October 9, 2017 The Nation. 13

O

n june 1, the right-wing blogger and avowed white supremacist jason kessler and other alt-right

activists met for dinner on the patio of Miller’s Downtown, a popular burger joint in Charlottesville,

Virginia. The dinner was two weeks after white nationalists had gathered in the city’s Lee Park, wielding

torches as a kind of dress rehearsal for the mid-August “Unite the Right” rally that left counterprotester

Heather Heyer dead and dozens more injured. According to local reports, members of the white-led

group Showing Up for Racial Justice surrounded Kessler’s party that night at Miller’s, recording the

gathering on their phones and shouting, “Nazi, go home!” At a nearby table sat University of Virginia

professor Jalane Schmidt, who at the time was trying to establish a Black Lives Matter chapter in Charlottesville. As

black passersby stopped and showed interest in the confrontation, participants in the SURJ action directed them to

Schmidt’s table. She considers that night to be her group’s first real meeting. Schmidt knew that many BLM chap-

ters were founded in response to police shootings. “It begins in a crisis,” she told me. “In our case, it was the crisis of

that limits civil liability for motorists who hit protesters

with their vehicles, as well as other legislation that puts

protesters on the hook financially for any police presence

their demonstrations require. “We haven’t seen com-

parable policies and practices since the McCarthy era,”

said Alicia Garza, a co-founder of the Black Lives Matter

Global Network, when I asked her whether the Trump

era demands a new approach to black organizing. “So,

yes, our tactics do have to change.”

The tactics may be evolving, but the organizers I spoke

with reminded me that in a “leader-full” movement such

as this one—that is, one that prizes collaborative and de-

centralized leadership—no one individual or group is in a

position to decide for everyone else what tactics to priori-

tize over others. Still, it was clear from my conversations

that activists in leadership positions within BLM-affiliated

groups were expressing much more interest in electoral

politics than I’d heard in the past. “In the early stages

of the movement, people were talking mostly about the

criminal-justice system and a system of criminalization,”

said Jessica Byrd, who runs Three Point Strategies, a con-

sulting firm that she refers to as “the electoral political firm

of the movement.” These days, black organizers are turn-

ing their attention to the electoral system as yet another

social structure that places black people at a disadvantage.

This means a new level of engagement in electoral poli-

tics as well as the interrogation of a system that diminishes

black voters’ power through the antiquated Electoral Col-

lege, voter-suppression measures, and laws that disenfran-

chise people with felony convictions. “As much as we need

to change the people, we need to change the process,”

said Angela Waters Austin of Black Lives Matter Lansing,

whose chapter is coordinating a statewide get-out-the-vote

and political-education campaign called Election 20XX.

“What are the policies that continue to make a Donald

Trump possible? If he did not get a majority of the popular

vote, then why is he the president?”

As the 2016 presidential campaign unfolded, BLM ac-

tivists gained a reputation for using disruption as a way to

push the movement’s key issues. At the Netroots Nation

conference that took place during the primaries, black

activists famously interrupted the candidates’ forum with

chants and heckles. At one point, Tia Oso of the Black

Alliance for Just Immigration (the organization headed

by Opal Tometi, one of BLM’s three founders), took the

stage. Soon after, Democratic candidate and former Mary-

Dani McClain

is a contribut-

ing writer with

The Nation and

a fellow at the

Nation Institute.

the alt-right organizing in our town.”
Despite reports to the contrary, the national constel-
lation of racial-justice organizations loosely referred to
as the Black Lives Matter movement is alive and well.
It would be easy to think otherwise: BLM appears less
frequently in the news than it did between 2013 and last
year, when the movement responded forcefully in the
streets and online to a string of black deaths at the hands
of police. Now, when BLM is mentioned at all, it’s often
because a member of the Trump administration is issuing
a dog whistle to the president’s supporters, as was the case
last month when Trump’s personal attorney forwarded
an e-mail to conservative journalists characterizing BLM
as “totally infiltrated by terrorist groups.” But even in
more sympathetic portrayals, BLM is said to have lost
or squandered the power it began building in July 2013
following George Zimmerman’s acquittal in the shoot-
ing death of Trayvon Martin. According to a recent
BuzzFeed article, BLM is beset by debilitating internal
rifts over direction and funding, preventing the move-
ment from doing much at all to accomplish its aims.
But conversations with just over a dozen people in
the movement suggest otherwise. BLM organizers are
still in the streets in places like Charlottesville and Bos-
ton, where white supremacists mobilized this summer.
From St. Louis, Missouri, to Lansing, Michigan, they’re
engaging with electoral politics in new ways. And they’re
taking the time to reflect on and develop new strategies
for moving forward given the changed political terrain.

T

rump’s election, like his campaign, brought
a new fervor to efforts to crush black organizing
and roll back the gains made during the Obama
administration. Since last year, so-called “Blue
Lives Matter” bills, which increase the penalties
for offenses against police officers and in some cases
designate them as hate crimes, have proliferated in state
legislatures. Attorney General Jeff Sessions announced in
late August that President Trump would sign an execu-
tive order again allowing local police departments to
procure military gear like bayonets and grenade launch-
ers. As president, Barack Obama had banned the transfer
of such equipment after protesters and police clashed
in Ferguson, Missouri, in the wake of Michael Brown’s
shooting. State legislatures are also considering laws
that make nonviolent public protest costly and, in some
cases, deadly: Lawmakers have tried to pass legislation

“If we’re

not creating

our own

independent

political

force to

counter

a potent

backlash

to our very

existence,

we’ll be

gone.”

— Alicia Garza,

Black Lives Matter

Global Network

ILLUSTRATION BY NURUL HANA ANWAR