October 9, 2017 The Nation. 15TOP: COURTESY OF MOBILIZE MISSOURI; BOTTOM: WIKIMEDIA CC 4.0 / CHRIS KENDIG
for Black Lives,” which calls for pulling resources out of
“exploitative forces including prisons, fossil fuels, police,
surveillance and exploitative corporations” and investing
those same resources in “the education, health and safety
of black people.”
The debate that Reed’s group co-hosted drew a crowd
of 1,500, and 33 percent of those who participated in an
exit poll indicated that they supported Jones, Reed said.
So the St. Louis Action Council paid little heed to the
8 percent that Jones had polled just days earlier. “What
we knew was that polls often do not speak to what’s actu-
ally happening in communities that are not [made up of]
regular voters,” Reed told me. By this point, she added,
she could feel the energy around Jones’s campaign in the
communities where she works. But she knew that the
campaign was doomed unless one of the other leading
black candidates agreed to drop out of the race.
Once the St. Louis Action Council endorsed Jones, it
threw its weight behind her for the next month, canvass-
ing, getting out the vote, and partnering with the national
civil-rights organization Color of Change to tell 20,
St. Louis residents via text messaging that Jones was its
endorsed candidate. In the end, it wasn’t enough. None
of the other black candidates—all of whom were men,
organizers point out—yielded to Jones, so the black vote
was split and a white alderwoman named Lyda Krewson
became the next mayor in a city in which black people
comprise a slim plurality (49 percent), and in a region
rocked by police shootings that have pushed questions of
systemic racism to the fore.J
ones’s loss was a wake-up call to the move-
ment’s leading organizers, and it made many of
them prioritize bringing the power they’d built
over the past four years into the electoral realm.
“We should play out each one of those races not
as a local race, but as a national race,” Garza told me.
“Nationally, we didn’t mobilize for Tishaura. Tishaura
should’ve been our Bernie. Stacey Abrams [a progressive
black woman vying to become Georgia’s next governor]
should be our Bernie.” That means offering hands-on, on-
the-ground support, she said. “All of us should have been
sending caravans of people to St. Louis to knock on doors
if they wanted that.” Jones and Abrams aren’t the only
candidates that Garza thinks the movement can support.
Chokwe Lumumba, the black progressive who was elected
mayor of Jackson, Mississippi, in June, is another; so are
Pamela Price, running for district attorney in Oakland’s
Alameda County, and Andrew Gillum, running for gov-
ernor in Florida.
Identifying exciting candidates like these and deploying
national resources to campaigns where they’re needed is
just one part of an electoral game plan, Byrd told me. In
November, she and Reed will launch the Movement for
Black Lives Electoral Justice Project, an effort to educate
and mobilize black voters that will kick off with town-hall
gatherings in cities throughout the South and in what
Reed calls “migration cities”: Midwestern cities with siz-
able populations of black Americans who moved north
during the Great Migration. Voter education will be es-
sential to these efforts. “We don’t understand what the[ Justice Department] is doing, or what this executive order
signed by Trump actually means,” Reed said. “We want to
find a space to spark a continued conversation with a hope
of getting more people to these midterm elections.”
Garza is launching her own electoral organizing
project, called Black Futures Lab, this year as well. The
$3 million initiative involves creating an institute where
participants will learn how to craft and advocate for
policy change, as well as recruiting and training candi-
dates and campaign staff. “If we’re not making decisions
about policy and about representation, if we are not cre-
ating our own independent, progressive political force to
counter what is a potent backlash to our very existence,
we’ll be gone,” Garza said, citing the imprisonment
and exile that black-liberation organizers have faced
throughout history. “Our ability to operate aboveground
will be severely compromised.”
For BLM activists, the key to success is keeping these
electoral efforts independent. “We’re not going to build
a black-voter mobilization project because one candidate
deserves it or the Democratic Party needs it,” Byrd said
of the Electoral Justice Project. “Black people deserve it.”
None of this means that organizers will be stepping
away from the tactics they used earlier in the movement.
Last summer, after five Dallas police officers were shot
dead after a protest and conservative commentators
laid the blame at the feet of Black Lives Matter, BLM
groups didn’t go quiet in an attempt to tamp down ac-
cusations that their actions led to the ambush. Instead,
activists from Black Youth Project 100, Million Hood-
ies NYC, the #LetUsBreathe Collective, and elsewhere
doubled down on direct action in the following weeks.
They showed up at the police-union headquarters in
lower Manhattan, at the Oakland Police Department,
and in Chicago’s Homan Square, the location of a ware-
house where police detained and interrogated thousands
of people who had no proper legal representation. “For
us, it was about telling a certain narrative,” said Charlene
Carruthers of Black Youth Project 100. “Our movement
has a clear vision that doesn’t center itself around indi-
vidual police officers. Our groups were being blamed,
without critical questioning of what we’d been doing for
the past several years.” (The Chicago group’s activitiesA new level of
engagement:
BLM leaders like
Alicia Garza are
more invested in
electoral politics than
ever before.“Tishaura should’ve
been our Bernie”:
Backed by a local
racial-justice group,
Jones finished second
in the St. Louis
mayoral primary.BLM groups
often “begin
in a crisis.
Our crisis
was the
alt-right
organizing
in our
town.”
— Jalane Schmidt,
Charlottesville
organizer and
University of Virginia
professor