Eliot Engel being defeated.

KYT: Oh, god,I know.

AS: Or my state senator Jabari Brisport, who is black, gay and a democratic socialist.

KYT: So there's that, but on the national level Joe Biden's response to the uprising was $300 million for the cops to do diversity training, cameras. And if that's the response at the top of the Democratic Party ticket, then of course you have to keep protesting! The political establishment has yet to catch up or fully comprehend the mood that is in the streets, so it still lags behind. The movement is talking about defund the police, right? It's not talking about train the police. And part of that is because 2015 is so recent, so the same people have lived through the piecemeal reforms. They've lived through body cameras as some breakthrough innovation that would compel the police to stop brutalising people. They've lived through policing commissions. They've lived through all of the reforms that the Democratic Party tries to now uphold as somehow original, innovative, as the solution to the problems with policing. And it's not good enough.

AS: And for them, it's too little too late.

KYT: Absolutely.

AS: And in a way, it's a reminder of what we saw in the 1960s with the Kerner Commission and how little follow-up there was.

KYT: It's the same solutions they've been recycling for fifty years, and no one's interested in that.

AS: I spoke recently to the poet and novelist Thulani Davis, who's herself a veteran of the movement of the sixties and seventies. And she told me that what had moved her about the protests was the intensity of the sorrow and the rage.
And she said that it made people of her generation able to cry again, that they'd somehow almost forgotten. They could no longer do it. And to see these young people responding, not just with horror, but with action was tremendously inspiring for people of her generation. Is that part of what you're feeling? You have a background as an organiser. You've been involved in politics for some time. Is that something that really impresses you?

KYT: Oh, I get asked all the time, do you have hope? Because it feels like we're just repeating the same things over and over again. And the rebellion is the most hopeful thing that... it was pretty hopeful in 2014.

AS: With the emergence of Black Lives Matter?

KYT: Yeah. But it didn't break out, you know? There were revolts in Ferguson and Baltimore, and then elsewhere there were solidarity protests, but the protests weren't centred at or focused on what was happening in that particular locality. And so I think the breadth of this emergent movement or the reemergence of this movement is absolutely inspiring. And the maturity of the politics because of the experiences in 2014 and 2015 is also hopeful, because the dynamics were different then because you had a politically skilled White House that understood that part of politics is creating the illusion of progress. And so you can put together a commission, you can put activists on the commission, you can do all these things that look busy, and create the appearance that something is happening, when not much really is happening. But it makes people feel like they're being effective. And the White House essentially then had an open door policy for activists, you know? And so none of that exists now, so the methods of co-optation are much more convoluted and difficult.

AS: Would you say also that when Black Lives Matter first emerged, you had in the White House a man who was perceived at least to be sympathetic to its demands, the nation's first black president, and so on? And so Obama, in part by virtue of just who he was, in part by virtue of his tremendous oratorical skills, had what you might call soft power. But people might have been disappointed with him. They might have felt betrayed. They might have felt abandoned. They might have thought, why can't he address our concerns? Why does he retreat from engaging with questions of anti-black oppression? And yet, because he had that soft power, it was enough perhaps to if not neutralise the movement, but to contain its spread and contain its force. Now you have someone in the office who is perceived, rightly, not just as someone who isn't sympathetic, but as an enemy.

KYT: Well, he's a white supremacist who has described Black Lives Matter, the movement, as terrorism.

AS: Exactly. So doesn't the fact that he's in power also partly explain why we see this eruptive force, and why it's spread and why it's acquired such momentum?

KYT: Oh, for certain, I think that Trump has been a provocateur in this sense. And also the actions of the Justice Department. I think some of the first decisions that were made initially under Jeff Sessions were to tear up all of the consent decrees that have been made between Eric Holder's Justice Department and police departments across the country. And so we can debate as to whether consent decrees actually lead to the reformation of the police. But to essentially say that you won't engage even in the fiction of trying to respond to this overwhelming desire to stop police brutality, and in several cases where Trump has either joked about the police beating up people or suggested that the police beat up people, then you've really been left with no other means except to protest. And so obviously the demonstrations that we saw at the end of May and the beginning of June were something more than just typical protests against police brutality. I think that it was an expression of a kind of pent-up rage at the way that almost... the George Floyd video, of course, is so disturbing because of the casualness with which Derek Chauvin just kills George Floyd as if he were killing a cockroach. It barely seems to be apparent.

AS: He's got his hand in his pocket.

KYT: He's just kind of hanging out on this guy's neck as he's begging for his life. And so there's something about the casualness, the white supremacist in the White House, within the context of this overwhelming black death because of Covid and the federal government's casual...well, you could call it inept, and part of it has been inept.

AS: A kind of a combination of ineptitude and callousness.

KYT: Yeah. And so between the two of those, I think that it was fuelling not only the sense that, well, if we don't do something ourselves, nothing will happen, but it literally feels like black lives actually do not matter in this country, and that's infuriating! And I think that's what people have reacted to.

AS: One of the really extraordinary things about the movement is the expansion of the sense of the possible, the imaginative aspect of the movement. You've written that no movement begins with the sense of what is possible, right? You begin with a vision of the impossible, in a sense, and this movement is no exception. So what yesterday would have seemed laughable, today is on the table. Defunding the police, abolition of prisons. Some of the demands are structural and others are more symbolic, like the tearing down of statues or the call for 'black' to be capitalised, or various other symbolic measures.
What do you see as really at the core, though, of the movement? I understand that it's a protest wave that's still gaining a sense of cohesion as a political and intellectual movement, but what to you are really the central demands, aside from an end to police brutality and so on? What do you think defines this movement?

KYT: I think people are trying to build out what it would mean for black lives to matter. And that is a combination of the structural and the symbolic. And so structurally - and this is what black movements always do - it obliterates the prevailing consensus that black deprivation is just natural and a part of our landscape, and is inexplicable and confusing and ultimately the product of black communities and black families themselves.

AS: The kind of culture of poverty argument that you've critiqued.

KYT: Yeah. That was just as prevalent in the Obama administration as it has ignored the condition of black people in the Trump administration. So when Obama chastises black families for whether or not they read to their children, or eating junk food and watching too much television, all of that worked to preserve the space for this discussion, that black people bear responsibility for the conditions and black neighbourhoods in the movement, as it did in the 1960s when the same kind of discussion was happening. And as it does every time it explodes, it forces a reckoning with the forces of racism, of discrimination, of exclusion and inequality in American society. And it forces the US to look at what it has done to African Americans historically and in this moment, in ways that outside of moments of extreme crisis are just ignored. And so people now are saying this is what structural inequality looks like. And this is what must be done to repair the damage that has been done to African American communities. And it's spelling that out.

AS: Well, this is actually one of the striking aspects of not just the movement, but of the American political conversation, if you will, that the idea of structural racism, which not only conservatives, but so-called liberals had for a long time dismissed, is back. It's widely accepted. Obviously it's not accepted by all Americans, but it's increasingly accepted. I was struck reading your book From #BlackLivesMatter to Black Liberation by the juxtaposition of two quotations. One is from Lyndon B Johnson, and the other is from Obama. Now Johnson, of course, was notoriously a Southern racist, and yet he presided over the civil rights and voting rights acts. And his quote is a very powerful statement about structural racism rooted in slavery and Jim Crow. And the Obama quote reflects a kind of culture of poverty analysis, which places the blame on black people themselves. How did we get from Johnson to Obama in your view?

KYT: Well, I think that part of what Johnson's comments reflect... it's from his commencement address at Howard university in 1965. And so by June of 1965, the US has already had a taste of its first hot summer...

AS: Watts...

KYT: No, Watts would come later, in August of 1965. But the previous summer, in 1964 in Harlem and Cleveland, Philadelphia, Rochester, New York and other smaller skirmishes, I think also the year prior, Birmingham in 1963, some see as really the first urban rebellion of the 1960s. But more importantly, it was a march on Washington that people forget. It was the march on Washington for freedom and jobs that the civil rights movement more than any was making the connection between racism and discrimination and inequality experienced by African Americans. But it was explaining to the American public why black people were disproportionately poor, why black people lived in disproportionately substandard housing. You couldn't understand that without understanding the centrality of racism, not just in the South, but as an American phenomenon.

AS: And at the time the movement had strong links to the labour movement as well.

KYT: Absolutely. Which was one of the organising forces for the 1963 march on Washington. And so Lyndon Johnson understood this and was responding to this, and was forced because of the movement to grapple with the structural aspects of black inequality in a way that Barack Obama had not been forced to deal with. And in fact, as a black elected official he was able to really articulate this idea of black domestic dysfunction and the perceptions of the broken black family or a broken black culture, in ways that in the 21st century no white politician would really think about doing in the stark terms that Obama did.

AS: Wasn't that almost a price of admission for Obama too? He had to, for example, dissociate himself from Jeremiah Wright.

KYT: Yeah. I think yes and no. I think that this has become such an ingrained, almost knee jerk response in politics that they perhaps convince themselves that this is what they must do. But I think that Sanders in particular points to the reality that there's a different way. I think some of the success of the socialists running on Democratic Party tickets says that there is a different way, that you don't actually have to run on racism to be successful, especially in the Democratic Party.

AS: I wanted to actually ask you a question about Sanders, because Sanders came under some criticism for not placing racism at the centre of his analysis of American society.

KYT: A lot of criticism.

AS: Right, a fair amount of criticism, and he tried to address that. But Sanders was the subject of a piece that ran a couple of days ago by the conservative columnist for the Times Ross Douthat. And Douthat argued that Sanders had suffered his second defeat with the emergence of the protests, and essentially Douthat argued that these protests reflect the victory of anti-racist politics over politics organised around social class that Bernie had promoted. My sense from the demonstrations that I attended, and from what I've been hearing from people, is that the lines between these politics are actually as fluid as they were at the 1963 march on Washington. And that Sanders in fact is about the only candidate who's routinely invoked at these demonstrations. So I'm rather sceptical. I wonder what you think, do you think Bernie still speaks to this moment?

KYT: Oh, more now than ever. I wrote a piece for the New Yorker that said reality had endorsed Bernie Sanders. And I think that that still holds true. I think in some ways the protests have gone beyond Sanders as well, particularly on the question of defunding the police. But I think that all of what are perceived as the strange divisions between race and class, these are the key questions that are facing ordinary people, black people in particular. The question about healthcare, the idea that we live in a country where healthcare is largely based on employment status, is absurd. And the absurdity is even more apparent now. And black people have been the biggest proponents for Medicare for all, across all other demographics. So the idea that African Americans are only interested in 'anti-racist' politics and not 'class' politics is functionally illiterate. It means that you don't actually understand that the vast majority of black people are working class. And so these issues about raising the minimum wage, about healthcare, about redistributing - defunding the police is about the redistribution of wealth in our society, we should throw defund the military into that mix as well - these are class issues that intersect with race in this country, because black people are disproportionately poor and working class.

AS: I read in the Times the other day that the income disparity between black and white men hasn't changed since 1950. And you recently published a chart having to do with income disparities. Everyone in principle can get behind the idea that the police have to stop killing black people, but addressing the roots of oppression, addressing unemployment, substandard housing, poor healthcare, the things that you were mentioning just a moment ago, attacking what you've called racial capitalism, this is another matter. This is not something that the corporations piggybacking on Black Lives Matter or states declaring Juneteenth a holiday can necessarily get behind. So do you think there's also a danger that the movement's energies could be co-opted by groups that have a much more truncated understanding of what this movement is about?

KYT: Well, this is how Martin Luther King went from being admired and respected in the United States to hated and despised by the time he was assassinated because, as he pointed out, ending Jim Crow didn't really cost anything. Taking the signs down and saying that black people were free to come and go as they pleased in public didn't cost anything. But when the focus of the movement shifts to the North, this is when you have to talk about the redistribution of hundreds of billions of dollars. Because if you're serious about ending housing discrimination, if you're serious about ending job discrimination, because job discrimination is not just 'we don't like black people, so we're going to hold them down,' it's about that wage disparity. It is about getting work for cheap for certain groups of people while still charging them the full amount to live in our society. And so if you're going to change that dynamic, then you're talking about a massive redistribution of wealth and resources in this country, and that's when the discussion usually comes to a screeching halt. And so Amazon can put Black Lives Matter on a masthead on its website, but unless that is actually matched by paid time off, by robust health insurance and other benefits, and by an actual living wage of $25 or $30 an hour, then it's all just window dressing. And you can say that to every corporation that is talking about Black Lives Matter, people taking knees and all of this kind of empty hollow, symbolic bullshit that doesn't actually cost them anything. But when it comes to changing the institutional practice that constitutes this systemic racism that everyone is talking about now, then that's where we see whether this is a serious effort or whether this is a photo op at a press conference. And that is also what is so important about where this movement is right now. It's that at the centre of it are these kinds of demands around redistribution that are trying to, as I said earlier, build out what it would mean for black lives to matter in this country.

AS: Keeanga, in the mid sixties, late sixties, early seventies, there were important figures, leaders who were articulating the kind of vision that you're describing, this expansive vision of political change, economic redistribution, a different non-imperialist foreign policy, and so on - MLK, Malcolm X, the Black Panthers, numerous people. I'm not saying that there are no leaders in the protest wave that we're seeing, but I would say that it's a much more horizontal movement. There are not as many charismatic leaders, the kind who once defined the civil rights movement or the black power movement for that matter.
In what ways is this a strength? In what ways is it a potential liability as it was in the Arab spring, for example?

KYT: I think that the strength of this is that it really is beginning to have a kind of mass character in which I think people will be challenged about how to democratically proceed. Like how do we figure out, once the obstacles become clear, once we start to move beyond saying black lives matter and kneeling in the street with protesters, how do we actually change things? Then it becomes clearer what type of organising and organisations that we need. And so it seems now, I think, without having the 'charismatic leaders', that this is a movement that anyone can involve themselves in and figure out how to plug in. And I think that's good. And there are a lot of organisations that have been building over the last several years. I think that is why these types of demands have been advanced so easily. I don't know that there's a particular drawback about having a figurehead. I can't think of a particular drawback. I know that those types of individuals and organisations that became seen as the leadership of the movement, the contributions that they made were being able to synthesise a lot of different kinds of information to really help narrate publicly what was happening to African Americans, to help narrate a list of demands and to really be able to articulate that publicly, which I think was important within the movement itself, but became attractive and helped to pull people into organising, into being a part of a social movement. And I think that doesn't have to be wrapped up in a single individual. And I think over the last several weeks that we've seen that same kind of articulation happening across the United States, where people who have been given platforms in writing, who've been given platforms in visual media, have helped to articulate to a larger American public what this is actually about and why it is happening now. And we can measure its impactfulness by the rapid shift in polling. Seventy-one percent of Americans think that racism is a problem in the US. That's a huge breakthrough. But it's not only because of the demonstrations themselves, it's also because of people who have been in this work for several years now being given a platform in several different kinds of media, to be able to explain what is happening.

AS: That actually brings me to my next question, because I wanted to talk to you about the cutting edge of critique, the intellectual work that has been done, that in a sense has prefigured some of the themes of this movement. I'm thinking about work that has focused on policing and mass incarceration, including your work. Now, obviously the question of police brutality, of over-policing, has always been a great concern, along with - and we can talk about this later, perhaps - a more complicated and troubled question of under-policing, because a lot of black people have felt their lives aren't even protected, that the police are just there to protect white lives. Du Bois once said that there's nothing easier than to accuse a black man of crime. This concern has been there for a long time, and as you've pointed out, the origins of the police can be partly traced to slave patrols. Still I think it's hard to ignore the conceptual revolution that's been brought about by works like Michelle Alexander's New Jim Crow or Khalil Gibran Muhammad's Condemnation of Blackness, and the abolitionist work of Angela Davis and Ruthie Wilson Gilmore. It's often sneeringly said that the millennials only have attitudes, not ideas, but it seems to me that we're seeing a movement that's inspired by scholarship much as the sixties' new left was inspired by William Appleman Williams, C. Wright Mills, Marcuse. Do you see these works as critical to the thinking and imagination of this movement?

KYT: Oh, absolutely. And I think that this work has helped to inform a generation of activists and organisers, many of whom were ex-students who were immersed in this kind of scholarship that had always conceived of itself in a certain respect as public, and not just scholarship for the sake of scholarship, particularly in the field of abolition. Ruth Wilson Gilmore was an organiser and went from organising into graduate school, and took those ideas that were shaped from her experiences in organising as a member of a community, and developed them further in graduate school, but never with the intention of it staying there in the Academy.

AS: This is your story too, isn't it?

KYT: Yeah, I was an organiser. I went to grad school. But also for me was to learn more about the issues that I was most interested in, as a way to be even more effective and trying to understand, explain, learn from what was happening in this country, as a way to challenge the status quo. Angela Davis, obviously, was an academic, then put in prison and continued, but I have always seen her scholarship as part of a larger liberation struggle for the freedom of black people, but really Angela Davis exemplifies a kind of internationalist political ethos that is important in training a new generation of organisers and activists and concerned people in the world. And so I think that the immersion in those kinds of politics has helped again shape the people who have been organising around these issues, and has meant that very quickly, within this particular iteration of these struggles, very well defined articulated demands around defunding, introducing the idea of abolition, over the last several years, has meant that these are no longer just strange abstract marginalised ideas that are seen as fringe, but are actually becoming part of a mainstream discussion about what we do. And that's a tremendous breakthrough.

AS: It is. And I want to ask you about... every movement looks for a kind of usable past. And as you've just pointed out, this is a movement that has a rich sense of its own history and of its ancestors. And you edited a beautiful book about some of them called How We Get Free. So I'm wondering, can you tell me a bit about this group, the Combahee River Collective, and why they matter today, why their concerns resonate with what we're seeing in the streets.

KYT: The Combahee River Collective was actually a small group of black feminists that formed in the early 1970s. The way that they describe it is that there was no space for them in the left, as it was constituted then. Within black led organisations, nationalism organised around strong male personalities was the prevailing organisational model. And then feminist organisations were dominated by liberals and white women who did not see the particularities of the experiences of black women. And so black feminism develops as its own current with its own organisations, its own politics. Combahee, I think, is most known because it so clearly and decisively defined why black feminism was important in a statement that three of the members drafted for a publication in 1977. And what's interesting about the drafting of this publication is that it was solicited by...

AS: Zillah Eisenstein, right?

KYT: Yeah. Who was putting together a reader on socialist feminism, and so it spoke to the kind of relationship that the women of Combahee had developed. And I think part of what is interesting is that they certainly saw themselves as part of the left, and not as just a feminist organisation out in the world, but they saw themselves as part of the left. And I think the power of the Combahee statement is still quite apparent. This was a statement that coined the term 'identity politics', and what they meant by that was the process by which black women became political, that living as people who suffered all sorts of oppression, that this was fundamental to the development of their politics. And so when they talked about the personal being political, that wasn't a retreat from political life into the internal, that was saying that because of the racism and sexism experienced by black women in their personal lives, that is what lay at the foundation of their radical politics.

AS: It's a remarkable statement. And I think that what I also found striking about the formulation of identity politics is that it hardly rules out - and in fact advocates - alliances, coalition building, solidarity. It was not the kind of identity politics that today's critics...

KYT: It's not exclusive.

AS: No.

KYT: It's not exclusionary. It is a bridge into other people's struggles, but on their own terms. It's saying, don't say we can build alliances as long as we don't talk about the difficult things or the hard things. The strength of these alliances is based on solidarity that you accept our agenda that we have set.

AS: The definition of identity politics seems almost like an epistemological stance. In other words, if we're going to understand oppression, we have to start from where we are, from our experiences. But the point isn't to end there, it's to branch out from there. And I was struck by something that Barbara Smith, one of the founders, one of the authors of the statement, and I believe she was one of the founders of black women's studies as well...

KYT: Absolutely.

AS: She says that we didn't mean that if you're not the same as us, you're nothing. We were not saying that we didn't care about anybody who wasn't exactly like us. One of the things I used to say is that it would be really boring only to do political work with people who are exactly like me. People of different backgrounds in different places, in a social structure actually at times come together. And I think that in this movement today, it seems to me - and I think this really began or became more visible with Black Lives Matter - is that we're seeing a kind of intersectional anti-racism in which women, and also queer people, are acquiring more prominence. Without hiding, concealing, repudiating their identities, they're foregrounding those identities. And so it's an interesting shift, too, from what we saw in the past with Bayard Rustin, for example, or Ella Baker and Fannie Lou Hamer, who in a sense are the godfathers, the godmothers, rather, of this movement. Would you say that this is also a kind of distinguishing feature of this new politics? The fact that black women and queer black people have been taking such a prominent role?

KYT: I think two things. One, at the height of the movement in the sixties, it was still before really the gay liberation movement had exploded through certain aspects of institutional homophobia in the United States, which really hasn't been realised in significant ways until the 21st century. And so I think that is part of what has happened here. But I also think that the more immediate foremothers of this movement come out of the Incite conference of 1999/2000, where this kind of politics was put forward, a politics that embraced a radical feminism that was anticapitalist, that was queer unto itself, and that had abolition politics at its centre. And I think that we have underestimated the centrality of that gathering and of Incite as a place where these politics were developed, contemplated, debated and nurtured.

AS: So this was kind of an incubator, and now we're seeing the results.

KYT: Absolutely. And the historian Barbara Ransby is one of the few people to write about this kind of earlier history in her book Making All Black Lives Matter, which I think is important. Those gatherings really helped to develop a cadre of organisers who had these kinds of politics at their core. And I think that development, along with the kind of...I wrote about this in my book, how in Ferguson, for example, one out of, I think, every six black men had simply disappeared out of the census, and most of that disappearance had been attributed to premature death. And I do think that the particular obliteration of black men, either through death or imprisonment, had necessarily opened a space which black women could politically occupy and not be forced to defer to male leadership. And I think we continue to see that dynamic. In addition to adept organising skills and developing political authority, I think that it also has some roots in this kind of demographic or sociological factors as well.

AS: You've been a very powerful champion of political solidarity and of developing coalitions. And along with this emergence of anti-racist consciousness that we've seen among young whites and in a different way among Asians, there's also been, among some, a questioning of the meaning of solidarity. To some extent it's informed by Afro pessimism in its white liberal version. I want to read you a passage from an interview that Ruthie Gilmore, the abolitionist advocate, gave with Paul Gilroy recently. She said,

There's a bit of a divergence these last few weeks between what you just described, a different future for human beings, as against a path, that worries me very much. Which is that in recapitulating a certain kind of apartheid thinking in the name of undoing the effects of apartheid in the world scale. And by that, I mean, the tendency that's got me worried is one in which people are insisting that only certain demographics of people are authorised to speak about, speak from, or speak against certain kinds of horrors. And other people have already existing assignable jobs based on their demographic, let's call it a caste system, that they're supposed to do. So white people are supposed to fix white supremacy, and so on and so forth. This path, which is actually a pretty strong path, doesn't excite me. I'm seventy years old. I'm done with it. I've been done with it for a long time. The path, however, which some of the young Black Lives Matter people named five years ago in that year of uprising in the US after the death of Mike Brown and Freddie Gray, the one in which they said quite simply "when black lives matter, everybody lives better," that's the path that's of interest to me.

KYT: Absolutely. We can't win with the idea that only black people can fight for black people, white people should fight for working class white people, Latinos should only fight for themselves. We can't win that way. And we have a lifetime of experience over the previous century that is proof of that. And I like to think of myself as an Afro optimist. I think that the black struggle in this country has been a source of inspiration for people around the world, because this is the most exploitative, the most oppressive country, just simply because it has the resources to be different. You know, this is not a struggling republic that has no money and resorts to brute force in order to eke out an existence. This is the richest country in the history of the world, where its ruling class deliberately sets poor and working class people in opposition to each other, to maintain wealth at the top of our society. And we acquiesce to that politically by reinforcing the lines of division that they have drawn in the first place. And so we have to think about solidarity as not an exercise in finding the least contentious issue around which to organise, so that's not what we're arguing for. We're arguing for an informed solidarity based on an understanding of the oppression of black people and a rejection of it, an understanding of the oppression and exploitation of immigrant labour in the United States and a rejection of it. And that's hard. It is hard. But there's no other way. There's no shortcut. There's no way to circumvent the need for what Combahee talked about as coalition-building and the need for what is actually playing out in the streets right now, which is a multiracial rebellion against capitalism and the excesses of it. And so people want to be in a movement. People want to be a part of an effort to transform this country. And no one should be told that you can't be a part of it, you know? And so to me, that's part of what it means to democratise our movements, to open them up and to struggle. You know, we have to struggle with each other. And we can't have this kind of sacrosanct approach to politics where you don't get to say the wrong thing. You don't get to make a mistake. And if you do, then you're banished from organising. Because the reality is if that is the standard that we are creating, then we'll never have a mass movement of ordinary people who'd make those mistakes and say those things all the time. And so if it's you and your 12 friends who had your American studies seminar and your women's studies seminar, and you figured out what all the language is, then that's great, and good luck. But if we're actually going to build a movement of the masses who are affected by this, then we have to have some grace, then we have to listen to people. We have to understand what their struggles are. And we have to find a way to knit ourselves together into a force that can actually fight for the world that we want. And that's hard. And it's much harder than just saying 'you people go to the back because you haven't experienced what it's like to be called the N word'. We're not going to get anywhere with that. And we have to have a different vision of politics to fight for the kind of world that we want.

AS: Keeanga, that was really eloquently put, and I think it's a good place for us to stop. And I hope that we'll be able to talk again. This has been such a pleasure and an honour. Thank you for joining us on the LRB podcast.

KYT: Thank you so much. I appreciate it.

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Podcast: Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor and Adam Shatz · How do you change things? · LRB 30 June 2020

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Adam Shatz: Our guest today on the LRB podcast is Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor. Taylor is a professor of African American studies at Princeton and the author of Race for Profit: How Banks and the Real Estate Industry Undermined Black Homeownership, From #BlackLivesMatter to Black Liberation and How We Get Free: Black Feminism and the Combahee River Collective.

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Black Americans being victimized and killed by the police is an epidemic. A truth many Americans are acknowledging since the murder of George Floyd, as protests have occurred in all fifty states calling for justice on his behalf. But this tension between African American communities and the police has existed for centuries. This week, the origins of American policing and how those origins put violent control of Black Americans at the heart of the system.
If you would like to read more about the topic: We love to hear from our listeners! Tweet at us @throughlineNPR, send us an , or leave us a voicemail at (872) 588-8805.

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Black Americans being victimized and killed by the police is an epidemic. A truth many Americans are acknowledging since the murder of George Floyd, as protests have occurred in all fifty states calling for justice on his behalf. But this tension between African American communities and the police has existed for centuries.

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Policing is an Avatar of American Racism

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Policing is an Avatar of American Racism

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In the wake of George Floyd's death at the hands of police, protesters across the country are demanding systemic changes in the way American police forces operate and are funded.

Journalist Jamiles Lartey says the discussion about policing feels different now than it has in the past. "You're hearing so much less of the 'few bad apples' argument and so much more of the, 'What is wrong with this system?' [argument]," he says.

Lartey is a staff writer for The Marshall Project, a nonprofit news organization that covers the U.S. criminal justice system. He previously reported on criminal justice, race and policing for The Guardian, where he was part of a team that created an online database tracking police violence in 2015 and 2016.

Lartey notes that America's model of policing is a relatively recent phenomenon: "Policing wasn't always this way. It wasn't always this big. It wasn't always this bureaucratic," he says. "Modern policing - the policing that you and I and listeners recognize today - is really a product of the 20th century."

He says that Floyd's death - and the deaths of other black people in police custody - highlight the need to change a broken system.

"There's so many things that we currently ask our police to respond to - whether it's a noise complaint or a car accident - that don't necessarily fit into a reason why someone would need to show up with a deadly weapon," Lartey says. "Sometimes as a society, you need to rethink institutions, especially when they're relatively new, especially when they've changed a lot over the last 20, 30 or 40 years."

Interview highlights
On destructive acts of protest, like looting and arson
I think it is important to keep in mind that to the extent that there has been destructive acts of protests, looting, that there's a range of causes: Are there passionate, angry people who were lashing out in grief and frustration? Yes. Are there anti-capitalists who see looting and destruction as a form of revolutionary praxis and are using this as an opportunity? Yes. Are there pure opportunists who want to get free stuff and are taking advantage of the chaos? Definitely. Are there chaos agents who are trying to give the protesters a bad name and potentially see violence against them? It appears that that was the case as well. So I think it's really important that when we are trying to analyze these moments that we're not reductive about the socio-economic phenomena, like destructive protests or looting. ...

I think there's an important distinction between measuring the efficacy of violent protests or destructive protests versus the morality of it. The morality of it is going to be personal and subjective. Most of us can think of moments and places where we find violence or destruction useful and justified, and moments where we don't. Now, the efficacy of it is something that we can probably wrap our heads around. But again, it's complicated. If the point is to get attention, then destruction works. If the point is to win hearts and minds and the political center, then it probably doesn't. And if holding public officials hostage and forcing them to appease your demands is the point, it might depend on the public official.

I think something that you'll hear a lot ... is that, "Two wrongs don't make a right," which is an ethical and spiritual intuition in many traditions, but it's not a particularly American one. Our whole criminal justice system is based on the premise that two wrongs make a right. Caging humans and fining poor people money they don't have are morally wrong, but it's how we define justice in most cases in this country.
On a model of protest used in the '80s and '90s, where protest organizers met with police beforehand - and why that model is less common now
The negotiated management model of protest is this idea that community thought leaders would be meeting with police. Ahead of a protest, they'd say, "Here's what we're going to protest. Here's when and where and how. This is how we expect it all to go down." And they'd come up with a plan to essentially let people exercise their First Amendment rights in the fullest way possible. And there would be this expectation on both sides that the police would stick to the plan that they agreed to, that the protesters would stick to the plan that they agreed to. This took a lot of the uncertainty and mistrust out of the calculation and allowed people to express themselves. ...

That was in a moment where it was always very clear who community thought leaders were, and in many respects, they were folks who are connected to the establishment ... church leaders, people in the church, the spiritual religious leaders. Now, that's not necessarily the folks who are leading Black Lives Matter protests today. Some of them are. Some of them aren't. So I think there's a lot of reasons why that model has fallen out of favor. I think it largely has to do with the militarization of U.S. police. It largely has to do with just a changing cultural attitude about how police approach their job. But it also has to do with the fact that I think, ideologically and structurally, in many ways, the police and the folks who are protesting are further away from one another within the society, whereas before they were both members of an establishment and a community.
On a softer way of policing protests known as the "Madison model"
I spoke to [former Madison, Wis., Police Chief] David Cooper, who I see is in many ways the forefather of this kind of softer approach to policing protests. ... And what he described to me is you show up in regular uniforms, people can see your face. (This was obviously outside the context of a pandemic.) You listen, you relate. You talk to people about their grievance. And in exchange for asking officers to make themselves fairly vulnerable in this way, you have these more well-equipped cops waiting somewhere close by in case things go bad.

But David Cooper, when I talked to him, he said ... "You never, never, never, never start with the show of force and power because it ratchets up everyone's expectations for violence and ... generate[s] it." And again, just when we think about escalation and de-escalation, that makes sense. You show up with the most aggressive version of how you can respond to something, and it ratchets up the perception of everyone who's there of where this is going to go. ...

Law enforcement officials and former police chiefs told me over and over again [that] just showing up in soft uniforms to a protest full of angry people does not in and of itself guarantee a peaceful, satisfactory resolution. The work starts before that. There needs to be some baseline level of trust between police and between a community that they're going to do what they said they were going to do. If you're talking about one of these pre-negotiated plans for a protest, that they're going to abide by that. There's this metaphorical bank of trust between police and a community, and too often it's overdrawn in both directions, and there's no way to really approach it as anything but a war. As one of the retired law enforcement folks I spoke to said, "The time to make friends is before you need them."
On why reforms within the Minneapolis police department didn't prevent George Floyd's death
Malcolm X once said, "You can't legislate goodwill." And I think it's maybe one of the most astute political observations of our time. And if I can take the liberty of elaborating on it, I'd say you can't regulate goodwill or implement it with a consent decree or a strategic policy initiative either. So, yes, we can outline specific line-level reforms that were promised and not implemented or implemented unevenly or ineffectively.

Let's take neck restraints, for example. Many departments have chosen to ban those outright. But when the Minneapolis police department addressed them in 2014, they chose to leave this carve out where if deadly force was permissible, then so too was this kind of restraint. It maybe makes sense that if you're legally justified to pull out your gun and shoot someone, you're also justified to choke them. That's the argument that's typically made, and a lot of use of force policies make it. But by leaving that carve out, there's a significant ambiguity there in the policy. You're asking officers, in the heat of the moment, or in the heat of several moments, to make a distinction about whether or not this particular situation merits or makes it reasonable to restrain someone's neck in that way.

But putting aside that specific example, a lot of changes were made. The Minneapolis department adopted a slew of changes after this voluntary review in 2013 by the U.S. Department of Justice. And they automated their system for flagging problem officers as the Department of Justice recommended. They rewrote their use of force policy with a focus on the "sanctity of life." They required officers to intervene when a fellow cop became abusive in front of them. And all of those would seem to be measures that would have lessened the possibility that an incident like what happened to George Floyd would happen. But they didn't. And so I think that's going to beg some really tough questions moving forward for reformers about why not.

And I kind of think it comes back to the words of Malcolm X: If there is a culture in an organization whereby the application of force to black bodies is the norm, that's the expectation. It's the M.O. You can't really policy change that away. The news that the city plans to disband its police department and kind of functionally start over again seems to be a recognition of that fact, as does this newfound popularity broadly of defund and abolition movements.

On why screening for racist officers is not going to fix the problem of racism in police departments

I've always found it instructive to think of the police and policing as this kind of avatar of American racism. The police are racism representatives.

I've always found it instructive to think of the police and policing as this kind of avatar of American racism. The police are racism representatives. They are the folks who we hire to actuate something that's far more distant than a person's individual biases.

I'm sure listeners will be familiar with the Central Park incident involving Christian Cooper and Amy Cooper [no relation] a few weeks back: A white woman was walking her dog off leash. This black man, Christian Cooper, asked her to put her dog on the leash, per the park rules. And she instantly seemed to feel very threatened and started calling the police and telling them that she was being physically threatened by a black man. This went viral just before George Floyd was killed.

And part of the reason that the Amy Coopers of the world feel so comfortable using the police as their own kind of personal racism valet is because that's in line with how they've operated in our society. Which is to say, even if you or I or we have never called the police on a black person for some deeply unserious reason, as a society we outsource the keeping of the racial order to police every day. ... And this is so important: Officers themselves do not have to be ideologically white supremacist to be performing that function.

So we spend a lot of time on this surface level question of how do we get police officers as individuals or as departments to treat black people better. But in sum, the way police treat black people in America is symptomatic of how America feels about black people, which is this state of conditional citizenship steeped in mistrust and in fear.
Amy Salit and Seth Kelley produced and edited the audio of this interview. Bridget Bentz, Molly Seavy-Nesper and Meghan Sullivan adapted it for the Web.

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Policing Is An 'Avatar Of American Racism,' Marshall Project Journalist Says

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In the wake of George Floyd's death at the hands of police, protesters across the country are demanding systemic changes in the way American police forces operate and are funded. Journalist Jamiles Lartey says the discussion about policing feels different now than it has in the past.

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(At least) 10 Things Educators Can Do to End the Prison Industrial Complex

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(At least) 10 Things Educators Can Do to End the Prison Industrial Complex

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Developed by the Education for Liberation Network

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Short episodes to support growing activist leaders!

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A podcast about taking political action guided by the concepts of direct action, solidarity, autonomy and mutual aid.

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Publisher: Lawrence Hill
Format: Book
Binding: pb
Pages: 274
Released: August 20, 1998
ISBN-13: 9781556520747

On May 2, 1973, Black Panther Assata Shakur (aka JoAnne Chesimard) lay in a hospital, close to death, handcuffed to her bed, while local, state, and federal police attempted to question her about the shootout on the New Jersey Turnpike that had claimed the life of a white state trooper. Long a target of J. Edgar Hoover's campaign to defame, infiltrate, and criminalize Black nationalist organizations and their leaders, Shakur was incarcerated for four years prior to her conviction on flimsy evidence in 1977 as an accomplice to murder.

This intensely personal and political autobiography belies the fearsome image of JoAnne Chesimard long projected by the media and the state. With wit and candor, Assata Shakur recounts the experiences that led her to a life of activism and portrays the strengths, weaknesses, and eventual demise of Black and White revolutionary groups at the hand of government officials. The result is a signal contribution to the literature about growing up Black in America that has already taken its place alongside The Autobiography of Malcolm X and the works of Maya Angelou.

Two years after her conviction, Assata Shakur escaped from prison. She was given political asylum by Cuba, where she still resides.

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On May 2, 1973, Black Panther Assata Shakur (aka JoAnne Chesimard) lay in a hospital, close to death, handcuffed to her bed, while local, state, and federal police attempted to question her about the shootout on the New Jersey Turnpike that had claimed th

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Ebook currently available for free

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"Would some communities be safer without police? That's the question at the heart of Who Do You Serve, Who Do You Protect?, a collection of essays and reportage penned by some of Truthout's most compelling and enlightened thinkers-including #BlackLivesMatter co-founder Alicia Garza. With heartbreaking, glass-sharp prose, the book catalogs the abuse and destruction of black, native, and trans bodies. And then, most importantly, it offers real-world solutions."
-Chicago Review of Books

"A must-read for anyone seeking to understand American culture in the present day."
-Xica Nation

" Who Do You Serve, Who Do You Protect? is an urgently necessary book, one that deepens and complicates thinking around police violence without waiting for a fresh on-camera brutality to restart the national conversation."

"This brilliant collection of essays, written by activists, journalists, community organizers and survivors of state violence, urgently confronts the criminalization, police violence and anti-Black racism that is plaguing urban communities. It is one of the most important books to emerge about these critical issues: passionately written with a keen eye towards building a world free of the cruelty and violence of the carceral state."
-Beth Richie, author of Arrested Justice: Black Women, Violence, and America's Prison Nation

" Who Do You Serve, Who Do You Protect? is a powerful collection of essays by organizers, legal activists and progressive journalists that take us beyond the 'few bad apples' theory of police violence, insisting that we interrogate the essential role and purpose of police and policing in our society. These writers have highlighted some of the critical questions that the anti-state violence movement is wrestling with."
-Barbara Ransby, author of Ella Baker and the Black Freedom Movement: A Radical Democratic Vision

"This timely and essential set of essays written by activists, organizers and journalists offers a window into our particular historical moment centered on an ongoing struggle against state violence. As a long-time organizer immersed in the current Movement for Black Lives, I read the contributions hoping to learn and to be inspired. I found the essays to be informative, illuminating and challenging. The book covers topics ranging from police torture and the fight for accountability to how we might best engage in transformative organizing that could lead to a word without police. I cannot recommend this anthology any more highly. It's an indispensable primer for anyone who wants to understand the current rebellions and uprisings against police impunity."
-Mariame Kaba, founder and director of Project NIA

" Who Do You Serve, Who Do You Protect? is an extraordinary collection of writings by activists living and working at the epicenter of police violence and the anti-Blackness and structural racism so foundational to U.S. systems of policing. Simultaneously enraging, invigorating, radically imaginative, practical, and inspiring, this essential book relocates justice in accountable social, economic, and cultural relationships, pointing the way toward foundational transformation rather than cosmetic reform."
-Kay Whitlock, co-author of Considering Hate and Queer (In)Justice

"America is at war, and the violence that propels that war is largely directed at people of color, especially Black youth. One instance of such a war is evident in the violence by the police against Black communities, the criminalization of everyday behavior, the assaults on Black bodies, and the ever growing incarceration state. Who Do You Serve, Who Do You Protect? addresses this violence in a way no other book has done in the last forty years. It reveals the underlying causes, economic and ideological, that drive such violence so as to provide a comprehensive understanding of its roots, its multiple layers, history, and different forms while at the same time it offers a discourse of critical engagement and transformation in order to address it. Who Do You Serve, Who Do You Protect? is an invaluable resource for asking questions about the emergence of racist violence and state terrorism as a defining principle of everyday life and how they can be addressed. Everyone who cares about justice and democracy and a future in which they mutually inform each other should read this book."
-Henry Giroux, author of Disposable Futures: The Seduction of Violence in the Age of Spectacle

"We know the names: Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown, Freddie Gray, Eric Garner, Sandra Bland, Tamir Rice, Rekia Boyd, Laquan McDonald. And we've seen the uprisings: L.A., Ferguson, Baltimore, Chicago. Who Do You Serve, Who Do You Protect? goes behind the headlines to ask the deeper questions: Do the police make communities (particularly, communities where Black and Brown people live) safer? Who do community residents fear? Are there ways to address those fears without the police and carceral state? What would we have to create in order to do this? What steps must we take to get there? Each of the essays examines these inter-related questions in depth. Read together, they provide an extremely thorough, and timely, examination of the issues underlying these recent events, forcing us to rethink the very idea of justice in this country."
-Alan Mills, Uptown People's Law Center

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"Would some communities be safer without police? That's the question at the heart of Who Do You Serve, Who Do You Protect?, a collection of essays and reportage penned by some of Truthout's most compelling and enlightened thinkers-including #BlackLivesMatter co-founder Alicia Garza.

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by Alex S. Vitale
Ebook currently available for free

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Recent years have seen an explosion of protest against police brutality and repression. Among activists, journalists and politicians, the conversation about how to respond and improve policing has focused on accountability, diversity, training, and community relations. Unfortunately, these reforms will not produce results, either alone or in combination. The core of the problem must be addressed: the nature of modern policing itself.

This book attempts to spark public discussion by revealing the tainted origins of modern policing as a tool of social control. It shows how the expansion of police authority is inconsistent with community empowerment, social justice-even public safety. Drawing on groundbreaking research from across the world, and covering virtually every area in the increasingly broad range of police work, Alex Vitale demonstrates how law enforcement has come to exacerbate the very problems it is supposed to solve.

In contrast, there are places where the robust implementation of policing alternatives-such as legalization, restorative justice, and harm reduction-has led to a decrease in crime, spending, and injustice. The best solution to bad policing may be an end to policing.

" The End of Policing combines the best in academic research with rhetorical urgency to explain why the ordinary array of police reforms will be ineffective in reducing abusive policing. Alex Vitale shows that we must move beyond conceptualizing public safety as interdiction, exclusion, and arrest if we hope to achieve racial and economic justice."

" The End of Policing's great strength lies in demonstrating that if the shape of American policing is historical, it is also contingent. We could have made different choices regarding how we set about securing the public against the array of threats that confront it, and - refreshingly, at this moment of general despair - Vitale believes we still can."

"Deeply researched, but also vibrantly and accessibly written, The End of Policing is essential reading for anyone wishing to understand the dire state of policing today. Alex Vitale shows compellingly that as long as we ask the police to shore up a fundamentally unequal and dysfunctional social order, superficial 'reforms' won't do much to help. And he offers concrete alternatives aimed at restoring communities and getting police out of the business of trying to contain social problems that they cannot-and should not-control."

"An extremely vital book on policing. Should be assigned at all police academies. If only the Philando Castile jurors had read this."

"Challenging standard accounts of how to reform policing, Alex Vitale argues that true safety demands directing resources away from police and prisons and towards economic development, education, and drug treatment. Urgent, provocative, and timely, The End of Policing will make you question most of what you have been taught to believe about crime and how to solve it."

"Unfortunately, neither increased diversity in police forces nor body cameras nor better training make any seeming difference. We need to restructure our society and put resources into communities themselves, an argument Alex Vitale makes very persuasively."

"Vitale's amassing of trenchant facts into an enticing intellectual framework makes The End of Policing a must-read for anyone interesting in waging and winning the fight for economic and social justice."

" The End of Policing is that holiday argument book, the relatively brief stack of facts you can hand to a relative who still talks about those nice guys who helped out with the flat tire and doesn't see why any lives have to matter more than they already do. A thorough rinsing of the American criminal justice system."

"Suggests a radical alternative that, on the one hand, abolishes corrupt and lethal police policies designed to contain the racialised poor and, on the other, develops and sustains safer communities."

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Recent years have seen an explosion of protest against police brutality and repression. Among activists, journalists and politicians, the conversation about how to respond and improve policing has focused on accountability, diversity, training, and community relations. Unfortunately, these reforms will not produce results, either alone or in combination.

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by Jordan T. Camp and Christina Heatherton
Ebook currently available for free.

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Verso Books is the largest independent, radical publishing house in the English-speaking world.

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Reformist Reforms vs. Abolitionist Steps in Policing

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Reformist Reforms vs. Abolitionist Steps in Policing

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Created by Critical Resistance

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A Decade Of Watching Black People Die : Code Switch

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The last few weeks have been filled with devastating news — stories about the police killing black people. At this point, these calamities feel familiar — so familiar, in fact, that their details have begun to echo each other.

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A vital and influential exploration of the rapid militarization of the police in the United States. Do Not Resist puts viewers in the center of the action - from inside a police training seminar that teaches the importance of "righteous violence" to the floor of a congressional hearing on the proliferation of military equipment in small-town police departments. Winner, Best Documentary Feature Award, 2016 Tribeca Film Festival.

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A vital and influential exploration of the rapid militarization of the police in the United States. Do Not Resist puts viewers in the center of the action - from inside a police training seminar that teaches the importance of "righteous violence" to the floor of a congressional hearing on the proliferation of military equipment in small-town police departments.

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Home organization of Mariame Kaba

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What's Happening Now

April 2019 Building Accountable Communities National Gathering

In April 2019, Mariame partnered with Barnard's Center for Research on Women to organize a panel discussion with local activists and change makers about the meaning of accountability.
Watch the video

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What's Happening Now In April 2019, Mariame partnered with Barnard's Center for Research on Women to organize a panel discussion with local activists and change makers about the meaning of accountability. Watch the video

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Article in The Conversation

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This article was updated on June 2, 2020.

But tensions between the police and black communities are nothing new.

There are many precedents to the Ferguson, Missouri protests that ushered in the Black Lives Matter movement. Those protests erupted in 2014 after a police officer shot unarmed 18-year-old Michael Brown; the officer was subsequently not indicted.

The precedents include the Los Angeles riots that broke out after the 1992 acquittal of police officers for beating Rodney King. Those riots happened nearly three decades after the 1965 Watts riots, which began with Marquette Frye, an African American, being pulled over for suspected drunk driving and roughed up by the police for resisting arrest.

I'm a criminal justice researcher who often focuses on issues of race, class and crime. Through my research and from teaching a course on diversity in criminal justice, I have come to see how the roots of racism in American policing - first planted centuries ago - have not yet been fully purged.

Slave patrols

There are two historical narratives about the origins of American law enforcement.

The first slave patrols arose in South Carolina in the early 1700s. As University of Georgia social work professor Michael A. Robinson has written, by the time John Adams became the second U.S. president, every state that had not yet abolished slavery had them.

Members of slave patrols could forcefully enter anyone's home, regardless of their race or ethnicity, based on suspicions that they were sheltering people who had escaped bondage.

The more commonly known precursors to modern law enforcement were centralized municipal police departments that began to form in the early 19th century, beginning in Boston and soon cropping up in New York City, Albany, Chicago, Philadelphia and elsewhere.

Police corruption and violence - particularly against vulnerable people - were commonplace during the early 1900s. Additionally, the few African Americans who joined police forces were often assigned to black neighborhoods and faced discrimination on the job. In my opinion, these factors - controlling disorder, lack of adequate police training, lack of nonwhite officers and slave patrol origins - are among the forerunners of modern-day police brutality against African Americans.

Jim Crow laws

Slave patrols formally dissolved after the Civil War ended. But formerly enslaved people saw little relief from racist government policies as they promptly became subject to Black Codes.

For the next three years, these new laws specified how, when and where African Americans could work and how much they would be paid. They also restricted black voting rights, dictated how and where African Americans could travel and limited where they could live.

Reverberating today

For the past five decades, the federal government has forbidden the use of racist regulations at the state and local level. Yet people of color are still more likely to be killed by the police than whites.

The Washington Post tracks the number of Americans killed by the police by race, gender and other characteristics. The newspaper's database indicates that 229 out of 992 of those who died that way in 2018, 23% of the total, were black, even though only about 12% of the country is African American.

Policing's institutional racism of decades and centuries ago still matters because policing culture has not changed as much as it could. For many African Americans, law enforcement represents a legacy of reinforced inequality in the justice system and resistance to advancement - even under pressure from the civil rights movement and its legacy.

In addition, the police disproportionately target black drivers.

When a Stanford University research team analyzed data collected between 2011 and 2017 from nearly 100 million traffic stops to look for evidence of systemic racial profiling, they found that black drivers were more likely to be pulled over and to have their cars searched than white drivers. They also found that the percentage of black drivers being stopped by police dropped after dark when a driver's complexion is harder to see from outside the vehicle.

This persistent disparity in policing is disappointing because of progress in other regards.

There is greater understanding within the police that brutality, particularly lethal force, leads to public mistrust, and police forces are becoming more diverse.

What's more, college students majoring in criminal justice who plan to become future law enforcement officers now frequently take "diversity in criminal justice" courses. This relatively new curriculum is designed to, among other things, make future police professionals more aware of their own biases and those of others. In my view, what these students learn in these classes will make them more attuned to the communities they serve once they enter the workforce.

In addition, law enforcement officers and leaders are being trained to recognize and minimize their own biases in New York City and other places where people of color are disproportionately stopped by the authorities and arrested.

But the persistence of racially biased policing means that unless American policing reckons with its racist roots, it is likely to keep repeating mistakes of the past. This will hinder police from fully protecting and serving the entire public.

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The racist roots of American policing: From slave patrols to traffic stops

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Half a century after the federal government voided Jim Crow laws, the criminal justice system still discriminates against African Americans.

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Episode 21: Police Accountability

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Josie Duffy and co-host Darnell Moore discuss police accountability and explain why it's so hard for the criminal justice system to hold police accountable.

As civilians, how do we hold the police responsible for wrongdoing? On the first episode of Season 3, Josie Duffy and co-host Darnell Moore discuss different avenues of police accountability and explain why it's so hard for the criminal justice system to hold police accountable. They are joined by Alicia Garza, an activist, writer, and organizer, who currently serves as principal at Black Futures Lab. Alicia is a co-founder of Black Lives Matter and has been a leader in the fight against police brutality and discriminatory policing, particularly in black communities.

Alicia Garza's Book recommendation: Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America by Ibram X. Kendi.
Additional resources:
You can find Darnell's book, No Ashes in the Fire, .

To learn more about Black Futures Lab, click .

Make sure to check out the Plain View Project to see more of the discriminatory posts published by law enforcement that we mentioned on the show.

More on the story of Laquan McDonald can be found . Jamie Kalven was the first journalist to bring attention to McDonald's autopsy report, and Brandon Smith, was the journalist who fought diligently for the footage to be released. Check out Kalven's twitter account and Smith's .

Here is the on Ferguson, Missouri, from 2015.

Our email is justiceinamerica@theappeal.org
Transcript
Alicia Garza: Anytime you try to have a conversation about police accountability, anytime you try to have a conversation about what needs to change with policing, you automatically run into the culture conversation. And the culture conversation is actually part of what allows policing to be wholly unaccountable because we have been indoctrinated with a lot of messages that police essentially should be able to function above the law because they are making the greatest sacrifices. And that is something that I think is a huge impediment and barrier to any possibility of changing how policing functions in this country.

Darnell Moore: And I am Darnell Moore.

Josie: And this is Justice in America. Each show we discuss a topic in the American criminal justice system and we try to explain what it is and how it works. Thank you everyone for joining us for the first episode of our third season.

Darnell: You can find us on Twitter @Justice_Podcast. We're also on Facebook, like our Facebook page, Justice in America, and subscribe and rate us on Apple Podcast. We'd love to hear from you.

Josie: So if you're just joining us for the first time, I'm Josie Duffy Rice. I'm president of The Appeal, a news outlet that produces original journalism about the criminal justice system. You can find us at theappeal.org. If you are a long time listener, you may have noticed that Darnell, our co-host today is not Clint Smith who co-hosted Justice in America for the past two seasons. Clint, so sadly will not be joining us this season. He is writing like nineteen books. He has a million hours in his day, but not infinite. But we are really, really excited to have some incredible voices joining me as co-hosts throughout the season. So you've met Darnell Moore, an unbelievable author, of No Ashes in the Fire a critically acclaimed memoir of growing up black and queer in New Jersey. Who's done incredible work in the criminal justice space. We're going to have three other guests co-hosts, join us throughout the season. To introduce you to each of them we recorded some fun, pretty short episodes where I asked them ten questions about themselves and their work. There's one for each of the four guests hosts, and even one for me, so please make sure to check them out either on Apple Podcast or wherever you listen to podcasts or on theappeal.org. And we want to thank all our listeners who wrote in with topic ideas. We really appreciate your input and we considered your ideas when planning this season and future episodes. We got so much great feedback, so thank you so much.

Darnell: We've opened the show with a clip from our guest, Alicia Garza. Alicia is an American civil rights activist, editorial writer from Oakland, California. She also happens to be a good friend and sister of mine. She organizes around issues of health, student services and rights, domestic workers' rights and in police brutality, anti-racism, violence against trans and gender-nonconforming people of color, and she's just an all-around dope sis from the Bay.

2:55 Josie: Alicia really is just so incredible. We're so excited to have her on today and she's going to be talking to us about our topic of the day, which is police accountability. In particular, why it's so difficult to hold police accountable. But first, we're going to do our word of the day and today's word is restitution. I want to shout out Sara at the Justice Collaborative for the idea because this is a really great one.

Darnell: When we think of punishment in criminal cases, we generally imagine a prison sentence or being put on probation, but often people convicted of crimes will also be required to pay the victim money, which is referred to as restitution. Basically, the implication is that this is how to make whole the people who have been harmed.

Josie: And restitution is not on its face an unreasonable concept, right? If someone steals $1,000 from you and is prosecuted, it makes sense that part of their punishment would be giving you your $1,000 back, right? But restitution isn't just used in cases where there is sort of an immediate monetary loss. It's used in other cases where the courts are sort of deciding exactly how much money a victim is owed. And the main problem with this is that our criminal justice system really only sees the idea of restitution in monetary terms. It really fails to take into account what a person victimized by a crime may actually need in order to quote "be made whole."

Darnell: Evidence shows that while some people want money, others want an apology or therapy or the ability to talk to the person who harmed them. Sometimes, for many, accountability doesn't look like punishment. It looks like justice coming to us in other ways, so some just want the ability to be heard either by the person who harmed them are their loved ones. Restitution looks different for different people, but the system really only has one approach to so-called restitution.

Josie: Exactly. This underscores something we've talked about a lot on here. The criminal justice system is phenomenal at punishing people, right?

Josie: They're great. A-plus on over-punishment. But it's not great at actually addressing harm.

Darnell: Right. Again, paying money to a harmed party is not the problem, at least generally. Right?

Darnell: The issue is with the term restitution and how narrowly it is defined. Police and prosecutors use it, so implied that money solves more than it does and we know that money just does not solve a lot of things. Ultimately, they use a narrow definition because their ultimate goal is not actually restitution. It's punishment. It's more important for our system to inflict punishment than address harm than actually create space for transformative justice.

Josie: Right. I really like what you said about how for some people, accountability doesn't look like punishment. This narrow definition is really indicative of a much bigger concern about the ways in which our system limits our imagination, right? It just projects definitions onto both the offender and the harmed party instead of responding to the actual needs that exist. For some monetary payments may be welcome, for others monetary payments may be good, but not enough and for others monetary payments may feel like their experience has been cheapened.

Darnell: For sure. Restitution isn't always just one thing, or at least we shouldn't think about it that way. It isn't the same thing for all people. The idea that money alone makes victims whole is not reflective of the many ways in which people navigate harm. I mean, and I think we also need to sort of expand our imagination, you know?

Darnell: To respond to the real ways that people need justice to be enacted.

Josie: Completely. Completely agree. At the end of last season, we had two episodes where we talked about prison abolition, restorative justice and transformative justice.

Here's a clip from Mariame Kaba in which she talks about harm and restitution.

Mariame Kaba: people who are practitioners of restorative justice see restorative justice as a philosophy and ideology, a framework that is much broader than the criminal punishment system. It is about values around how we treat each other in the world. And it's about an acknowledgment that because we're human beings, we hurt each other. We cause harm. And what restorative justice proposes is to ask a series of questions. Mostly the three that are kind of advanced by Howard Zehr, who is the person who about 40 years ago popularized the concept of restorative justice in the United States. He talks about since we want to address the violation in the relationships that were broken as a result of violence and harm, that you want to ask a question about who was hurt, that that is important to ask, that you want to ask then what are the obligations? What are the needs that emerge from that hurt? And then you want to ask the question of whose job is it to actually address the harm? And so because of that, those questions of what happened, which in the current adversarial system are incidental really, you know, it's who did this thing, what rules were broken? How are we going to actually punish the people who broke the rules? And then whose role is it to do that? It's the state's. In restorative justice it's: what happened? Talk about what happened, share what happened, discuss in a, you know, kind of relational sense what happened. And then it's what are your needs? Would do you need as a result of this? Because harms engender needs that must be met, right? So it asks you to really think that through. And then it says, you know, how do we repair this harm and who needs to be at the table for that to happen.

Darnell: Just something to think about the next time you hear the term restitution. Okay. Now we're on to our topic of the day, which is policing.

8:53 Josie: Today we're talking about law enforcement and police oversight. We haven't actually focused many of our episodes here on Justice in America on policing specifically, although we always talk about the police cause they are a major part of every element of the criminal justice system. But there are a few reasons that we haven't sort of centered anything around policing thus far. And one of those is that rightfully there's a fair amount of focus on policing, especially the past few years. And we kind of thought our value is generally in paying attention to other issues. But the other reason really has to do with the sheer number of things that there are to talk about when it comes to policing, right? There's just no way to cover all of policing in one episode.

Darnell: No way at all. But today we're focusing on one aspect of law enforcement specifically. How is law enforcement held accountable? What systems, policies and people are responsible for that and what can the people do? When you hear that question, you may think about some of the stories that have made headlines, especially over the last several years. Like holding police accountable for killing unarmed kids like Laquan McDonald who was shot in the back seventeen times; or twelve-year-old Tamir Rice who was killed playing in a park; Atatiana Jefferson who was shot in her home as she played video games with her nephew; or Philando Castille who was killed as his girlfriend's four-year-old daughter sat in the back seat; or Eric Garner who was killed after yelling "I can't breathe"; or Mike Brown whose body had been left on the street for hours.

Josie: Yeah, I mean all of these, just hearing them said all in a row, right? And this is just the tip of the iceberg and it is of course the case that police accountability means in part the need to hold individual officers responsible when they do something like murder a civilian for no reason. We're going to talk about why that's so difficult today, but when we say police accountability, we mean something even broader than that. You may have heard the Latin phrase - back when I thought I was going to get a tattoo one day I wanted to get this tattoo - the Latin phrase Quis custodiet ipsos custodes? And loosely translated it means who is watching the watcher? In other words, how do we hold accountable the people who are supposed to be holding us accountable? And I think that's kind of the big question when it comes to police in America today.

Darnell: So, a little background before we get into these questions. First, the basics about how law enforcement is structured in America. There are many different kinds of police working in many different jurisdictions. The best way to imagine a spectrum of policing is to think of policing across two axis.

Josie: So the first axis deals with what the police do. In other words, are they just like general law enforcement, you know, your everyday patrol officer or are they specialist police where they might be part of a special jurisdiction? These officers may have a particular skill, like they might be officers in the state bureau of investigation or they may cover a specific jurisdiction, like they may only be officers in parks or public schools or tribal land or college campuses, etcetera.

Darnell: So that's one axis. The what they do axis. The other axis determines where they do it. Again, there are three main levels here. The federal level, the state level and the local level. Federal law enforcement is kind of tricky. The Constitution gives the federal government power to make law of course, but does not explicitly grant the feds much power to enforce the law. There are federal law enforcement agencies including the FBI, the DEA, ICE and others. So it's not like the federal government has no enforcement power, but it's also not like the feds are like regular cops. They aren't patrolling neighborhoods or doing house calls.

Josie: Right. Especially if you're just Joe Schmo who has nothing to do with the DEA or ICE or ATF. Certainly for some people, especially people who have complicated immigration status - right? - ICE is easily the scariest and most powerful law enforcement agency out there perhaps. But as a general rule, the federal law enforcement functions differently. It tends to be specialized, not general, and it's limited by the department or agency. ICE, for example, deals only with immigration issues like we said, the DEA deals only with drug crimes, ATF agents deal primarily with crimes related to firearms. Plus, federal law enforcement only has the power to enforce federal laws. No state laws at all can be enforced by federal law enforcement.

Darnell: State police often exist to enforce the law where local law enforcement can't. The best and primary example of state police would be the highway patrol, which enforces traffic laws on the interstate. In some states, the state police only have the power to enforce traffic laws. In other states, they have more power and are more like what we imagine when we think about cops. But the bottom line is the state police exist to fill in the places local police don't cover or supplement the work local police are doing.

Josie: Right. So that's federal law enforcement and state law enforcement. And then lastly, and most importantly, there's local law enforcement. So that's your local municipal police department or county sheriff. There are some differences between police and sheriffs. Police exist again in municipalities, which tend to be smaller. County sheriffs tend to cover obviously the whole county, which tends to be a much bigger area. Sheriffs are also elected where police chiefs are appointed. But for now the main thing to know is that local policing is the most ubiquitous and the most powerful level of policing that exists.

Darnell: So here's a question. How many different police departments/law enforcement agencies do you think there are in America total? Federal, state, local, specialist, general, all of it. How many? The answer is almost 18,000. 18,000 different law enforcement bodies and no two operate exactly the same. And here's something wild. All federal, state law enforcement combined with all the specialized apartments account for only about 2,500 of that 18,000. The other 15,400 are local police and sheriff departments. There are three times as many local police in America than there are federal and state law enforcement agents combined.

Josie: Right. So again, we just want to emphasize that local police are the ones with the power here, right? The power and numbers. The power and actual power, they have the most power in terms of enforcing the law, and they're the ones that you see on your street corner that are responsible for so much of the harm we see that comes out of policing, right?

15:35 Josie: So we hope you have a clear map in your head. Now, let's get into the real stuff. The perception of the police is so dictated I think, for most people, by their own experience with the police or the experience they saw their loved ones have with the police. For a lot of people, the police represent public safety, they represent protection. But that's not true for a significant portion of this country.

Darnell: Not at all. I mean, I grew up in Camden, New Jersey in the eighties and it was a period, not just in the eighties, but in a city where a lot of the residents, a majority of whom are black and Latinx, were policed by a law enforcement body that did not represent or didn't look like the community. So there had been long standing issues between community members and police. One, many of them didn't live in a neighborhood, so there was no trust. And secondly, there was a long history of law enforcement abuse. We had, like many cities, particularly post-industrial, predominantly black cities across the country, we had, people rioted because of police violence, some of which deadened, some of the citizens there. So you have to imagine that growing up in that city we didn't have a trusting relationship with police. And then being black in America.

Darnell: Being black in the world. Like, you know, your relationship to law enforcement of any type is tinged because of the racism that was inherent in the practices.

Josie: So I thought your point about police not looking like the community is a really important one. A study a couple of years ago found that 95 percent of sheriffs in America are male and 99 percent of sheriffs in America are white.

Josie: It's a remarkably, remarkably high number. And it really speaks to the point that you made about kind of the disconnect between communities and the people policing them. So in theory, how do we keep police accountable? Right? And we'll talk a little bit about theory and practice today, but this is sort of the first question. What would be the first way we'd expect police officers to be held accountable?

Darnell: Well, in theory, a police department or sheriff's office should be first to hold the officers accountable. I mean, to some extent that's what a workplace is supposed to do. No?

Josie: Right. Like if I plagiarize a story or we make up facts or are we harass a colleague or someone we're interviewing, we get fired. I mean, that seems like how it should be. Right?

Darnell: But we know this often doesn't happen. And then 13 years between the time Jason Van Dyke became a cop and the moment that he shot Laquan McDonald, an unarmed black kid in the back 17 times, he had already had 25 complaints filed against him by both civilians and other officers. Most of them were excessive force.

Josie: Right. I mean that's an enormous number of complaints: 25. And yet he was never disciplined. He was never punished. He kept his job after he shot Laquan McDonald. Right? As city officials, supposedly in the midst of a quote unquote "investigation" - that didn't actually seem to be happening - refused to impart any sanctions. They avoided releasing the footage of Laquan MacDonald's death. I mean they basically protected him.

Darnell: Wow. It's so interesting that so often when you hear these types of cases, like my response is always one of just like exasperations.

Darnell: Because it's the same story over and over again.

Josie: It really also makes you think about what we don't know. Right? A very, very dedicated journalist managed to get his hands on the Laquan McDonald footage. But it's very possible we would have never heard about it otherwise. And there are a million things right now that we're not hearing about, that we don't know are happening because they're being protected by the people who are supposed to keep them accountable.

19:16 Darnell: Indeed, recently, an online database called The Plain View Project made public 5,000 sexist, racist and Islamophobic Facebook posts written by cops. Here's a clip from CBS News highlighting that story.

Reporter: The people at this rally outside the Philadelphia Police headquarters weren't surprised by what they read in the racist social media rants.

Man #2: We live here in this city-

Reporter: But Solomon Jones, one of the protest organizers says the brazen public display took it to a different level.

Solomon Jones: It's a turning point because they felt the license to engage in hate in a public way. And what that says to me is that there is a culture that allows that to happen.

Reporter: The Facebook posts in question contained discriminatory opinions. "If our country was all caucasian the homicide rate would drop 70%." "Perhaps we should be very suspicious of all Muslims in this country" said another. Or encourage violence "It's a good day for a chokehold." They were collected by The Plain View Project, a group of lawyers and activists who over two years painstakingly reviewed the Facebook pages of 3,500 current and former police officers in eight departments: Dallas and Denison, Texas, Lake County, Florida, St. Louis, Twin Falls, Idaho, Phoenix, York, Pennsylvania and Philadelphia.

Darnell: If you go to the database at playviewproject.org you can see which officers still have jobs. Spoiler alert, it's a lot.

Josie: Yeah, it's a ton of them.

Darnell: While some of those officers were fired, most of them were not. Many were not even reassigned.

Josie: And this isn't uncommon, right? Misconduct often goes unaddressed or at most results in paid leave or desk duty, and recent studies show that when bad behavior goes unpunished, other officers are more likely to commit misconduct in the future. In other words, one bad apple actually does spoil the bunch.

Darnell: But, even if the police or the sheriff won't hold their officers accountable, there are other possible ways to ensure consequences from misconduct. For example, if the local prosecutor has probable cause to believe the officer's guilty of a crime, they could bring criminal charges. But traditionally local prosecutors have often been less than willing or even in some cases sabotaged their own case to ensure the officer doesn't have to actually face consequences.

Josie: Right. And it's not just charging the officer even, right? You see prosecutors all the time who know that a certain police officer has lied on the stand before. They know a police officer has been accused of coercing confessions out of people or violating someone's due process rights and they'll still present them as like a trustworthy witness to the jury. It's pretty remarkable how willing a lot of prosecutors, not all, but a lot of prosecutors are to let police officers get away with stuff that they would never actually let anyone charged with a crime get away with. And in some ways the calculus makes sense, like in a really kind of dark and cynical way. Prosecutors need the police, they need them on their side, they arrest people, they investigate cases for the prosecutor's office, they testify on the stand. If you prosecute a police officer for murder or for police brutality, you are jeopardizing a really important relationship. And you can see how there's this incentive, right? To avoid holding police accountable.

Darnell: So what other ways could police be held accountable? Well, laws can be enacted and ratified that could be used to hold them accountable. Like the state legislature could pass a law that raises the standard of acceptable officer conduct. In August 2019, California did this very thing: passed a law that says law enforcement can use deadly force only when necessary. In most states, though, the standard is much lower. Deadly force is justified as long as the officer feared for his life. And we know that that fear, this justification of fear can be used in a lot of different ways to excuse police officers. This low standard is part of the reason so many officers have been acquitted. All it takes is you saying you were scared for your life for the death of an unarmed innocent person to be acceptable.

Josie: And there was no interrogation from the system about why someone feared for their life. If seeing a black male consumes you with so much fear that you feel justified in murdering him, that's racism.

Josie: And we don't talk about the mere fact that even being so fearful, I always think about that video of Walter Scott running away from a police officer in South Carolina and getting shot in the back. If you're scared of a man running away from you just because he's black, that's a problem. So quickly, two other potential forms of accountability that are worth mentioning and also why they often fail to actually hold police accountable. First, in theory, a civilian can file a Section 1983 claim and this is a super complex area of law, but the gist is this, if you file a Section 1983 claim, it means that you're filing a federal claim against an individual, state or local actor who you're accusing of violating your civil rights. These claims usually arise when a person acting quote "under color of" state or local law has deprived a civilian of their rights, their rights that they have under the US Constitution or under federal law. It's a civil claim, it's not a criminal one. So if you're subject to police brutality that rises to the very high standard that's required to even win one of these claims, you may receive monetary damages, but there are not going to be any criminal consequences for the officer.

Darnell: Unfortunately though these claims are significantly limited because of another legal principle, qualified immunity. Qualified immunity protects government employees from being sued or held responsible even if they violated a person's civil rights. And while it is supposedly only in cases where the government employee made a reasonable but mistaken judgment, it has repeatedly protected police officers in very extreme cases.

Josie: Yeah. Cases that you wouldn't think are reasonable. Qualified immunity has just really made it difficult to hold people responsible and to hold police officers responsible for violence. I think it's also worth mentioning that like because of qualified immunity, when someone wins a major settlement, who ends up paying for that settlement? The local government, right? Like the local city, the local county. And so that's really us. That's taxpayers, right? Like the local police officer beat someone, torture someone, kill someone, and it's not just that they've inflicted this brutality. It's not like the rest of us are paying out the millions of dollars to the victim of this crime and they're not even getting fired. They don't even lose their job for that. If I cost my job a couple million dollars a year, I promise you I would be fired.

Darnell: Totally and you'd be paying that money back.

Darnell: You would be paying the money back.

Josie: Exactly, exactly, and that's just not the case here.

Darnell: There's another accountability tool we want to mention: consent decrees. These are agreements between an entire police department and the Department of Justice that allows the DoJ to thoroughly investigate and assess issues in the department.

Josie: Yeah. You know, the consent decrees are particularly notable because they address the whole department and issues that are happening across an entire police department. For example, after Mike Brown was killed, DoJ entered into a consent decree with Ferguson and that's at least going a little bit further than just holding the quote unquote "one bad apple" - as they always say - officer accountable. That might be important too, but we're not going to change anything unless we actually look deeper than that. They can't do everything. But under Obama's administration, they did have an impact in places like Ferguson and at the very least, they allow sort of the harmful practices of these departments to come to light publicly.

Darnell: But the use of consent decrees is dependent on who runs the justice department. Obama's DoJ entered into consent decrees with a number of police departments and even one prosecutor's office. But Trump's DoJ immediately scaled them back. Jeff Sessions felt that they were "bad for morale." Those were his words. And of course all of this should really underscore just how difficult it is to hold police accountable through the more traditional channels. A main reason for that is a culture of policing.

Josie: This is a really important point when we talk about holding the police accountable, right? Like we want the right system or the right policy. And I get that, and I think that's important. But the reality is that like we live in a country that is deeply, deeply reverent of law enforcement and law enforcement holds a lot of sway over elected officials. They like have a lot of power. It's really hard to keep the powerful in check.

Darnell: Oh, it's not only a, it's a, it's a culture like that's a militarized culture. It's a culture that favors not only a culture policing, but very sort of militarist, masculinist approaches to managing. That's the way we do our business. It's in so many ways and it's, you know, we are a culture that only ever thinks about managing conflict through means of like, I mean dare say, not just war, but by adding additional conflict to the fire. Right? So it's embedded in our culture all around.

Josie: Right. And I think it's also worth mentioning, part of the reason policing is so harmful in America is, well there's a historical reason, right? But there's also this other thing which is we ask police to do a lot. We ask them to deal with mental health issues. We ask them to solve disputes that they do not have the training or skills to actually address. And we kind of set everybody up I think for failure in some ways.

Darnell: And not only are police doing things that are not necessarily their jobs, I also think that we rely on police to do what so many of us could otherwise be doing ourselves in our communities.

Darnell: I think the point though that we are trying to manage the everyday affairs of human relations and the conflict that comes along with that by means of punishment, you know, I often say like I had to call the police as a young person to get them to come over my house when my father was abusing my mom and what I often say in that example is it wasn't necessarily that I'd needed him to be in jail. I wanted the abuse to stop.

Darnell: Now I probably, if I had another option, say a safe number that I could have called that could have rallied people in the community to come together, that every time I call this number, you know they're coming over to make sure that my mother is safe, to get my father out of the house, to provide him whatever supports he needed to work on his issues. That would have been a better solution. Right? Inevitably what I wanted was safety for my mom. I didn't necessarily need the jail cells to be bolstered up by another black man being in them. And often, I should say too, when we called the police, it was many times where their presence added another layer of heightened aggression, antagonism. The energy that came along with them trying to bring safety was never really, it didn't make us feel safe at all.

Josie: Right. I think that's such an important point and I also think it's worth pointing out that like in this kind of era where police feel targeted and criticized, the approach that in general law enforcement has taken, has been a really antagonistic one, I think, to your point. I think about how rather than making it easier to hold the police accountable over the past five years, six years, seven years, we've made it harder to criticize the police, right? Like they've passed laws in states, Blue Lives Matter laws that are functionally hate crime laws. Hate crime laws have traditionally been four characteristics that people have, immutable characteristics that people have, things they can't change, their race, their gender, things that have been traditionally discriminated against for. And it's remarkable to me and terrifying that in states across the country, the government is basically saying you are in extra trouble if whatever you do involves law enforcement. It's terrifying and it's really just a sign that we do not live in a world that wants to hold police accountable. We just don't.

Darnell: To discuss this some more, we'll be joined by Alicia Garza, an American civil rights activist, an editorial writer from Oakland, California and Alicia will be with us in just a moment. Stay tuned.

31:50 Josie: Alicia, thank you so much for joining us on Justice in America. We're so happy to have you.

Alicia Garza: Thanks for having me.

Darnell: So Alicia, there is so much to be said about you and who you are, your work, it encompasses so much. But in your own words, describe yourself. Tell us who you are.

Alicia Garza: Okay. Big profound question. I wear a lot of hats, but all of those hats are built for the work that I'm mostly passionate about, which is making black communities powerful in every aspect of our lives. So I have done that previously through my work with the Black Lives Matter global network. I work with the National Domestic Workers Alliance as the strategy and partnerships director and a lot of what I work on there is figuring out how to build powerful movements that benefit black communities. And I started an organization in 2018 called the Black Futures Lab and the Black to the Future Action Fund. And our work is focused on making black people powerful in politics.

Darnell: Dope. And give us some context. Talk about where you're from, who your people are, who do you name as your people, a sort of sense of your larger world and how it impacts you and shapes your work in the world.

Alicia Garza: I'm born and raised in the Bay Area and that matters to me. I'm a Bay Area girl through and through.

Darnell: You totally are.

Alicia Garza: I rep the Bay super hard and I am somebody who tries to get a deep belly laugh in at least once a week. It is my self care. And my people honestly are incredibly cosmopolitan. So again, being born and raised here in the Bay, I've had the pleasure and the blessing of having been mentored and nurtured and knocked upside the head by some of our greats. And we also have the benefit here of being a site of very powerful social movements. And so that very much shapes me and very much I consider movement people to be my people. And by movement people, I mean feminist writers and poets and activists like Linda Burnham. I mean people like Angela Davis who lives here in Oakland and once a member of the Black Panther Party for self defense and now as a leading kind of thinker theoretician and organizer around abolition. My people are the people who are trying to make this world a better place and trying to figure out what their lane is and how to get in it and do it really well. And my people are folk who believe that we have to work hard, but we also have to play hard because nobody wants to join your movement if it's hella boring and stuffy all the time. So that's me.

Josie: I love that. Alicia, so we've been talking today about policing and really what it means to keep the police accountable. This I think is one of the many ways that you've been an activist and one of many issues that you've worked on and you are one of the black women who started the Black Lives Matter movement, really credited with naming it, with inspiring it in the wake of Trayvon Martin's death and the acquittal of George Zimmerman in 2013. And I thought George Zimmerman was actually an interesting place for us to talk substantively about the police because he wasn't a police officer, right? He was like just another civilian, but he so believed and so embodied this culture of policing, which I think when we talk about the police, we talk a lot about policy. We talk a lot about like body cameras and this and that and like what we can do, but I don't think that very often traditional media at least gets to the core of this, which is the culture of policing is so pervasive in America and has caused so much harm in black communities in particular. Can you talk a little bit about the culture of policing and how you see it? What you think it means for the larger movement towards accountability and how it's affected your work?

Alicia Garza: Yeah. It's interesting that you say that policing is not just about policy, it's also very much about culture. And I think just to draw that out a little bit, when we talk about the culture of policing, I think we have to be able to talk about the culture of punishment and surveillance and control. One, America has done a very good job of infusing the culture of policing into our everyday lives through popular culture. So one of the shows I grew up on that I think I may have seen every single episode of is Law and Order SVU . And it's really fascinating, right? Because the show has a very similar structure. There is a bad guy that's committing crimes and then there's these two detectives that sometimes skirt the law in order to uphold the law. And in the end they always win. Right? And so it's really interesting that for me, when I think about the culture of policing, I think about the culture of punishment, the culture of how we define what is criminal or what is a crime? I think about the ways in which policing happens, which is now kind of in the hands of everyday citizens. And that's largely about surveillance. So I have a Ring camera on my home, a Ring doorbell or whatever. And it's really fascinating because as part of that you get subscribed automatically to what they call a community, right? Of people who are looking out for each other. But a lot of what that community does is it surveils people in their own community. I get notifications about packages being stolen or a suspicious person who tends to almost always be black in neighborhoods that are historically black but are rapidly gentrifying. And so when we think about who is suspicious, there's a culture there that has actually been placed into the hands of civilians, which is very much about learning to see poor people and black and brown people as potential criminals. Right? And when I think about the culture of policing, I also think very much about the insularity of it all. So with Black Lives Matter, one of the major things that would happen and still happens today is that the familiar retorts are either like 'all lives matter' or 'blue lives matter.' And you know, I was talking just recently with a student journalist who asked me, 'what do you say to people who say that blue lives matter?' And I said, well there aren't blue people, right? So policing as a profession that people choose to do, whereas race, it's not a profession and it's not of our choosing, it is automatically assigned to you for the purposes of categorizing you. And in those categories lie power and privilege. So there is very much though a culture in this country when we talk about policing that leaves policing and police untouchable. There are a few professions in this country that are deemed as not being able to be scrutinized. People who have served in the military, people who are members of law enforcement, people who are firefighters. Like there are particular professions in this country that we uphold in such a way where it becomes blasphemous to scrutinize their behaviors, critique their behaviors or push for changed behavior. So I think for me what makes my work hard is that, you know, anytime you try to have a conversation about police accountability, anytime you try to have a conversation about what needs to change with policing, you automatically run into the culture conversation. And the culture conversation is actually part of what allows policing to be wholly accountable because we have been indoctrinated with a lot of messages that police essentially should be able to function above the law because they are making the greatest sacrifices. And that is something that I think is a huge impediment and barrier to any possibility of changing how policing functions in this country.

Darnell: So let's talk a bit about police oversight. And even though it sort of exists as an idea, I'm not sure that we've seen police oversight work in such a way that it actually has made any type of change. Right? First question is a bit about, I want to hear your sort of thoughts on what might police oversight look like and is it a possibility? But then I'm also thinking about, you brought up Angela Davis, you talked about abolition and I want to attach to that how does abolition, if anything, fit into a framework of police oversight or not?

Alicia Garza: So let's, I mean starting with the question about police oversight, I think you're right, there are examples of police oversight that is quote unquote "affective," but I would say by and large it never can go far enough for a lot of reasons. So, okay, so let me just break down some of these models, right? There are models of like civilian oversight boards, some that have teeth, some that don't. By teeth we mean boards that are able to actually recommend discipline for officers who act out of line in the line of duty. And then there are oversight boards that don't have teeth, right? They make recommendations, but there's no there there in terms of anybody being forced or mandated to actually follow those recommendations. I think there are several jurisdictions around the country that are testing different models of police oversight. However, when we have this conversation about abolition, part of, I think what an abolitionist framework would say is that all policing is harmful, right? And so essentially police oversight is overseeing the harm that policing is doing in communities, but that's not eradicating the harm that policing is doing in communities. And I tend to agree with that. I think when we look at the origins of policing, policing is largely geared around, not safety per se. Policing is largely geared around protecting property and people and because we have societal conditions on who is deserving of protection and who is not, and societal provisions around the role or the importance of property in relationship to people, inherently baked into policing are the wrong priorities. If what we care about is actually solving problems, policing is not set up to do that. Policing is essentially set up to quote unquote "prevent" problems from happening or to punish people when problems occur. But it is not at all geared toward changing any of the material, societal, economic, or political mechanisms that create these problems in the first place. And so when we talk about abolition, I think that abolition as a framework and as a series of practices is really important because what it is calling on us to do is not just to imagine a world without policing, I think that that ends up being a very flat way of understanding what abolition is. I think abolition is actually calling us to figure out how to solve problems in ways that don't create further harm. And I can say, as somebody who thinks abolition is a good idea, I have a really hard time practicing it. So in a lot of ways I think it points to how important it is because it forces us to say, okay, well we know all the things that we're fighting against, but if we were going to change it, what would it look like? In this instance when we're talking about police accountability, I'm actually not interested in monitoring how police do their jobs in communities. Like I don't think that's a good use of time or resources. It's a first step, but it certainly is an intermediate step and it's not a long term step. I'm more interested in figuring out how do we make it so that the things that police are charged with - you know, moving homeless people from corner to corner - I'm more interested in figuring out how do we make sure that everybody has a home to go to.

Alicia Garza: I'm less interested in police monitoring activities in schools. I'm much more interested in figuring out how do we make sure that all families have the things that they need so that the problems that police are checking for actually get dealt with.

Alicia Garza: And so at its best, I think the abolition frameworks are calling on us to be the architects of the world that we want to live in. And it's challenging us also to undermine and dismantle all of the ways that we've been taught to think about the role of punishment in creating safety. Also, the way that we've been taught that to be safe as actually not in our own hands and it's not in our own wheel houses. For me, if I'm compelled to call the police for a problem, I have to think about that. I have to think to myself, well, why don't I have the tools to deal with this problem? If it's my neighbor and their music is too loud, why am I calling the police rather than having a relationship with my neighbor where I can call them or knock on their door and say, 'hey, can you turn the music down I have to go to work tomorrow?' If I see somebody breaking into a car on my street, why do I call the police for that? Right? Yeah, okay. I have a broken window, but there's some other problems that need to be attended to. What do we need to do to have those tools to deal with those problems? That's the thing that I'm the most interested in.

46:21 Josie: It's interesting. I went to go hear Mariame Kaba speaking April and she asked a question to a room full of people like, 'okay, what happens if you hear your neighbor beating his spouse?' And it was so hard for people in the room, myself included, to imagine not calling the authorities in that moment and really getting deep down into the question of what does it mean to have a relationship with your neighbors? What does it mean to be able to like intervene in moments of violence or pain without involving police or law enforcement and what are our fears? When there is a relationship and kind of a tapestry of a community that's strong enough, people hold each other accountable in ways that are really important.

Alicia Garza: Yeah. I mean, interestingly I have actually had to deal with that situation and did not call the police because I was worried about the harm that the police would inflict. This was a young couple with a young child that had some issues and things were not going well with them and they were arguing and it was getting escalated and actually we were able to de escalate. But part of what that was about, as you said, was that those were my neighbors for like 13 years. Right? And so we knew each other, we knew each other in, you know, not intimate ways, but in such a way where it mattered that we needed to share space.

Alicia Garza: And so they were hyper aware of that. But the other thing that I think is just really fascinating is that in a lot of communities, and the community I lived in at this time when I was dealing with this incident, it doesn't matter if you call police because they don't come. So. (Chuckles.) It's like in communities across America, people have already been forced to figure out what to do without police services because they don't receive police services. Policing is not equitable in it's distribution. And so there's a lot to tap into there as well about what happens and we're, we're moving into these moments. What happens when we're forced to depend on each other to survive, right? Where it's not like a hippy dippy convenient thing where we depend on each other when we want and we don't when we don't want to, but it's like actually as a matter of survival, nobody's coming for us. Nobody's coming to save us. So then what do we do to save ourselves?

Josie: Right. You know, I think you brought up something interesting just about how hard it can be to avoid the culture of punishment, the culture of law enforcement and how abolition kind of is like a daily practice that we all sometimes fail in terms of our own instincts. On that point, I just wonder about the traditional way that even a lot of people who believe in more police accountability think about police accountability, right? Which is, have we punished the police officer in question? So, you know, a police officer kills a black on armed person or armed person in the case of like Philando Castile or some other stories and, and there's completely legitimate outrage about it. And then the question becomes, are we going to use this screwed up system to punish this person in this screwed up system? Which I obviously understand the instinct and also regularly I'm invested in that also happening, ,to your point. I wonder what you think about the way that even many progressive people think about accountability as is this person going to get prosecuted? Are they going to go to prison? Are they going to serve time? How that as a way of keeping the police accountable is both what are the merits of that, if there are any, and also how is it harmful.

Alicia Garza: This is actually how I met Darnell is through these conversations about what is accountability and what is justice. And the context here is just that after we created the Black Lives Matter hashtag and the social media platforms, Renisha McBride, who was a young woman who was killed in Dearborn, Michigan, again by not police, but a private citizen who for all intents of purposes saw this young girl on his porch in the middle of the night asking for help as a threat so he shot her through his door in the face and killed her. The prosecutor in that case initially refused to press charges and it was people like Dream Hampton, who were like, 'you're not going to sweep this under the rug or allow for this young black woman's death to not be acknowledged.' Right?

Alicia Garza: Ted Wafer was subsequently sentenced. He's never going to get out of prison basically. And lots of people were cheering and saying, 'hey, justice has been served.' And we actually pulled together a whole national conversation to actually have the discussion about what was justice? And it is really tricky. I think that we hold on to punishment in ways that are not healthy for us. And when I think about social movements that have struggled, even though they've had very beautiful components and pieces to them, one of the major things beyond corruption that derails successful social movements is the use of punishment and retribution. And when power changes hands, there is a question on the table about how is power being transformed rather than how are we not just replacing one group of people with another group of people, but keeping the same harmful dynamics in place? Now with that being said, of course when bad things happen, we do, we want some recourse for bad things happening, but it doesn't equal justice. It equals something bad happened to me, so something bad has to happen to you. And that's where we are. That is a part of that culture of policing that we were talking about earlier. It is inherent in our criminal system that the way that we address harm is to make sure that we set up conditions to where harm is equal as opposed to dealing with the harm itself. Allowing for there to be a process by which people can acknowledge the harm that's been done and get what they need to move through the trauma of what harm does to us and our families and the people we love. With that being said, is it justice that a man who made a really bad decision in a split second, is it justice that he is going to spend the rest of his life in prison? I don't know that I would call that justice. I would say that it is, it's another kind of harm. Is it justice that Renisha McBrides family will never see her again? No. And I think from working with families who have lost people to state violence, nobody is going back and forth with these families about, you know, don't push for jail time for somebody who killed your child. Like, nobody's doing that and they shouldn't, but it doesn't mean that we don't have to have those conversations as a movement. And so I have this question on my mind and my heart like when we win - I think about this a lot as a movement builder - when we win, and so winning for me is like disrupting the state apparatus so that it can't function the way that it functions, we are taking power, right? And we are now in a position to determine how we move forward, which means we also have to be thinking about how is it that we are dealing with the people who we have identified as problems? When we start to win and when we take over what becomes different about who we are than what is happening right now? If it's just that there's different people in power, I'm not totally interested in that. I do think it requires us to rethink and reimagine what accountability looks like. And Mariame Kaba talks about this a lot. Accountability is also not punishment. It is a way to address harms that have been done, but it is also a, it's not a one directional process. Harm is collaborative. I think part of what I keep trying to drill down on, and I don't have the answers for this, so this is not a critique of like our movement it's more just reflections on my own self about, yeah, like when I feel harmed, when I am harmed either by somebody's policies, their practices or you know, whatever is happening, how am I engaging in such a way where we're not just replicating the same harm back and forth over and over again? At what point does that cycle get interrupted and what needs to happen for it to be interrupted? In the case of Ted Wafer and Renisha McBride, what needed to happen there to really interrupt that pattern of harm and abuse that they were actually symptomatic of, but not the totality of. What needs to happen, right? In this dynamic between George Zimmerman, who continues to be a perennial fucking idiot and the Martin family, right?

Josie: He really does. Right.

Alicia Garza: What needs to happen in order for there to be an intervention that sets it on a different course? And those are the big questions that I think we need to be grappling with when we're talking about accountability of any sort, whether it be with the police or politicians. And when we talk about abolition and what abolition looks like in real time, what are the interventions that we're making that interrupt the patterns that are killing our people?

Darnell: This is so good. You're almost sorta like, you keep hinting at the questions that we have yet to ask you like you're all up in our heads. Um, but as you're talking, I'm thinking about what some folk have called, like the crisis of imagination. On some occasions I remember having conversations with people and said, you know, in so many ways, so many of us are trying, especially black people, right? Like vulnerable folk within the context of the US and the globe we're spending our time trying to live so that you don't really have time to dream, you know? And I just want to talk a little bit about the importance of expanding our imaginations so that we can dream up new ways of being, new ways of relating. Ruthie Wilson Gilmore talks about abolition not only as an absence of the things that harm us, but it really is about imagining and building of the things that we need in place of the things that harm us. So talk a little bit about the usefulness of imagination. What we need in this moment to dream up new ways of being in a relationship with one another, new ways of thinking about justice beyond what we have and how critical that is, not only for the work, but also as critical to your own work?

Alicia Garza: Oh man. Okay. Yeah. Woo. Big questions. So the crisis of imagination and what are the interventions and practices that we need to make around that? I mean, for me personally, I spend a lot of time thinking about the crisis of imagination as it relates to politics and political systems. I spend a lot of time trying to get in the way of the weird symbolic and really denigrating ways that black people are and are not engaged in the decisions that impact our lives. And I think where the imagination comes in is like every time I have to remind a candidate that a plate of soul food is not an engagement strategy, then I also have to say what is an engagement strategy?

Darnell: I mean who's making that soul food though?

Alicia Garza: And wasting the soul food too, which is killing me. Anyways. Every time I have to have a conversation with a political party about how much they are or are not investing in engagement of black communities, I also have to be able to say what they have to be able to do. And so I feel like my imagination is always being tested because I know how frustrating it is to always run into nos with no path or pattern, right? And I think that our people really do deserve, our people deserve a regular practice of freedom dreaming that helps us get through the bullshit in our day, but also orders our steps towards what we actually care about. And how I personally do it, I can say - I'm just going to, I'm just going to say this and people are going to be mad, but I don't care - there's a lot I love about growing up in the Bay and part of it is this rich political history and rich political practice. And there's been a point for me where I've started to say I'm not sure choirs are helpful, right? For imagination. There have been many times in my own political trajectory where I have felt like I'm being taught what to think but not how to think. And so as a result, it has allowed me to be comfortable playing small because there was a cheering section. And so for me, the way that I cultivate imagination and counter the crisis of imagination is like really listening to and listening for like what am I doing, talking about, projecting, engaging around that is playing small and what am I talking about, communicating, engaging around that is inviting more people to be with me? Even people who aren't saying the same things I'm saying or don't say them the way that I say them. How am I inviting more and more people to be a part of the community that I'm trying to build and how do I get more invitations to the communities that other people are trying to build? That's my job. That's how I see my job. My job is not to find like a small group of people who all think and feel the same about a thing. That's not change to me. And somewhere along the way, I think part of what has helped me continue to cultivate that is just reminding myself and being aware of everything that becomes possible when you can touch more people. Being able to touch more people means that you get a wider view of what's actually happening in the world. Being able to touch more people means that you get new and layered and nuanced perspectives about how to solve a problem and who needs to be considered in the addressing of those issues. Reaching and touching more and more people means that actually when it's time to move, that you actually have a group of people who will roll with you from likely and unlikely corners, which is actually a strategic thing because it helps us get stuff done.

Alicia Garza: So, that for me has become kind of the centerpiece of how I'm engaging in political work right now, which also means that I have to sit with myself in the process of the change from like being super comfortable with a small group of people who all say and do the same thing to being really uncomfortable and sometimes lonely and isolated in a wider ocean where there's lots of different fish, there's lots of things happening in the, in the ecosystem. But I can say that that discomfort is how I know I'm in the right place. I don't think imagination happens when you're like in your tightest groove. Like imagination happens when you really got to figure some stuff out and you feel like, okay, I need to find the ground under my feet, I need to figure out like who's on my side, who's got my back, right? Like imagination comes from there for me personally. So that's my practice around how to cultivate it.

Darnell: I love it. And certainly your imagination has been quite expansive because you've been at the helm of a lot of projects and we want to end by having you just say a bit about the project you're working on, ones that we should be listening out for and how people can get involved.

Alicia Garza: Oh yes. Well, I am involved in many projects right now, but one that I'm super excited about is the Black Futures Lab and the Black to the Future Action Fund. In 2018, we conducted the largest survey of Black America in 154 years. And we got a lot of information about what black people experience in the economy, in our society and our democracy and most importantly, what black people envisioned for our futures. We spent 2019 going back into the communities that we collected data from, releasing the results of the survey and dreaming with folk about what was possible, not just with this data, but in particular with these freedom dreams that black folks were offering us. And so in 2020 we have taken that data and translated it into a black political agenda and are launching a program that we're calling Black to the Ballot. We know that 2020 is a turnout election and we know that black folks relationships to electoral organizing is very complicated.

Alicia Garza: And so we really seek to be a home for black folk who are trying to find their way through a very complicated political terrain, but offering also, what is it that we're fighting for? So when people are telling you and people are going to be telling you all year how important it is for you to vote, how important it is for you to get in lock step with everybody else, the thing that's actually gonna motivate black voters in 2020 is pushing for an agenda that addresses our needs. And so as we do that work to build that agenda, the agenda for a black future, we are also working to expand the black electorate in five states - California, Louisiana, Florida, Georgia and Alabama - by really tapping into black communities that are incredibly active but not electorally. So what does it look like when we build the capacity of black trans folks to actually be able to participate in the electoral process? What does it look like when we really invest in black rural communities or black immigrant communities to participate in the electoral process that they've been locked out of or left behind from? We are very excited to register, mobilize and activate 10,000 new black voters in advance of 2020 as our little contribution to making the change happen that we need to see in this country. Not just in the White House but in state houses and decision making places all over the country. So that's what I'm super passionate about. And if you want to know more about not only what we're up to but how you can get involved, you can visit us at blackfutureslab.org.

Josie: We are both inspired by you daily and really are so honored that you joined us. I wrote down like thirty things you said and I'll be thinking about them for at least the next ten years. So.

Darnell: Yeah she really has a whole page.

Josie: I really have a whole page. So we're so grateful for you joining us and thank you so much.

Alicia Garza: Well, thank you for having me.

66:36 Josie: Thank you so much again to our guest Alicia Garza, just an incredible woman, an incredible conversation. We're so thankful that you joined us. For show notes and to find other resources to read on this issue, please visit TheAppeal.org.

And on that note we're introducing a new element to our podcast this season. We received a number of emails from listeners asking for book recommendations. Mainly who our guests are reading or have read to help inform their perspective. So this season we're offering a bonus episode with our guests talking about books that have influenced them. So make sure to check out our first bonus for Alicia Garza! You can find it wherever you listen to podcasts or on The Appeal.org.

Darnell: And thanks to all of you for listening to Justice in America. I'm Darnell Moore.

Josie: I'm Josie Duffy Rice.

Darnell: You can find us on Twitter @Justice_Podcast, like our Facebook page at Justice in America and subscribe and rate us on Apple Podcast.

Josie: Justice in America is produced by Florence Barrau-Adams. The Production Assistant is Trendel Lightburn. Research Assistant Nawal Arjini. The location recording by Phoebe Gunter. Studio recordings at Real Voice LA. The engineer was Mike DeLay. And at Skyline Studios the engineer was Joe DiStefano. Thank you so much everyone for listening and we'll catch you next time.

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Justice in America Episode 21: Police Accountability

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As civilians, how do we hold the police responsible for wrongdoing? On the first episode of Season 3, Josie Duffy and co-host Darnell Moore discuss different avenues of police accountability and explain why it's so hard for the criminal justice system to hold police accountable.

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Eyes on the Prize Episode 12: A Nation of Law? 

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Eyes on the Prize Episode 12: A Nation of Law? 

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This episode covers the Chicago police murder of Fred Hampton and Mark Clark and Attica Prison Riots.

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Eyes on the prize - 12 - A Nation of Law? (1968-1971)

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A NATION OF LAW? (1968-71) - Black activism is increasingly met with a sometimes violent and unethical response from local and federal law enforcement agencies. In Chicago, two Black Panther Party leaders are killed in a pre-dawn raid by police acting on information supplied by an FBI informant. In the wake of President Nixon's call to "law and order," stepped-up arrests push the already poor conditions at New York's Attica State Prison to the limit. A five-day inmate takeover calling the public's attention to the conditions leaves 43 men dead: four killed by inmates, 39 by police.

UMA NAÇÃO DA LEI? (1968-1971) - O ativismo negro se deparou cada vez mais com uma resposta, por vezes violenta e sem ética, das agências de aplicação da lei local e federal. Em Chicago, dois líderes do partido Panteras Negras são mortos em um ataque da madrugada por policiais atuando a partir de informações fornecidas por um informante do FBI. Na esteira do apelo do presidente Nixon por "lei e ordem", a retomada dos aprisionamentos levou ao limite as condições já precárias da prisão estadual de Attica (estado de Nova Iorque). O motim de cinco dias, que chamou a atenção do público para estas condições, deixou 43 homens mortos: quatro mortos por detentos, 39 pela polícia.

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VISION FOR BLACK LIVES

Black humanity and dignity requires Black political will and power. Despite constant exploitation and perpetual oppression, Black people have bravely and brilliantly been the driving force pushing the U.S. towards the ideals it articulates but has never achieved.

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Black humanity and dignity requires Black political will and power. Despite constant exploitation and perpetual oppression, Black people have bravely and brilliantly been the driving force pushing the U.S. towards the ideals it articulates but has never achieved.

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Article in Scalawag Magazine

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Late in the evening on May 27th, 1821, Joe Forest and two accomplices canoed down the Santee River to South Island, nestled between the major port cities of Charleston and Georgetown in South Carolina.[1] The three fugitive slaves arrived on George Ford's plantation to steal some cattle for provisions for their camp further up river; such raids were commonplace for maroons who chose not to flee the South and instead made a life for themselves in the swamps and wilderness surrounding plantations.[2] While the men were slaughtering a cow and preparing it for the journey, George Ford was alerted to their presence and came out to pursue the men. Rather than face capture or death at the hands of the planter, the maroons shot at George Ford, who died almost instantly. On that night there began a three year search for Joe and his maroon gang by the White citizenry of coastal South Carolina, resulting in the first official police association in the area where Joe's camp was hidden.

Fast forward to 2015, a year when police in the United States killed 1,207 people. Young Black men are five times more likely to be killed by the police than White men of their same age. Simultaneously, the police are under perhaps the greatest scrutiny they have ever faced as an institution in this country. The riots in Ferguson and Baltimore and Oakland, the occupation of a police precinct in Minneapolis, and the waves of solidarity marches, riots, blockades, highway and bridge takeovers, and economic disruption that followed, have all brought tremendous attention to police training, their technologies, their structure, and their individual members. Some of this attention is the managed product of media outlets and politicians during an election season, almost totally divorced from the lived elements of unrest of the past two years. However, there are also many people asking real questions about the history and role of the cops, and what it could be like to live without them.

The histories contained in this piece are brought back to life when we directly attend to these questions. In reviving these histories, we rely on knowledge that has been generated by generations of mostly Black scholars and researchers, but also lives in the bodies and minds of freedom fighters, grandparents, storytellers, healers, artists, and lovers.

We argue that policing evolved as a method of control to enforce and protect a key economic foundation in the development of American (and global) capitalism: slavery. Policing also functioned to produce a society grounded in the "social death" of Black people.[3] Modern policing continued to evolve after chattel slavery to maintain the racialized division of labor and social divisions that slavery created, but which now (in a post-Emancipation society) had to be reproduced by other forms. This reproduction of authority, wealth, and White supremacy never ceased, and in many ways it has only grown stronger and more insidious.

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In the downtimes between national crises around unarmed police killings, all but the tiniest sliver of our society's discourse around the police isolates that institution as a "natural" arm of that other great "natural" phenomenon, the law--and as a phenomenon without a history. We can read this discourse in part as a set of creation myths, meant to justify the unique power the police have over life and death. And so it is not surprising that the logics of reform and progress, which seek to better but not break with society, rest on an assumption of the inevitability of the police, prison, and the law. But we show here that the police have a beginning, and so may also have an end. We present this piece not as a work of original research, but as our own collected notes and understanding of these inextricable links between slavery, capitalism, police, and civil society. We write this not simply to "set the record straight" on the history of police, as many have already done that work more completely elsewhere, but to understand how that might speak to our ongoing efforts to destroy the system that has been imposed upon us.

One Beginning Among Many

Within days of slaveowner George Ford's death, the Governor of South Carolina delivered a proclamation, including physical descriptions of Joe and his accomplice "Jack," as well as a $200 state reward for their apprehension. Georgetown citizens volunteered their own $300 towards the maroons' capture. Four days after the Governor's Proclamation a local militia, the "Columbian Greens" apprehended Jack and brought him to Georgetown to be tried for the murder of George Ford. Meanwhile, Joe managed to escape the multiple militias and remained free for the rest of the summer.

Georgetown's Court of Magistrates and Freeholders-White, propertied men, and the formal predecessors of today's citizen jurors-found "the evidence conclusive" that Jack was culpable for George Ford's death. He was found guilty and sentenced to be hanged on June 8th. On June 12th, the Captain of the Columbian Greens petitioned the Governor for his reward, claiming personal responsibility for apprehending the maroon. Captain Carnes received the $200 state reward after his son H.L. Carnes Jr. served as one of the men who condemned Jack to his death.

For the next two years, Joe remained at large, his legacy and band growing all the while. Joe and other maroons, with whom he communed and conspired, survived in a well-fortified camp at the headwaters of the Santee River in the densest swamp between Georgetown and Columbia-impenetrable to outsiders.

Maroons posed more than an economic loss to the plantation economy-they threatened both the legitimacy of its existence and its secure future. Maroons were proof that it was possible to subvert White control by navigating the wilderness surrounding plantation and town borders, living a life free of both enslavement and, largely, of waged work. Alliances formed in these swamps that betrayed the White supremacist pact of planter economics-poor Whites who were marginalized from proper society would trade with and assist maroons, though less is documented about these alliances. Shamefully, more is known about the frequency with which non-slaveowning, poor Whites aligned themselves with the planter class by volunteering in the militias and patrols who hunted down escaped slaves. Their collusion with the planter class, with whom they shared little besides racial identity, was absolutely crucial during times like the 1820s when generalized slave insurrections were not only rumor, but planned conspiracy.

Poor Whites, for instance, proved crucial when Denmark Vesey, a free Black man in Charleston, conspired alongside hundreds of enslaved and free Blacks in coastal South Carolina to overthrow the White planter class of the coast, free slaves, and sail to Haiti. This plot was uncovered in the summer of 1822, while forces north of Charleston struggled to control the threat that Joe and his gang posed on the Georgetown planter class. The two governing districts ended up collaborating to apprehend Joe. This collaboration between Georgetown and Charleston points to the evolving geopolitics of southern capitalism: the control of slaves, and especially escaped slaves, became less of a private matter of the individual slave-owner and more a public responsibility of White society and capital. Thus, after two years of failed searches by militias and informal posses, in the fall of 1823, the citizens of Pineville looked toward a hybrid solution between the militia and the posse-the Police.

Instituting an elaborate system of rewards-including manumission (the buying of a loyal slave's freedom), the citizens surrounding Joe's camp formed their own Pineville Police Association in October of 1823, "specifically to deal with the threat posed by Joe and his gang." Their strategy was to force the collaboration of enslaved people against maroons. Within a few days, an enslaved river-boat driver named Royal, who had been dealing with Joe and the maroons in that area for years, volunteered to lure Joe out of the Camp with promise to trade. When Joe and three other maroons emerged from their encampment, they were fatally shot by 23 members of the Pineville Police Association. Joe's head was stuck on a pole at the mouth of the river, "as a solemn warning to vicious slaves." One year later, 81 planters from central South Carolina petitioned the Governor to free Royal for "bringing to merited punishment an offender, against the laws of the land and against the laws of God." The state agreed to pay Royal's owner seven-hundred dollars, declaring that it was "'the policy of this state to reward those slaves who thus distinguish themselves by way of inducement to others to do so.'"

The hanging of Jack in 1821, of Denmark Vesey in 1822, and the shooting of Joe in 1823 did not mean defeat for fugitive slaves in South Carolina, and both maroonage and northward escape would continue to pose viable threats to slavery up through the Civil War. Meanwhile, by 1839, the constitution of the Pineville Police Association clearly stated its purpose as "the enforcement of a rigid system of police and the suppression of all traffick with slaves." The documents left behind from the courts, the newspapers, and the small town police in the wake of Joe Forest's capture and death foreshadow a world 200 years later--a world where the FBI is still issuing rewards for self-identified fugitive slaves. Assata Shakur, an invaluable part of the Black liberation movement of the seventies, lives in political exile in Cuba where she identifies as a "20th century escaped slave." Shakur fled the U.S. prison system after enduring an unfair trial, in which she stood accused of killing a New Jersey cop during a traffic incident on May 2nd, 1973. Thirty years after the shooting, on May 2nd, 2013 the FBI renewed their investment to hunt down and capture Assata and now offer two million dollars for her extradition to the United States.

A Broader View of Early Policing Forces in the Antebellum South

The example of Joe Forest's rebellion and the emergence of Pineville's original Police Association offers one poignant snapshot of the origins of the police in the South. A broader picture, including the roles and development of policing bodies in both rural and urban areas, offers some more insight. Officially designated by authorities as "slave patrols," "alarm men," or "searchers," and nicknamed "paddyrollers" or "paterolers" by those they policed, these emerging institutions changed during the 18th and 19th centuries in ways that directly foreshadowed the institutional and structural character of modern police forces.[4]

The first slave patrols that emerged not only depended upon but often coercively required the help of White people in policing slaves, whether they were slaveowners or not. A 1690 law in South Carolina, for instance, demanded "all persons under penalty of forty shillings to arrest and chastise any slave outside of his home plantation without a proper pass." These White people were volunteers, in the sense that they were unpaid and held other jobs, but they sometimes faced real punishment, such as fines or jail time, if they refused their duties. In this way, these slave patrols not only provided for the security of this highly profitable mode of production, but directly enforced and reproduced early racial designations. Whiteness meant not only a structurally reinforced privilege, but implied a duty and obligation toward a state and economy that was both constituted through slavery, and needed it to thrive.

Patrols of this kind were empowered to capture runaways and beat slaves caught travelling without a pass. As concerns of active revolt took hold, they would preemptively break up slaves' gatherings, search their homes, and seize their possessions.[5] The distinction is important: the patrols performed their activities not simply as hastily assembled bands sent out to catch a group of runaways or put down an ongoing revolt, but as a preventative body of racial, social and labor control. In many places, these patrols were also tasked with governing disorderly Whites, in particular vagrants, outsiders, and those who would trade with fugitives and maroons.

The authority of slave patrols typically lay with the militia at first, though this changed. In Mississippi, for example, the patrols were first performed by federal troops, then by militiamen, then finally by groups of White men appointed by the county. Many rural patrols started off as temporary or part-time, and eventually transitioned to full-time policing bodies. Accompanying those changes was the specialization of the police themselves. Though it varied across the South, in many places these patrols evolved from groups of able-bodied, White, male volunteers to paid employees, sworn in by the state and thus indemnified against lawsuits.

Policing bodies in the city evolved along similar lines. In 1783 the city of Charleston formed a City Guard that patrolled as a company, wore muskets and swords, and was tasked with breaking up slave gatherings and cutting down on urban crime. In her book on slave patrols, historian Sally Hadden quotes an Englishman who visited Charleston in the 1850's: "It was a stirring scene when the drums beat at the Guard house in the public square...to witness the negroes scouring the streets in all directions, to get to their places of abode, many of them in great trepidation, uttering ejaculations of terror as they ran."

In cities like Charleston it was not uncommon for slaves to live in one part of the city while their owners lived in another, making difficult the more private system of discipline of the plantations. It was also common for owners to "hire out" their slaves, for a fee, to early urban manufacturing firms. Municipal and state governments recognized the threat to labor control represented by these developments-South Carolina banned the practice for 90 years-but the system of hiring out slaves was immensely profitable, and regulations against it went largely ignored. In this sense, urban police emerged and modernized during the historical and spatial intersection of industrialized labor and slavery. Industrialization and urbanization forced changes in and additions to the private, informal methods of discipline characteristic to the classical plantation system, but not with the intent to lessen White control over Black bodies, or to diminish an enormously profitable system of agrarian capitalism.

Though they varied in pace by city and region, these developments in social control-the slave patrols' preventative function; their specialization as a paid, permanent force; the establishment of civilian rather than military control over the patrols, ultimately by municipal authorities; and the patrols' role in policing racialized neighborhood territories of early industrial workers-all point directly towards modern policing.[6] These forces were already a modern (and modernizing) apparatus of social control long before the Civil War.

Transitions in Policing during Reconstruction

The modernity, industry, and racial "reconciliation" of the post-war period, imposed in part by Northern liberators, directly relied on and enhanced the role and structure of police. The Reconstruction period resulted in a power vacuum in much of the South, whereby experiments in freedom and self-determination could be undertaken with newfound brazenness. Maroons in places like North Carolina's Great Dismal Swamp and the Sea Islands continued their efforts at communal life, while former slaves in places like the Ogeechee Neck of lowcountry Georgia armed themselves, raided rice plantations, and occupied the(ir) land, declaring, "No Whites between the Ogeechees!" In Robeson County, North Carolina, a band of Lumbee Indians, former slaves, and disaffected Whites called the Lowry Gang exacted revenge on the plantation aristocracy by assassinating former Confederate officials, expropriating and redistributing crops, and refusing to work in the industrializing sectors of the economy.

It's important to remember that "emancipation" was a program that many Black people had already interpreted on their own terms and had been carrying out before and during the Civil War. In that context, and that of the post-war period where open, armed rebellion by laboring people was a serious threat, the project of northern institutions like that of the Freedmen's Bureau often had more to do with ensuring labor discipline in the newly emerging wage-labor economy than ensuring any kind of meaningful racial "justice." Eric Foner suggests that institution revealed itself to be the enforcer of the old economy in new terms:

The "two evils" against which the Bureau had to contend, an army officer observed in July 1865, were "cruelty on the part of the employer and shirking on the part of the negroes." Yet the Bureau, like the army, seemed to consider the Black reluctance to labor the greater threat to its economic mission. In some areas, agents continued the military's urban pass systems and vagrancy patrols, as well as the practice of rounding up unemployed laborers for shipments to plantations. Bureau courts in Memphis dispatched impoverished Blacks convicted of crimes to labor for Whites who would pay their fines.

It was not uncommon for northern White "liberators" to force former slaves to labor for their former masters at the point of a bayonet, often making use of the very same systems of identifying people and controlling their movement developed under slavery. Those systems of policing were indispensable to disciplining former slaves into the new exploitation of the wage, and thus crucial to the project of industrializing the South after the war. Militia patrols, rewards, bounty hunters, informants, and court structures, for example, were used both by former Confederates in Robeson County as well as northerners and Republicans in an attempt to stem the Lowry Gang's rebellion.

Ultimately, there evolved in the post-war period a "hybrid" system of discipline and social control in the South. This system integrated private forms of discipline consistent with the plantation, the publicly authorized rural and urban patrols alongside Northern judicial practices, institutions of social work and management like the Freedmen's Bureau, and industrialized modes of work and the wage. This meant that although there were already modernizing police forces in the South before the end of the war, those forces had to adapt to the post-war realities of controlling wage labor, unemployment, urbanization, and social codes of segregation all without the "help" of a legalized system of slavery.

Some Closing Notes on Policing, Whiteness, and Civil Society

It's beyond the scope of this piece to further elaborate on the continuity of anti-Blackness and White supremacy endemic to policing and the law after the period of Reconstruction. Suffice to say, White supremacy in America remained both literally and figuratively business as usual into the 20th century, during the periods defined by convict leasing, Jim Crow segregation, and the country's massive prison boom-the "afterlife of slavery" as author Saidiya Hartman has put it.

Plenty of folks will consider the painting of 21st century police as modern-day "slave catchers" as nothing more than metaphor and hyperbole. But as we (and many others) have already demonstrated, modernized police actually emerged in the South during slavery-they literally were slave catchers. We would ask those who desire an "accountable" or "just" police force: At what point in this history, in what period, do they believe that police became an institution that intended anything other than the reproduction of capital and the enforced social death of Black people? When has there ever been a break, either social or economic, political or existential, with this contiguous line of flight towards dispossession and misery? Slavery functions not just as the historical origin point of policing, but also as its continued ontological force and psychological foundation. How could there ever be "accountability" with such an institution?

Slavery itself can of course be defined by and considered from any number of theoretical viewpoints, of which we can only scratch the surface in this space. Two perspectives do seem necessary to mention here. First is a materialist perspective, which primarily defines slavery as an economic condition of bondage and forced labor. The other, suggested by historians like Orlando Patterson, defines slavery not so much by forced labor as by a threefold condition of dishonor or "social death," the systematic rupture of familial ties and genealogical continuity, and gratuitous violence.

Our interest here lies in considering how 21st century policing in fact fulfills the conditions of both perspectives. The police undeniably coerce labor participation in the capitalist economy and thereby reproduce patterns of forced labor, for example by securing unpaid labor for prison facilities, or by preventing acts of collective expropriation, criminalizing lifestyles that resist wage work, and policing the boundaries between the legal/illegal economies, all of which forces those without capital to sell our labor for a wage. Likewise, it's just as possible to see how police continue to fulfill the conditions of slavery identified by Patterson, for example by breaking up familial connections via the mass removal of Black bodies from their communities into the prison system, destroying Black social organization with programs like COINTELPRO, or enacting limitless violence against young Black people in poorer neighborhoods across the country.

The other aspect to this role of police in reproducing conditions of slavery is their role in the reproduction of Whiteness, not just as a set of assumed, individual privileges but also as a structurally reinforced civil duty to the state via inclusion in the social body, citizenship, and Humanity itself. The genesis of this duty is clear in the use of White, non-slaveowning volunteers in the early slave patrols and in the deputizing of White people for the posse comitatus, among many other possible examples.[7] To quote Saidiya Hartman again, "The slave is the object or the ground that makes possible the existence of the bourgeois subject and, by negation or contradistinction, defines liberty, citizenship, and the enclosures of the social body." It follows that the policing of Black people implies, again by contradistinction, a White inclusion in the social body that indicates a specific relationship to the state.

This has real consequences that can only be touched upon here, both in its challenge to the individualizing discourse of privilege politics, so hegemonic in Left circles, as well as in its challenge to the traditional sphere of legitimized (Black or White) activist politics we call "civil society." It raises practical questions for those of us who wish to not just understand policing but actively undermine and destroy it. How do certain forms of activism reinforce a civil relation to the state as a prerequisite for "change"? If the terrain of civil society is inherently and permanently marked by Whiteness, capitalism, and state structures, what forms of organizing against the police are less (or not) limited by this terrain?

These are just some of the questions attending to the history of slavery and policing, as those forces continue to haunt both normal, daily life as well as the increasingly common moments where that normality is ruptured in some way. But slavery doesn't just hover in the background like a specter from another century; it actively tells us who we are and where our loyalties lie, it distinguishes the dead from the living, it holds the keys to prison cells and patrols our streets.

[1] All original research about Joe Forest and the maroon struggle of South Carolina in this section can be found in Timothy Lockley Maroon Communities in South Carolina: A documentary record (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2009), 93-120. As well as Timothy Lockley and David Doddington "Maroon and Slave Communities in South Caroling Before 1865." The South Carolina Historical Magazine Volume 113, No. 2 (April 2012). The sequence of events and original court and newspaper documentation can all be found in those sources. The stylizing of narrative is our own.

[2] "Maroon" is a term that originated from the Spanish "cimarron" meaning "wild, not tame" typically referring to domestic livestock that went into the woods, escaping their pastures. However, this word morphed over time into a self-identified term by more permanently escaped slaves who led slave revolts from the Caribbean to Brazil to the American South. Lockley, Maroon Communities, ix.

[3] We use the concept of "social death" in the tradition of historians of slavery such as Orlando Patterson and Saidiya Hartman. Implied is not just physical, violent dispossession but a dispossession of and from both place and self, whereby one is separated not only from their past but also from possible future generations. In such a context, one is not simply made to labor for others, but in fact entirely excluded from the category of Human.

[4] Most of the research for this section can be found in the new edition of Kristian Williams' excellent and exhaustive book, Our Enemies in Blue: Police and Power in America. Kristian Williams, Our Enemies in Blue: Police and Power in America. (Oakland: AK Press, 2015).

[5] One is reminded of the 1984 Comprehensive Crime Control Act which, among an array of get-tough-on-crime policies, expanded the state's ability to seize the assets of convicted or accused drug dealers. The act established a direct and ingenious tool for the financial reproduction of the departments themselves. Neal Shirley and Saralee Stafford, Dixie Be Damned: 300 Years of Insurrection in the American South. (Oakland: AK Press, 2015), 248-249.

[6] We owe some of our taxonomies of police functions to Kristian Williams' criteria that distinguish "modern" policing from its earlier forms. Ibid., 53-54.

[7] Likewise, every car that passes by on the highway with a "thin blue line" sticker is a modern-day reminder of this, best understood not as a symbolic political support of law enforcement but as the expression of a conscious social contract between White citizens and the police.

References & Suggested Reading

Anonymous. "Between Strangers and Friends: Reading Baldwin and Genet," Baeden: Journal of Queer Time Travel Vol. 3 (2015): 53-114.

Eric Foner. A Short History of Reconstruction. New York, NY: Harper & Row, 1990.

Frank Wilderson."'We're Trying to Destroy the World:' Anti-Blackness and Police Violence after Ferguson." Chicago: Ill Will Editions, 2014.

K. Aarons. "No Selves to Abolish: Afropessimism, Anti-Politics, and the End of the World." Chicago: Ill Will Editions, 2016.

Kristian Williams. Our Enemies in Blue: Police and Power in America (Third Edition). Oakland, California: AK Press, 2015.

Neal Shirley and Saralee Stafford. Dixie Be Damned: 300 Years of Insurrection in the American South. Oakand, California: AK Press, 2015.

Orlando Patterson, Slavery and Social Death: A Comparative Study (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1982).

Saidiya Hartman. Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997.

Sally E. Hadden. Slave Patrols: Law and Violence in Virginia and the Carolinas. Cambridge, Massachussetts: Harvard University Press, 2003.

Tim Lockley and David Doddington. "Maroon and Slave Communities in South Caroling Before 1865." The South Carolina Historical Magazine Volume 113, No. 2 (April 2012).

Timothy James Lockley. Maroon Communities in South Carolina: A Documentary Record. Columbia, South Carolina: University of South Carolina Press, 2009.

WEB Dubois. Black Reconstruction in America. Oxford: Oxford University Press 2007.

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Late in the evening on May 27th, 1821, Joe Forest and two accomplices canoed down the Santee River to South Island, nestled between the major port cities of Charleston and Georgetown in South Carolina.[1] The three fugitive slaves arrived on George Ford's plantation to steal some cattle for provisions for