“Our Power Is Where We Choose One Another”: Abolitionists Discuss Our Moment

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Movement Memos

“This is a moment that is going to be looked back on 50 years from now, 100 years from now, and what is going to be said of us is how we came out of this moment,” says M4BL organizer M Adams. In this episode of “Movement Memos,” host Kelly Hayes talks with Adams and community organizer Montague Simmons about the last decade of Black-led organizing, the state of movements against police violence, and where prison and police abolitionists should go from here.

Music by Son Monarcas, HATAMITSUNAMI & Guustavv

TRANSCRIPT

Note: This a rush transcript and has been lightly edited for clarity. Copy may not be in its final form.

Kelly Hayes: Welcome to “Movement Memos,” a Truthout podcast about organizing, solidarity and the work of making change. I’m your host, writer and organizer Kelly Hayes. Last month, activists and organizers in Ferguson and St. Louis marked the 10-year anniversary of the murder of Mike Brown, who was gunned down by a police officer, and the uprising that followed. In the years since Mike Brown’s death, Black organizers have challenged police violence, targeted police budgets, created new community safety projects and built solidarity across movements. In spite of those efforts, police killed a record number of people in 2023, and officials have doubled down on police budgets in many municipalities, and at the federal level. With the Democratic Party lurching further to the right, this feels like an important moment to take stock of what movements against police violence have endured and accomplished over the last decade, and to talk about where police and prison abolitionists should go from here. Today, we will be hearing from M Adams and Montague Simmons. M Adams is a community organizer and the movement infrastructure executive with the Movement for Black Lives (M4BL). M Adams has been a leader in Wisconsin politics as the Co-Executive Emeritus of Freedom, Inc., and the Take Back the Land Movement. Montague Simmons is a community organizer and human rights activist based in St. Louis. As director of strategic partnerships for the Movement for Black Lives, Montague is responsible for expanding movement relationships across M4BL’s broader movement goals.

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KH: Montague and M, welcome to “Movement Memos.”

Montague Simmons: Thank you, Kelly. Good to be with you.

M Adams: Thank you. I’m excited to be here.

KH: Can the two of you introduce yourselves and tell the audience a bit about your work?

MA: Sure thing. My name is M Adams, just the letter M, and I use all gender pronouns said respectfully, and I’m one of the co-executive directors of the Movement for Black Lives.

MS: My name is Montague Simmons, I use he/him pronouns, and I direct strategic partnerships for the M4BL ecosystem. And I’m born and raised in St. Louis.

KH: Well, so glad to have you both on the show. In August, protesters in Ferguson marked the tenth anniversary of Mike Brown’s murder and the uprisings that followed. In the decade since Mike Brown’s death, we have seen waves of mobilization around police brutality, including the uprisings of 2020. In spite of heightened awareness of police killings, and aggressive organizing in Black communities, at least 1,232 were killed by US police in 2023, making it the deadliest year for victims of police violence in over a decade. Montague, in the local context of Ferguson and St. Louis, can you talk about what’s changed since Mike Brown’s death, and how police and public officials have escalated the violence of policing over the last ten years?

MS: So in 2014, in the wake of the uprisings, there was actually a significant response, both to the scale of uprisings locally, but I think even more so to the spotlight that was placed on the city nationally. A lot of questions came or I think governance to wrestle with, but also movement literally took advantage of the moment. Initially, just before, in August 2014, forces on the ground had been fighting just for basic things like a civilian oversight board and for more transparency. They were able to within, I want to say, 12 to 18 months actually win a civilian oversight board in the city of St. Louis. But within the municipalities surrounding Ferguson, in St. Louis County, there was not as much significant transformation. What we did see were in some of those municipalities layers of consolidation.

And we also saw, I’ll say for a period [of time], there was less aggressive policing, meaning during the ’90s and well before that and the 2000s, you literally would have ongoing police interactions, whether they’re pulling you over in stops, but also doing checks to verify insurance, checks to verify sobriety, and we saw a decline in that type of activity. But what also emerged during that period on the movement side was a fight in courts around the way folks had actually been treated, a fight around holding people just for inability to pay bail. And we actually were able to, in some places, lessen the amount of people that had actually been incarcerated. But what I’ll say, right now, I think we are in a period of assessment around what’s actually shifted in the decade because some of what’s also been noticed is the police have actually… I don’t want to make a claim that we can’t fully track, but we’ve noticed a pattern of less or different kinds of responses from police.

And what I would assess from that is that that is part of framing a narrative that violence has increased as a result of the work that we’ve been doing since the uprisings in 2014. I think organizers and attorneys, analysts, policy makers have actually been trying to reach for data to verify what’s real. But what we know is in the large scope, crime has actually continued to go down. The people who’ve honestly been affected and been working with our bail programs show up whether there’s money, whether there’s actually bail or not, in high numbers.

But there is still a dominant narrative that police are directly connected to safety that is still under deep contention. And as a result of that, we’ve seen more funds go into policing and increasing recruitment and different weapons and, what do I want to call it? Deployments. Like what we’re seeing now in Atlanta, this being stood up in Cop City. We’re seeing models like that appear around the country and those things feel like a direct response to the demand that came out of Ferguson in 2014 around demilitarization of the police and re-prioritization of those funds.

KH: M, what do you feel has changed at a national level, over the last ten years?

MA: I think that’s an interesting question to ask: well, what exactly is different, or what really changed in the last 10 years? In some ways a lot of things changed. The public consciousness and broader narrative was challenged and in some ways shifted. So you had, prior to 2014, abolition was not a popular idea. It was not a popular concept. Most folks didn’t discuss it, didn’t know what it meant. And the tenants of policing or questioning the legitimacy of policing was still seen as a more fringe issue despite the important organizing and abolitionist work that had been happening for decades.

Due to the uprisings of 2014, and even more so with the uprisings in 2020 related to the murder of Black people by the police, that ideological shift happened in many ways. You had everyday people at home, at kitchen tables discussing should we actually defund them? Well, what really is the point of policing? Are police actually kind or good to Black people? And you have people from all different identities, socioeconomic statuses, experiences, asking those questions. And that’s huge. You don’t usually see that kind of ideological shift happen so quickly. It usually takes a generation or generations to create that kind of ideological shift. And that culturally felt different in terms of being able to interact with other institutions and organizations who were beginning to prioritize or appearing to prioritize the acknowledgement of the carceral state as violent, as anti-Black, as something that needed to be abolished.

What is also different is there was a proliferation of Black organizing and Black organizations. Prior to 2014, there were not as many Black organizations. And in fact, most Black-led organizing work had to really fall under the banner of people of color as there wasn’t specific resources, time, attention given specifically to Black people. And after 2014, you saw very clearly initiatives that focused on the Black community organizations that are dedicated to the Black community and Black leadership running and governing those organizations. And so there was, I can speak for the Movement for Black Lives… dozens of organizations have been created between 2014 and now. And that creates a real shift in local communities, in the national landscape, et cetera. So in some ways we’re on very different terrain.

The reason why that question is interesting is, the other side of that is in some ways a lot of things haven’t changed at all. I think we have done a lot of work around a cultural shift and narrative power building and popularizing the concept. So we can call on NBA, NFL, folks taking knees in solidarity with the struggle on the ground. We can look at academic institutions that have dedicated resources to Black studies or Black leadership advancing scholarship in this area. We can look at public health institutions that talk more focusedly about social determinants of health of Black people. So we’ve had impact.

But then if we do a measurement of, well, how has that really transformed to Black communities having more power and Black communities being in a greater position to self-determine what actually happens to us, not a lot has actually shifted. And so we still have a lot of work to do. And I want to be clear, that shift didn’t happen around power, not because we took our work any less serious or that we didn’t fight hard for it. It is because the opposition and the dominant narrative and power structures of the United States and the world are based upon white supremacy, gendered, racial capitalism and patriarchy.

KH: Montague, how has Black organizing changed in Ferguson and St. Louis over the last ten years? What are the organizers in those communities up against in 2024?

MS: Since 2014, honestly, Black organizing has actually transformed in many ways. Before 2014, on one hand, there were only a handful of organizations who were around to respond to issues specifically around police violence and issues of divestment. But the other thing around that reality was there was little to no investment in those organizations. August 9th changed that dramatically in that there was actually a courageous front of folks who actually did make an effort to support some of the organizing work, not only in terms of philanthropy, but people began to donate in different ways. In the wake of Ferguson, a very new ecosystem of organizations came to life and began to work strategically together, many of them moving directly in a divestment framework. And in doing so, were able to build the power, on one hand not only to respond directly to police violence as it continued, but even specifically to close, say, the jail in St. Louis city, The Workhouse, which everyone knew for a long time was a dungeon, and it had actually been a 40-year campaign. A constellation of organizations took that on from different vantage points of both organizing, litigation, and then around both bail and supporting clients to make the case that not only was it inhumane to hold these people, but it was unwarranted because most of the folks in the jail were pre-trial.

In addition to that, part of what we’ve seen is more capacity on the ground. I think so many people have actually been inspired by the uprising, that many of the folks who at the time may have either been students, or in many cases just witnesses in the community, were actually transformed and activated. Some of them went on to do organizing, like we see in the case of specifically Kayla Reed of Action St. Louis, other folks stepped into different arenas. Some of the folks I can think of would be Rasheen Aldridge, who’s currently an Aldermen in the city, Alisha Sonnier is actually on the St. Louis City School Board, and obviously Cori Bush, who ended up running for Congress. These people, if not for Ferguson, may not have actually chosen that path. And for the most part, have actually tried hard to stay aligned with the movement values that they actually gained in that fight.

KH: Can you speak to the waves of repression that folks have experienced? I know that the protesters marking the anniversary of Mike Brown’s death have been hounded by police in the wake of those protests.

MS: Since day one there has been repression, there have been deaths under suspicious circumstances. I think personally, my own experience started with clear surveillance. Initially, even the week of the initial uprising, I started getting police surveilling my house, literally shining spotlights through, but a lot of folks, they witnessed and experienced even worse. And still to this day, there is at least one person who’s still incarcerated, Josh Williams, who was at the time literally had just turned 18 in the wake of the uprising, who was imprisoned in a long stint, for something I think many of us still question around his participation in one of the actions.

But part of what actually has endured for many of them, many of the folks who’ve been involved, has been layers of trauma, not only from the discreet repression, but just from the actual experience, meaning being in the field and having to drink so much tear gas, the trauma of actually having bullets thrown at you and not knowing where to go and not feeling safe. And in that, folks have actually built additional community. I think about the Black Healers Network actually formed as a response to not only what we’ve been experiencing with the uprisings, but just trying to think through better ways of actually handling ongoing trauma as it hits our community. And then there’s also been a wound clinic that’s actually also opened up as well to begin to train more and more folks actually how to respond to discreet traumas.

And I think the other reality is within St. Louis, St. Louis already experienced violence well before this and had actually normalized it. It had just not made the direct connection and correlations between policing as also being a form of violence, or the fact that state power would actually be wielded against it. So some of these things, unfortunately, had already been normalized and that trauma already embodied. So, part of what happened in the wake of the uprising was that recognition. And in many cases, many of us have actually been able to engage with different ways of therapy, and engaging in the work itself as a means of both healing and transformation.

KH: In the face of so much repression and backlash, what do you think Black liberation movements have successfully built over the last decade? What have some of those movement victories looked like?

MS: Some of what we’ve seen, especially at the ground level, have been a variety of different campaigns that emerged, some that were targeting depopulating folks that had actually been imprisoned, like I mentioned before, pre-trial. Meaning that they were held in jails in different cities around the country for very little money, but money that they could not afford to actually pay. I know in St. Louis, The Workhouse that I mentioned before, some of those folks had been in jail for more than a year over very minimal fees.

So there were campaigns that actually emerged in cities around the country. I can think about Black Mama’s Bail Out that started both in Atlanta, but then became a coordinated campaign nationally. It began to depopulate folks, but also to challenge the narrative that bail was effective at keeping folks safe, when the data that we began to surface, was when we actually effectively provided the resources they needed to get out, folks still returned to court. They still actually returned and made whatever arrangements were needed to make themselves whole and to stand in justice.

In addition to that, there were some experiments that did happen, both electorally and just civically, meaning folks have actually attempted to stand up. Well one, folks actually attempted to run progressive candidates. In some places, the framework of progressive prosecutors, and have been able to win. That is very much an experiment that I think folks are in assessment of in this moment. Because in some cases, and discreetly in St. Louis, we found ourselves unable to hold the prosecutor accountable, and then ended up facing that same person who we got elected as a challenge. Other places have seen more success. I’m thinking like Philadelphia and a few other cities definitely out east.

In addition to that, I know some cities have also been able to engage in some level of participatory budgeting, that actually begin to make slow shifts of funds that have been going into carceral and shifting that into a more holistic fashion. The most successful things that we’ve seen stand up are literal interventions that I think of specifically in Durham. They’ve stood up an alternative response to police, meaning that if someone’s going through a mental health crisis, instead of actually calling police, they have an alternative.

We’ve seen the same thing out of California with the Anti Police-Terror Project. They have alternative people they can call when they don’t feel safe when their friends or family are going through crisis, they don’t have to call someone who is directly going to activate a carceral response or a violent response. So our folks have actually been experimenting and they’ve had political room. I don’t know how much longer that’s going to last. We’ve definitely seen a withdrawal from some of the experiments, both by philanthropy and the question of whether there’s continued civic will to engage. But I think our folks are also in the process of making sure we’re capturing the data and the findings, so we can share and continue to explain to folks that there are other ways for us to keep ourselves safe, that don’t have to be responses by people with guns.

MA: To build on what Montague is saying, also, I think that the gains are significant and the impact is significant of Black liberation movement’s contribution to a new society over the last 10 years. Other ways that I see it, is that policing and abolition have become key debates inside of local and municipal races, where mayors, school board members, alderpeople are having to contend with their position on policing in a public way, even creating more space for more leftist or more progressive candidates to win in some key areas. And I think that that has also been true for national and federal elections as well.

Other advancements that I think we see, is I think about how part of the reason why the uprisings in 2020 in response to the police murder of Breonna Taylor and George Floyd were so big and impactful, is because of the work that happened prior in 2014, to shaken, to awaken a mass of people to say, “Black people don’t deserve this. We don’t deserve this. We should do something.” And so when I think about the sort of electoral and policy shifting, or attempts to shift that happened in response in 2020, I think a lot of that is to be accredited back as well to the uprising in 2014, which seeded, if you will, or begin to get the temperature or the fodder, or begin to fuel that opportunity or fuel that rebellion happening in 2020.

When I think about organizations even in Minneapolis who were able to put on a ballot, “Can we reconstitute? Can we restructure the Department of Public Safety?” That’s huge to imagine that a city could put on the ballot, “Do we continue this police department?” It’s no small thing. That’s actually a huge thing. But I don’t think that would’ve been possible without the work before in 2014.

I also think, again, to Montague’s point about the leadership that emerged, I think to me, I think that that may be the most profound shift or the most profound win or advancement for our movement, is we actually have dozens upon dozens of [people in] leadership, new leadership, activated leadership across the age spectrum. Young people, older people, elder people, middle-aged people who’ve entered movement or been reinvigorated to be back in movement. It’s huge.

And so those folks are fighting for school board positions in their local areas. Those folks are engaged, like Montague was saying, engaged in alternatives and experiments to actually practice what safety, security, and care means for communities that is not the police. Those folks are engaged in helping to create federal legislation. And so for the Movement for Black Lives, we were able to put forward the vision for Black Lives, as well as the BREATHE Act and the People’s Response Campaigns, all key and important legislative interventions to say, “Here’s the pathway to creating the world we want that is good and just for Black people and the planet.” And so I think there’s a spectrum of gains that have happened. And I want to say a little bit about the repression.

As we have been building, as the Black left and Black movement has been building its ability to take power and position ourselves to be self-governing so that we can create the world we want, our opposition has been very busy and trying to thwart or stop those efforts. So, where you see that there’s been a proliferation of organizations on the Black left who are advancing these agendas, there’s been a proliferation of vigilante violence and far right, white supremacist, patriarchal, capitalist organizing from the ground.

And that has produced a set of attacks, which we see as a form of repression against our communities and our movements. That ranges from the ways that our opposition has been trying to take over school boards. And we know that school and education have been important sites of contestation for the Black left. We see them trying to regain or reclaim power. We see attacks at the federal level, whether that is attacks on our bodily autonomy through the striking down of Roe v. Wade and anti-trans bills that are threatening to sweep the country state by state, and also a threat nationally. We see the rise of a popular fascist movement happening from MAGA and other far right entities.

And so I think it’s important to understand that that is in response from our success of challenging where power sits. And so I think this is a very interesting moment in history where power is up for grabs, governing is up for grabs, and I think we really are struggling with the questions of, which vision is going to take us forward? Which vision is going to advance the country and advance the world? And I think that that question is posed in the way that it has been because of the organizing that was birthed and started and moved through the Ferguson uprising in 2014 through the last decade, and certainly building on the history before that.

The other thing that I want to say about repression is that our organizing on the ground has been successful in some ways in challenging police expansion projects. The organization I was with for many years, Freedom, Inc., we were successful in stopping the construction of a new jail, which would’ve been upwards of $150 million. And it wasn’t just us, right? That kind of organizing was happening around the country.

The state has been inventive and creative and very harmful in how it has responded. When I think about the organizing happening in Atlanta right now with the Stop Cop City efforts, a successful organizing intervention, or what was becoming a successful organizing intervention to stop the creation of essentially a cop city, where a campus would be built that would hypermilitarize the police and also take significant resources away from communities, in particular Black communities, that will lead to further criminalization and harm and violence against Black people. Because of the organizing work that was happening, it’s rebellion, it’s gaining attention, the state has responded in very aggressive ways, beginning to threaten RICO charges for organizers, threatening to lock people up who bought, like actually sticking tape or paper for flyers or just for really criminalizing non-criminal or non-illegal activity, threatening RICO charges against that. That level of repression exists because of the work that has been building and moving from the rebellions of 2014. So, in some ways we are in both a qualitative and quantitative, different moment of struggle or phase of struggle where the state is responding very strongly with this form of repression even to very fairly benign or green organizing work. And so I think that’s something we have to closely look at and plan around.

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KH: Next year, Kamala Harris could be the first Black woman to become President of the United States. Some people are already celebrating this as a major victory for Black communities. Others are pointing to the Vice President’s unwillingness to support meaningful action to end the genocide that Israel is currently waging against Palestinians in Gaza. There has been some friction on social media between some Harris supporters and Palestinian organizers, which some people have attempted to frame as a conflict between Black and Palestinian activists. With social media, it’s hard to know what’s real and what’s being manufactured. So, from an organizing perspective, can you talk about the history of solidarity between Black and Palestinian liberation movements? How are M4BL organizers and other Black organizers you work with approaching your solidarity work with Palestine in the context of this election?

MS: So first, yeah, it’s important to ground in the fact that Black radical organizers have stood directly with the Palestinian people since the occupation began. You’ll find writings going back to the beginning of the occupation, to the Black Panther Party, to even Malcolm X like naming both the occupation and colonization as an issue that both we know well, and that it was stark and easy for us to see both the parallels in their experience of both displacement and apartheid as being lived realities that we both share in facing empire. Specifically from my experience in St. Louis, I think our relationship became deeply tethered in the wake of the Ferguson uprising. Organizers in Palestine, West Bank and Gaza sent messages to folks on the ground here who were just activated via social media.

And they knew not only the weapons that we were actually facing, the MRAPs and the teargas that were sprayed, but they actually helped explain, “This is how you can actually survive. Go into it with your face wrapped like this. Make sure you have all the water, the Maalox, the different tools.” And not only were they doing it from afar, the solidarity was tangible and real. They actually sat through not only strategy meetings with us, but they actually were in the field. Folks were capturing this, and they knew… They actually helped unpack for us… The tactics that we saw them deploying in the streets were in some cases actually learned directly from practices that police had gone over to Palestine. And they stood with Israeli police officers and received training. So yeah, for us, one, it’s hard for me to actually… I think you’re right when you named that we don’t know who’s who when there’s actually layers of division.

At the same time, I do want to hold that there is an excitement among Black people to actually have the potential of another Black candidate ascend to the presidency. But that’s not for us a contradiction that we haven’t held before. I think the challenge is in this moment, making certain that as we enter closer and closer to November, that as organizers, we are continually highlighting the reality of the behavior of the administration, the reality of the apartheid on the ground, the continuing aggressive war against the people of Palestine, and the U.S.’s complicity in it. In the Vision for Black Lives, which we launched in 2014, embedded in the invest/divest plank of the platform, we talk about the militarism that the U.S. is literally funding in Palestine, and we call for divestment there. That call stands.

So right now, the main demand that we’ve heard from our Palestinian siblings has been not only the stop and ceasefire, but knowing that even when there was a ceasefire, money is still going. They want to see an arms embargo applied to make sure that there’s literally a stop to funding going in. And they saw an opportunity — if one of their folks, either someone who’s literally been either a doctor in the field or another Palestinian, would actually be able to speak to the Democratic National Convention from the stage and be paralleled to the Israeli family who also spoke from the stage to tell their story.

And 50 years from 1964, when the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party organized themselves, captured delegates came to the Democratic National Convention to not only talk about their own disenfranchisement, but the apartheid and violence that they experienced in Mississippi, they were invisibilized. They were not allowed to actually take the stage. There’s a lot of stories underneath that, I’m sure, around how that happened and the forces that actually prevented that, prevented their voice from being heard. Just as we know that there are other forces who have continued to respond, even to our solidarity. We spoke before about Cori Bush, and Wesley Bell’s opposition to her was directly in response to her solidarity in demanding a ceasefire.

I can say specifically for our lane of Black movement, I don’t think anything’s going to undermine that. And our relationship to broader Black people has to continually be one that helps clarify the political moment, understanding both who the candidates are, not only the landscape on which we operate, but what we’re actually still accountable for and what we have to hold them accountable for, and how to continue to advance the demands that we’ve been living in now for more than a decade.

MA: It’s also important to understand that at our root, the Movement for Black Lives is an anti-imperialist organization. Because of that, we are clear about, domestically, what that means. We have an understanding that the police function as an occupying force against Black communities, and that is a result of imperial and colonial rule. Therefore, we also have to be in solidarity with the struggles of Palestine for a Free Palestine, as we are against any form of colonial domination and imperialist rule. That expands beyond the conditions of the United States, and also the conditions of folks in Palestine. We see clearly the need for a liberated Haiti, a free and liberated Sudan, a free and liberated many different places in the world. And I think that as the Movement for Black Lives, we are unapologetic, we are unequivocal, we are unwavering in our commitment ending all forms of colonial domination and imperialism. For us, it is not a question about our position for the liberation and the solidarity for Palestine.

We see them as inextricably linked to the liberation of Black people. We do not think Black people can be free anywhere in the world as long as any form of a colonial or an imperialist nation state is able to dominate or subjugate any group. Because we know that the group that will ultimately be most hurt or harmed by that of subjugation is Black people, is African people. And because we are anti-imperialist, we are also clear about having a pan-African politic. And so we see it as deeply in alignment with our pan-Africanist, our feminist, our leftist politics to be on the clear side of the liberation of the Palestinian communities. In addition to us having a personal connection, we have that clear political understanding.

I will also say about the electoral landscape right now is as grassroots organizers, as folks who are building a base, working with everyday people, helping them understand how their issues are connected to the broader issues of injustices and take action, as those folks we also understand how this is a complex time, how this is a time where some folks are feeling more hopeful. And we think it’s important to organize people around their hope and optimism. At the same time, we are also committed to building power for Black communities to be self-governing. So, our measurement or our ultimate metric of success in the electoral landscape is going to be: how does any candidate, all candidates, all policies, et cetera, impact the masses of Black people? That question or that instilled fulcrum is central for us.

And we know that we are in a particular moment right now where there is a growing fascist movement, popular fascist movement that is threatening to secure or to take national governing power. And we know that we must defeat that. We know that fascism is a direct threat to our vision of liberation. And so we must be just as clear and unwavering in the defeat of fascism on all fronts at this particular opportunity and time. And so we are navigating all of that complexity as we engage in power building in our communities.

KH: Since we’re talking about demands and bringing pressure to bear, what other demands does M4BL have for the Democratic Party?

MA: Our demands are for the state, regardless of which party is in office. And I want to make that clear, because the Movement for Black Lives is not a partisan formation, we are a people formation. So, we are always seeking to advance the needs of Black people beyond any particular party that is in rule, so our demands are always what they have been. We are fighting for three core ideological pillars. We are fighting for abolition, so we continue to have policies and campaigns that seek to end the carceral state and any institution that is harmful for Black folks. Right now we have an important campaign called the People’s Response Campaign, which is about advancing The People’s Response Act, which is legislation that directly seeks to take resources away from the carceral state and policing, and instead to use those resources to build actual mental health alternatives that don’t kill people.

So, we think about solutions that someone like Sonya Massey or Natasha McKenna deserved to have instead of the ways that they were murdered by the state. And that campaign is happening in 20 different sites right now across this country where folks are advancing local referendums in support of the PRA. We also are pushing nationally and federally to identify champions to bring The People’s Response Act into federal legislation. We are fighting for a vision of Black queer feminisms, which means we believe in a world that is pro-Black that is good for Black people and the planet, but we’re also seeking to end all forms of oppression. So, organizing in experiments that are activating that right now is we have a project or a table called the Abolishing Patriarchal Violence, which is where folks are organizing to create safety pods in their communities in response to patriarchal violence that is happening.

So, instead of calling the police to deal with sexual violence, intimate partner violence, child abuse, how do we actually call folks that can show up and actually support survivors? We think about folks like Marissa Alexander, who was a survivor of domestic violence, who was incarcerated. The police showed up to arrest her as she was trying to survive. We think about Ky Peterson, a Black trans man who was being raped and harmed, and the police showed up to arrest him when he protected himself. We think about CeCe McDonald, a Black trans woman who had to fight for her life because she was being assaulted by White men who were transphobic, anti-Black, etc. So, we know that folks who are surviving the worst of gender-based violence are not actually being protected by these systems. So, we have real organizations of real communities experimenting right now. How do we create safety, protection and care for each other that does not rely on this system that’s going to show up, harm us and kill us?

And we are also anti-capitalist, which means that we believe in creating a world where the sole function of the economy is to meet the needs of people and the planet and not to extract, dominate, and create profit for a few. And so our work around that happens in a variety of ways. We have policy within our big, bold, visionary document called the Vision for Black Lives that speaks to economic changes that need to happen, that folks are organizing it in their communities. Some of those changes include changes to the tax codes. It includes land redistribution. So, how do we get land not to be owned corporately or commodified corporately or by rich folks, but instead back to the hands of people? We have projects that defend\ and protect land for Black farmers. We have a reparations project that is so much focused on ending the economic exploitation of the Black communities currently and historically, and redistributing or putting those resources back in the hands or back under the leadership of those communities. And so our anti-capitalist work exists in a lot of different ways. So those are some of the projects that we’re advancing right now.

KH: Thank you for that.

Montague, I know you have to leave us. I want to thank you so much for joining the conversation.

MS: So, glad to be with you. Thank you for hosting us.

KH: Take care.

M, are you able to answer a couple more questions?

MA: Yes.

KH: Wonderful. Thank you for that. Given the repression that Black organizers have faced over the last 10 years, can you talk about your concerns regarding a Trump presidency, including Trump’s plans to create relocation camps for unhoused people, oversee mass deportations, and use the military to police protests that he deems violent?

MA: This is an important question. The Movement for Black Lives is not… I should be clear about this. The Movement for Black Lives does not endorse any particular candidate, however we are clear and aware about the threats that a Trump presidency poses for Black communities. There is a popular fascist movement that has been building over the last years, and MAGA has been a key aspect and organization of that fascist movement. In addition to the popular front that is growing around fascism, we also know that there is an organized administrative plan for governing and building a fascist government in the United States, and that plan is called Project 2025.

We are clear about needing to defeat those things on all fronts. That Project 2025 must never be allowed to happen or to take place. Fascism must be ended, must be stopped, and not allowed to grow any more popular. It needs to frankly be squelched in the United States. And we understand right now that the fascists see that this is a key opportunity for them to seize national governing power through that particular candidacy. And so we are clear about the need to stop fascism on all fronts.

So I can talk about Project 2025 and some of the threats of a Trump candidacy in some key and core areas. There are so many, let me say that. There are so many, but I’ll just point to a few for the sake of our time here. One, we understand the planet, the actual earth is in a critical stage. Climate scientists, environmental justice organizers and activists, scientists have been warning us for decades, if you will, about the state and the condition of the planet.

And as we see in the last few years, it is just worsening, and so the need for us to actually protect the planet is urgent. And a right-wing or far-right presidency right now threatens to end any sort of environmental protections that we have been fighting for to advance the protection of the planet. And so Trump’s particular candidacy, he talks about dig, dig, dig, oil, oil, oil. And the amount of harm and disaster and threat that that will cause the planet and all of its inhabitants, us as people but also animals and plants of the earth, is devastating.

And so we have to be able to fight to safeguard the planet and the climate and the environment. And that is such a huge threat that he is bringing. And so some of the advancements, again, made over the last few years would be squelched, and harms against the planet will be accelerated. That would really destabilize our communities and the environment for all of us.

Another area, or that agenda’s clear attack around bodily autonomy and reproductive justice. Proposing things like further criminalizing abortion, further making abortion inaccessible and illegal and unsafe. Threatening to remove gender and sexual orientation as a category in federal legislation has huge impact, ranging from being able to get real data that informs public health policy and work on the ground and in communities around the health of folks along gendered lines, whether that is maternal health, reproductive health in many different areas is huge and critical.

Doing things to further criminalize trans, intersex, gender nonconforming, and other queer people has devastating and life consequences. We know that as legislation threatens a particular community, violence against that community escalates. And so creating even more legislation that targets the legitimacy of trans, gender nonconforming, intersex folks makes us even more vulnerable to vigilante attacks and violence, reduces our access and ability to gain healthcare access, and live lives full of dignity. And that includes being able to get jobs or have jobs that don’t have discrimination, being able to get equal pay, and just access to other public institutions based on TGNCI [transgender, gender nonconforming, and intersex] and queer discrimination or phobia.

There are also things around the economy. Making the economy more profitable and better fitting for the really rich and elite at the expense of the poor and exploited. The further housing discrimination, the lack of protections that we’re already fighting for and for Indigenous people to be able to keep their land, for Black farmers to be able to keep their land. The list goes on and on in terms of the devastation that that candidacy and Project 2025 is threatening for our communities.

KH: Regardless of who is elected, organizers will be faced with increasingly harmful policies, from the criminalization of homelessness to mask bans and the rise of cop cities. What kind of organizing infrastructure, mutual aid, and policy initiatives do our communities need to build and rally around in these hostile times?

MA: As abolitionists, we are responsible for not only ending and tearing down the harmful institutions and practices, but we also have the role of building the thing that should exist. Right now, some of our most important organizing as a Black left formation is interfacing or warding off the violence and advancements of the state repression or state violence against our communities, but it is also the experimentation. It is also the calling of the question inside of our communities. What can we solve ourselves? How do we prepare ourselves to govern what we have, where we are, and begin to assert community control?

And so, over the last year, M4BL has determined that we have a couple key and urgent political objectives. One of them is co-governance. So, where we can, being able to control aspects of the state through the electoral arena, being able to advance our agendas through policy. That is key right now. And also it is the objective of community control or dual and competing power, which is the idea that we have to be able to build our own institutions. We have to begin to create our own cultural practices that model, in the community, what we should have, that increases the left’s legitimacy inside of the communities, and that positions us to be able to govern at a greater scale.

And so examples of some of those projects looks like an organization like Freedom, Inc., where in the summertime they run a program called Books and Breakfast modeled after the work of the Black Panther Party. But what that program is doing is seeking to build an education alternative. If it’s been identified that there is a gap between the performance of Black students and white students around literacy in those public schools, that organizing group said, “How do we meet that need ourselves with the communities there?” As a political experiment.

And how does a community begin to build an institution? And how does a community demonstrate its legitimacy to a greater public? So that is an example of dual and competing power where they said, “We’re not just going to wait for these failing schools to make it right. To be clear, we’re going to continue to organize these schools around electoral shifts and policy shifts to better the experiences of Black students. And in the meantime, we are also going to try to solve this problem on our own.”

There are other experiments like that happening around the country, where folks are building those institutions on their own, and I think that that is key right now. Where so many folks are disenchanted or experiencing pessimism because of the failures of the state, they are asking the left, they are asking movement, what is next? What should we be doing? And I think the answer to that is building dual and competing power.

KH: I think a lot of people are struggling with that question about what we should be doing right now. From what I have observed and heard from a lot of people, many activists and organizers are feeling discouraged and powerless right now. Do you have any words of encouragement for people who have been organizing over the past 10 years who are feeling defeated or worn down right now?

MA: I’m reminded of the words of Cedric Robinson who was, I think, one of the key Black leftist thinkers, socialist thinkers. And he really developed an important text called Black Marxism that articulates the creation of a Black radical tradition. And so what I would do right now is offer folks to be re-grounded in the Black radical tradition. And Cedric Robinson, in his work he agitates around some important questions or prompts. In one of them he says, “Hey, look, before you see the light, before you meet the light you are going to face incredible despair, pain, pessimism, and dismay. And when you meet that moment, when you face that moment, you can no longer ask the question of, are we ready for revolution?” What he agitates and prompts is that you are already in it. You are already in the revolution. And so he then goes to say, “So the real question isn’t, are we ready for revolution? The question is actually, how are we going to come out of it?”

And that is what I would say to any of the folks organizing in communities, to our comrades, to co-conspirators, for folks who’ve never been involved but who are looking to be involved or seeking invitation. I would say to them that right now we are on the precipice of something big. Where the terms of society, where the social relationships, how we understand one another is being questioned and agitated. Where there are different visions competing right now for where society would go. We are in that moment. We no longer have to say, “Oh, I wish we could have those things up for debate.” They’re being debated right now.

This is a historical moment. This is a moment that is going to be looked back on 50 years from now, 100 years from now, and what is going to be said of us is how we came out of this moment. We have the far right fascists competing and offering a vision through Project 2025, as well as some of their other interventions. We have centrists and the Democrats offering a vision for the world forward through their presidential candidate and policy platform. And then we have us. But we cannot forget that. Then we have us offering a vision of Black queer feminisms, abolition and anti-capitalism.

We are in the time right now. We are in the time where those things are being decided and negotiated, and we have in front of us a direct opportunity to steer which way we go. And so the question in our lap is, how are we going to come out of it? And with that, I hope folks feel empowered and inspired. I hope folks can see that, oh, we’re coming to the other side of that despair now. We’re going to the other side of pessimism now. I would remind folks to look back at our ancestors. Coming from folks who defeated chattel enslavement as an institution, coming from folks who defeated Jim Crow as an institution, coming from folks who’ve defeated the worst and the most extreme forms of violence that was state-sanctioned, global domination, et cetera.

We have the history, we have the blueprint, we have the training before us. So it is really up to us. And to me, I think that’s where our power is. Our power is where we choose one another, where we commit to one another, and we refuse to leave any freedom on the table. So that is what I would say to folks, that this is actually our time. We don’t have to look around, we don’t have to say, “Who?” It’s us, and it’s our time.

KH: Thank you so much, M. I’ve really appreciated hearing from you and Montague about the important work that M4BL is doing, and I am just so grateful for your organizing and for your time.

MA: Thank you.

KH: I normally close things out with some commentary of my own, but I think I want us all to sit with M’s words. We have a long fight ahead, and I really appreciated this opportunity to hear from M and Montague about the state of Black-led organizing, the ground that’s been gained, and the work that we all need to do together.

I also want to thank our listeners for joining us today, and remember, our best defense against cynicism is to do good, and to remember that the good we do matters. Until next time, I’ll see you in the streets.

Show Notes

• You can learn more about M4BL’s work, and find resources for activists and organizers, here.
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