A Q&A With Alicia Garza, Co-Founder of #BlackLivesMatter

Before he became the third president of the United States, Thomas Jefferson sat down to compose the Declaration of Independence. “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal,” he wrote. At the time, he was a slave-owner. Hypocrisy aside, there’s a “duh” factor in saying “all men are created equal,” but Jefferson must have found value in the proclamation of a self-evident truth. The fact that he needed to spell it out might have reflected the reality that we didn’t then live in a world where all men were treated equally—and we don’t now.

On July 13, George Zimmerman was acquitted on murder charges for killing Trayvon Martin. Immediately thereafter, Alicia Garza, an organizer and special projects director for the National Domestic Workers Alliance, took to Facebook to write her own self-evident truth: “Black Lives Matter.” At once powerful and haunting, those three words have been embraced as the banner under which a new generation of activists and organizers is building a movement for racial justice. Like Jefferson’s “all men,” the statement is undeniable in its truth. But unlike the celebrated founding father, Garza’s words do not echo a hypocrisy. Instead, they challenge a nation that has failed to live up to its stated belief that “all men are created equal.”

I sat down with Garza, in the first of a series of interviews with the three creators of Black Lives Matter, on February 21, 2015, the fiftieth anniversary of the assassination of Malcolm X, and we spoke about imagining a world where the fact that “Black Lives Matter” is self-evident.

Mychal Denzel Smith: In everything you have written and every interview that you’ve done, you say that Black Lives Matter, as a movement, does not depend on convictions and incarceration for the sense of justice. Why is that?

Alicia Garza: What we are dealing with right now is a disease that has plagued America since its inception. Convicting a few cops isn’t going to deal with that disease. We’ve been trying hard this year to be clear that state violence is bigger than police terrorism. Although police terrorism plays a specific role on behalf of the state, it is not the totality of what state violence looks like or feels like in our communities. We’ve been shifting the narrative to talk about state violence being structural racism. Given that, what we are lifting up here is that we need a bigger vision than just Band-Aid reforms—we need to move towards a transformative vision that touches on what’s at the root of the problems we are facing.

The new movement against police violence was sparked by specific deaths of young black people, as movements of the past have been. In the moment, people want a sense of justice. The chant goes: “Indict, convict, send that killer cop to jail!” Is it hard to get people who are drawn to these rallies and marches on the basis of those deaths to understand that there is more to the movement than convicting the individual police officer—and we need to think bigger than relying on the criminal justice system?

In some ways, [the focus on individual deaths] allows us to build the movement. Right now, our movement is very segmented. Where are the people doing work around housing in this fight around black lives? They may not see the connection between the murder of young black people and evictions and the demolition of public housing. We need to, if we are going to sustain what we’ve started, but also if we are going to get free. Which is the point, right?

The thing that’s important in this moment is that our movement doesn’t become an intellectual exercise, but that it’s something that actually happens in practice. At the NDWA, we’ve been having a lot of conversations about state violence against black domestic workers [and their families]. People say, what’s the connection? Well, we are three-dimensional beings and black women who are working in other people’s homes also have families and are afraid for their children. These are women who are living in communities that have really high rates of unemployment where their kids can’t get quality education. They are living in conditions where over 60 percent of black domestic workers that we talked to said that they didn’t have food in the last month. Many are also spending way more of their income than they should on rent or mortgage. The way we organize forces people to choose what’s most important to them as opposed to creating movement space where people can understand and can put words to and have a framework around what they live every single day.

When we sit and think about what the world needs to looks like in order for black lives to actually matter, there is a debate: what is going to make our communities safe, how do we deal with harm, how do we solve problems that come up in our communities? I saw a piece in The Nationthat said we should abolish the police, which was awesome and in some ways is forcing questions that we have been afraid to talk about for a long time. The point to me is to be able to dig into these questions as opposed to being prescriptive about what the answers are.

In the same way, we are living in political moment where for the first time in a long time we are talking about alternatives to capitalism. Socialism became this weird household word partially because right-wingers call Obama a socialist, which he is the farthest from. It is a political moment that’s opening up opportunities to envision a world where people can actually live in dignity. So whether that’s abolishing a criminal justice system that feeds off the labor and the lives of black and brown people, whether that’s abolishing an economic system that thrives on exploitation, poverty and misery: this is the time for us to not just dream about what could be, but also start to build alternatives that we want to see.

But the institution of policing won’t be abolished overnight. In the interim, what does policing look like in a world where black lives matter?

Quite honestly I’m not sure we can have both [policing and the valuing of black lives]. That’s me personally.

Right now we have a really harmful set-up where the police police themselves. They act as judge, jury and executioner, usurping democracy. That’s how we can get a situation where a white man in Wyoming or Montana can stalk and shoot a black chief of police and still be alive. Where people like Cliven Bundy can openly call for an uprising against the government and still be alive and holding property and land—but a little black kid can’t go into a store and get Skittles and an iced tea and live to see the next day. Another little black kid will lay bleeding out for four and a half hours in front of his mother’s home because he is walking in the middle of the street.

I’m not sure that the way that we can have policing where black lives matter because the institution of policing is rooted in the legacy of catching slaves. But what we can do in the interim is make sure that police departments don’t get tax dollars for tanks, for bazookas, for flash grenades and things like that. We can make sure that police departments that have been shown to exercise a pattern and a practice of discriminatory and quite frankly racist policing don’t get resources to do that.

The other thing we can do immediately is insist on more oversight over police departments—oversight that is accountable to the communities the police purport to serve. What this looks like is civilian review boards that actually have teeth. In the worst cases, review boards are still constructed by the police. People who are not going to raise questions or rock the boat are handpicked to play a role. Then we see amazing things like in Los Angeles, where activists just won permanent civilian oversight of the Los Angeles sheriff department, which has not happened before. They are fighting to ensure that there’s teeth and accountability and a redistribution of resources from militarization to community needs, so that we don’t need to put people in jails and prisons.

Black Lives Matter as a slogan and as an ideology has taken off, with a lot people embracing those three simple words. You created it in a moment where you needed to say it for yourself to affirm black lives do matter because there was a pervasive feeling that they don’t. How do you feel now about the way this phrase has been embraced?

That’s such a big question. You know, I’ve been reflecting a lot today. Today is the fiftieth anniversary of Malcolm X’s assassination and I’ve been reflecting a lot on his contributions. One thing I really admire is that Malcolm talked about self-actualization, self-love and being really rooted in who we are unapologetically. When [Opal Tometi, Patrisse Cullors and I] created Black Lives Matter, it absolutely was about: how do we live in a world that dehumanizes us and still be human? The fight is not just being able to keep breathing. The fight is actually to be able to walk down the street with your head held high—and feel like I belong here, or I deserve to be here, or I just have right to have a level of dignity.

Before [Black Lives Matter] I was hearing people not want to talk about race, even black people. They would say, “When we talk about race it sets us apart from everybody else.” I’m like, “We are different and that’s OK!” It’s actually OK to be unique and have your own contributions, to celebrate what it means to be black, how we’ve survived and thrived through the worst conditions possible.

After Trayvon was killed and when George Zimmerman was acquitted, I was in a public place with a lot of other black people. I felt like I got punched in the gut, but it was like we couldn’t look each other in the eye because on televisions across America that court said black lives don’t matter.

We carry that in our shape. We carry that in our physical body. So what’s profound to me about this moment is the way that black folks are looking at each other in the eyes, the way I was taught to by my mother, who came up in really different political conditions. She told me any time you see black person, you say, “What’s up.” I don’t give a fuck who they are, what they’re doing, what they look like. That’s a culture that we created to survive, a culture of solidarity. It’s what has kept us alive.

I’m really feeling that right and I see it. People come up to me and say, “I’m having a hard time sitting with the fact that I didn’t think this was going to happen again in my lifetime and I just resigned myself to it. Now I’m so hopeful and I don’t know how to feel about how hopeful I am because I’m also scared. I’m scared for what the backlash will be. I’m scared that you all will have to hold what we had to hold and you will have to watch your movement be dismantled.” They say, “We are rooting for y’all.” I’m like, no, “We are rooting for us.” It’s profound.

I don’t know how to wrap my head around what’s happening with Black Lives Matter right now, but what I can say is that I’m so in awe of how bold and brave people have been. I’m so in awe of the folks in Ferguson who are still fighting, no cameras. They are out there every day at the police station doing direct actions, calling out the mayor. They are in it. I’m really honored to be a part of this moment. This is a moment I have dreamed of my whole life. Growing up, I learned about the black freedom struggle and the Black Liberation Movement and was told that this was a “lull period” or that it wasn’t possible to have black liberation in our lifetime. So I’m just grateful to be alive in this moment where more and more people are saying: we believe it can happen and we’re gonna to fight for it.

October 1966 Black Panther Party Platform and Program What We Want What We Believe

1. We want freedom. We want power to determine the destiny of our Black Community.

We believe that black people will not be free until we are able to determine our destiny.

2. We want full employment for our people.

We believe that the federal government is responsible and obligated to give every man employment or a guaranteed income. We believe that if the white American businessmen will not give full employment, then the means of production should be taken from the businessmen and placed in the community so that the people of the community can organize and employ all of its people and give a high standard of living. 3. We want an end to the robbery by the white man of our Black Community.

We believe that this racist government has robbed us and now we are demanding the overdue debt of forty acres and two mules. Forty acres and two mules was promised 100 years ago as restitution for slave labor and mass murder of black people. We will accept the payment as currency which will be distributed to our many communities. The Germans are now aiding the Jews in Israel for the genocide of the Jewish people. The Germans murdered six million Jews. The American racist has taken part in the slaughter of over twenty million black people; therefore, we feel that this is a modest demand that we make.

4. We want decent housing, fit for shelter of human beings.

We believe that if the white landlords will not give decent housing to our black community, then the housing and the land should be made into cooperatives so that our community, with government aid, can build and make decent housing for its people.

5. We want education for our people that exposes the true nature of this decadent American society. We want education that teaches us our true history and our role in the present-day society.

We believe in an educational system that will give to our people a knowledge of self. If a man does not have knowledge of himself and his position in society and the world, then he has little chance to relate to anything else.

6. We want all black men to be exempt from military service.

We believe that Black people should not be forced to fight in the military service to defend a racist government that does not protect us. We will not fight and kill other people of color in the world who, like black people, are being victimized by the white racist government of America. We will protect ourselves from the force and violence of the racist police and the racist military, by whatever means necessary.

7. We want an immediate end to police brutality and murder of black people.

We believe we can end police brutality in our black community by organizing black self-defense groups that are dedicated to defending our black community from racist police oppression and brutality. The Second Amendment to the Constitution of the United States gives a right to bear arms. We therefore believe that all black people should arm themselves for self defense.

8. We want freedom for all black men held in federal, state, county and city prisons and jails.

We believe that all black people should be released from the many jails and prisons because they have not received a fair and impartial trial.

9. We want all black people when brought to trial to be tried in court by a jury of their peer group or people from their black communities, as defined by the Constitution of the United States.

We believe that the courts should follow the United States Constitution so that black people will receive fair trials. The 14th Amendment of the U.S. Constitution gives a man a right to be tried by his peer group. A peer is a person from a similar economic, social, religious, geographical, environmental, historical and racial background. To do this the court will be forced to select a jury from the black community from which the black defendant came. We have been, and are being tried by all-white juries that have no understanding of the "average reasoning man" of the black community.

10. We want land, bread, housing, education, clothing, justice and peace. And as our major political objective, a United Nations-supervised plebiscite to be held throughout the black colony in which only black colonial subjects will be allowed to participate for the purpose of determining the will of black people as to their national destiny.

When in the course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume, among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the laws of nature and nature's God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.

Rules of the Black Panther Party

Every member of the Black Panther Party throughout this country of racist America must abide by these rules as functional members of this party. Central Committee members, Central Staffs, and Local Staffs, including all captains subordinated to either national, state, and local leadership of the Black Panther Party will enforce these rules. Length of suspension or other disciplinary action necessary for violation of these rules will depend on national decisions by national, state or state area, and local committees and staffs where said rule or rules of the Black Panther Party were violated. Every member of the party must know these verbatim by heart. And apply them daily. Each member must report any violation of these rules to their leadership or they are counter-revolutionary and are also subjected to suspension by the Black Panther Party. The rules are:

1. No party member can have narcotics or weed in his possession while doing party work.

2. Any part member found shooting narcotics will be expelled from this party.

3. No party member can be drunk while doing daily party work.

4. No party member will violate rules relating to office work, general meetings of the Black Panther Party, and meetings of the Black Panther Party anywhere.

5. No party member will use, point, or fire a weapon of any kind unnecessarily or accidentally at anyone.

6. No party member can join any other army force, other than the Black Liberation Army.

7. No party member can have a weapon in his possession while drunk or loaded off narcotics or weed.

8. No party member will commit any crimes against other party members or black people at all, and cannot steal or take from the people, not even a needle or a piece of thread.

9. When arrested Black Panther members will give only name, address, and will sign nothing. Legal first aid must be understood by all Party members.

10. The Ten-Point Program and platform of the Black Panther Party must be known and understood by each Party member.

11. Party Communications must be National and Local.

12. The 10-10-10-program should be known by all members and also understood by all members.

13. All Finance officers will operate under the jurisdiction of the Ministry of Finance.

14. Each person will submit a report of daily work.

15. Each Sub-Section Leaders, Section Leaders, and Lieutenants, Captains must submit Daily reports of work.

16. All Panthers must learn to operate and service weapons correctly.

17. All Leaders who expel a member must submit this information to the Editor of the Newspaper, so that it will be published in the paper and will be known by all chapters and branches.

18. Political Education Classes are mandatory for general membership.

19. Only office personnel assigned to respective offices each day should be there. All others are to sell papers and do Political work out in the community, including Captain, Section Leaders, etc.

20. Communications--all chapters must submit weekly reports in writing to the National Headquarters.

21. All Branches must implement First Aid and/or Medical Cadres.

22. All Chapters, Branches, and components of the Black Panther Party must submit a monthly Financial Report to the Ministry of Finance, and also the Central Committee.

23. Everyone in a leadership position must read no less than two hours per day to keep abreast of the changing political situation.

24. No chapter or branch shall accept grants, poverty funds, money or any other aid from any government agency without contacting the National Headquarters.

25. All chapters must adhere to the policy and the ideology laid down by the Central Committee of the Black Panther Party.

26. All Branches must submit weekly reports in writing to their respective Chapters.

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