‘We’ve ignited a new generation’: Patrisse Khan-Cullors on the resurgence of black activism

The author of When They Call You a Terrorist sees hope in the Black Lives Matter movement she helped launch

It started with a Facebook post.

“I continue to be surprised at how little black lives matter” wrote activist and writer Alicia Garza in 2013. “Black people, I will NEVER give up on us. NEVER.”

A jury had just acquitted George Zimmerman in the shooting death of Trayvon Martin, a black teen in Sanford, Florida. Similarly bowled over by the verdict, Patrisse Khan-Cullors, a friend of Garza’s and a fellow activist, replied to the post simply: #BlackLivesMatter.

A year later, after the shooting death of another black teen, Michael Brown, in Ferguson, Missouri, those three words leapt off the screen and took on a life of their own. The refrain, self-evident yet historically elusive, would serve as a totem of the newly energized black liberation struggle, and for days. weeks and months that followed, bring the race to the fore of the national conversation in ways unseen for decades.

“Before BLM there was a dormancy in our black freedom movement,” Khan-Cullors said in an interview with the Guardian. “Obviously many of us were doing work, but we’ve been able to reignite a whole entire new generation, not just inside the US but across the globe, centering black people and centering the fight against white supremacy.”

In her new book, When They Call You a Terrorist: A Black Lives Matter Memoir, Khan-Cullors explores her own personal journey, from her childhood in Van Nuys, California, to becoming one of the leaders – if perhaps not as well known as others – of the latest incarnation of the US civil rights movement.

“What was most important for me is that I could share what I experience as a young person, in particular what impact incarceration and policing had on my life and my family’s life,” Khan-Cullors said of the memoir, co-authored with writer and journalist asha bandele.

Looming large in the story is what she describes as the criminalization of her older brother, Monte, diagnosed with schizoaffective disorder as a teen, and how a lack of access to treatment led to his repeated arrest and detention. Khan-Cullors said her “big, loving, unwell, good-hearted brother” was the kind of person who “rescued small animals” and “has never, never hurt another human being”. Yet he was arrested in his own home in the middle of a psychiatric episode, she recalled.

Khan-Cullors calls his incarceration the breaking point, the watershed moment that drove her into activism.

“We rarely know what motivates somebody in their work and it’s usually a particular moment in their life,” she said. “For me that moment is my brother’s incarceration, and the ways in which this country has decided to neglect, abuse, and sometimes torture people with severe mental illness, especially if they’re …

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