• 1 Among these memoirs—the list is not exhaustive and extends before and beyond 2016—one finds Kiese L (...)
• 2 Cullors acknowledged that BLM-Canada and BLM-UK were still thriving in 2022 (Ramsey). For an assess (...)
• 3 The second co-leader of BLM, Alicia Garza, is the author of The Purpose of Power. How to Build Move (...)
• 4 The editions used are: Patrisse Khan-Cullors and asha bandele. When They Call You a Terrorist. A Bl (...)
• 5 Carruthers describes BYP100, a radical feminist organization, in her preface to Unapologetic (xvi). (...)

1The #BLM movement has led to the publication of a plethora of autobiographical texts, to the extent that Imani Perry called 2016 “The Year of Black Memoir.” Indeed, novelists such as Ta-Nehisi Coates, Jesmyn Ward, and Kiese Laymon, the poetess Claudia Rankine, but also activists and journalists produced texts to account for and echo the nationwide mobilization against police brutality and for social justice.1 A domestic struggle at its inception, the movement achieved international proportions and had global repercussions thanks to social networks, the spread of protests abroad, and the emergence of national BLM organizations in a number of countries.2 After a brief summary of the three co-founders’ role at the inception of the movement, their ongoing involvement in Black radical activism and a short biography of Carruthers, this article first draws on theoretical work on the genre of militant memoirs and on African American autobiographical writing to qualify the two works under study and highlight the characteristics they share. It then successively addresses in detail When They Call You a Terrorist: A Black Lives Matter Memoir (2018), by one of the movement’s three co-founders,3 the activist Patrisse Cullors, and Unapologetic: A Black, Queer, and Feminist Mandate for Radical Movements (2018) by Charlene Carruthers.4 Carruthers is the head of the Black Youth Project 100, created in 2013 as a response to the acquittal of George Zimmerman for the murder of Trayvon Martin, a 17-year-old African American teenager in Sanford, Florida on February 26, 2012 (U 116).5

• 6 Dream Defenders is a Florida-based organization aimed at ending police and prisons; it is geared to (...)
• 7 The political statement of the Trans Women of Color Collective reads: “We work to uplift the narrat (...)

2At the origin of the movement, Patrisse Cullors created the hashtag #BlackLivesMatter that went viral in answer to Alicia Garza’s Facebook post of “a Love Letter to Black People” in which she stated: “I continue to be surprised at how little Black lives matter. And I will continue that, stop giving up on Black lives, black people, I will NEVER give up on us. NEVER” (WT 180). The context of Cullors’s response to Garza, another Black Lives Matter co-founder, is her outrage, her tears at the acquittal of Zimmerman, compared to the six-year prison sentence for robbery received by her friend Richie, whom she has just visited in jail. In her memoir, she also describes the mobilization of the Dream Defenders under the leadership of Umi Selah (Phillip Agnew), of activist minister Al Sharpton, as well as the protests to throw light on the event and bring the murderer of Trayvon Martin to trial.6 The coming together of the Trans Women of Color Collective, the Marsha P. Johnson Institute and BLM further leads to a long passage about the role of women in grassroot activism, as “caretakers of this community”: “It is always women who do the work, even as men get the praise” (WT 219, italics in the original).7 Cullors highlights the convergence of numerous “sister” organizations and the Black queer feminist foundation of the movement.

• 8 Garza is currently the head of the Principal of Black Futures Lab; she has worked for the US Nation (...)

3Opal Tometi, whom Cullors describes in When They Call You a Terrorist (180), is the third leader of the organization, the Black Lives Matter Global Network (BLMGN), that chose a non-hierarchical structure and was led by Black queer women. Cullors stayed on in the BLMGN, while Garza and Tometi, who were already involved in the Black Alliance for Just Immigration (BAJI), were active in their own ventures.8 Co-founder Alicia Garza now runs the Black Futures Lab, a think tank working to increase Black political power. Suffering from PTSD and racial trauma, Patrisse Cullors sought medical help in a special mental health center in 2021; she stepped down as executive director of the nonprofit behind BLMGN after social media harassment such as accusations and death threats. In 2023, her cousin Keenan Anderson was killed, a death followed by the killing of Tyre Nichols by five police officers four days later; both deaths led her to assess the continuous urgency of the situation (Levin). She is also an artist, a filmmaker, and she conducts Theater of the Oppressed workshops as part of her political activism.

• 9 These academic studies focus on the French and Francophone autobiographical tradition but can prove (...)
• 10 bandele’s first work, The Prisoner’s Wife (1999), about her marriage to a man met when she came to (...)

5As a genre, memoirs differ from autobiographies since they engage a much more limited time period and have a narrower focus (May; Simonet-Tenant).9 Their writing is often triggered by their authors’ celebrity as they can be commissioned: “The leader is viewed as the depository of a unique experience under the threat of erasure” (Chamorand et al. 304). They imply a relation between the “I” narrator—her biography, her life story, the particulars of her circumstances—and her environment—i.e., the historical period under consideration and society at large. As Driss Aïssaoui explains, however, definitions of the genre abound since memoirs hover between two opposite poles: historical testimony and personal intimacy (12). In the twenty-first century, the overlap between history and private memory is further troubled by memoirists’ closeness to journalists, who are sometimes their co-authors. In the case of Cullors’s memoir, asha bandele’s participation means that, if Cullors is the author and the narrator of her own life, bandele, as a poet and professional writer, herself the “author” of two memoirs, is the shaper of her text.10 In the promotional blurb of the bookstores, the book is presented as: “a poetic memoir and reflection on humanity. Necessary and timely, Patrisse Khan-Cullors’ story asks us to remember that protest in the interest of the most vulnerable comes from love.” Refuting the label of terrorism, the pedagogical thrust of the memoir is underlined, together with the poet’s contribution.

• 11 Time and chronology are of the essence: “The challenge of reconciling the narrative of a person’s l (...)
• 12 Unless otherwise indicated all translations from the French are mine.
• 13 For a study of gay memoirs as militant self-writing, see Marche.

6Both When They Call you a Terrorist and Unapologetic focus on the BLM movement and political activism; hence, they map out the conjunction of an individual story and a collective endeavor. They report on a “historical” event, even if their closeness to that event makes them more akin to testimonies.11 They retrace the emergence of a collective struggle in an era when the individual and autobiographical writing effect a powerful return, countering such pronouncements as “the death of the subject,” and “the end of history” (Barthes; Foucault; Fukuyama). Like the autobiographies of political activists, these militant memoirs “[are] in fact the autobiography of a political subjectivity with its specific references.” (Chamorand et al. 303).12 The organization BLM, started on July 13, 2013, was a response to the acquittal of George Zimmerman for the killing of Trayvon Martin. That crucial moment, which can be then construed as an event (Farge; Le Dantec-Lowry and Raynaud), is the subject of chapter eleven of Cullors’s text, soberly entitled “Black Lives Matter” (WT 166-181). The book is in fact structured in a crescendo motion culminating in that episode, the unfolding mobilization (e.g. the 2014 killing of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri) and the birth of her child. As in most militant autobiographical accounts, a teleological thrust runs from childhood experiences, to consciousness, to action. Militant autobiography, as opposed to a militant’s autobiography—read memoir in this case—fulfills different political, historical, and didactic functions (Chamorand et al. 292).13 The narrator indeed shares with her readers her own progress towards an awareness that necessarily leads to militancy, and her hopes that they will follow suit. What is central to militant autobiographies is “the theme of awareness: the awareness of the injustice of the established order, of a necessary alternative” (Chamorand et al. 294).

• 14 Each chapter is preceded by a short epigraph, in succession from dancer Alvin Ailey, novelist Toni (...)

7Patrisse Cullors’s When They Call you a Terrorist is divided into two distinct sections: “All the Bones We Could Find” (WT 3-110) and “Black Lives Matter” (WT 111-254); it is followed by a brief Q&A with both authors. A short poem by Black Panther and political exile Assata Shakur, that ends with: “We have nothing to lose but our chains” (WT viv), serves as the epigraph. The renowned political activist and thinker Angela Davis, herself the author of a celebrated Autobiography (1974) after she was imprisoned and charged with murder, wrote a foreword to the text. In it, Davis underlines how Cullors and her co-workers “were pushing Black and left, including feminist and queer, movements to a new and more exciting level, as they seriously wrestled with contradictions that have plagued these movements for generations” (WT xi). As Cullors makes clear: “When we speak of ourselves, we always lead with this, that not only are we unapologetically Black, a term coined by BYP100, but we are also Queer and Trans-led and non-patriarchal” (WT 216). The introduction is preceded by a line from Black Arts Movement poetess Sonia Sanchez. The memoir thus boldly claims its allegiances, its filiation: Angela Davis, Sonia Sanchez, asha bandele, i.e., radical Black feminism and Black queer feminism.14 Cullors also acknowledges the support of filmmaker dream hampton and political activist Rosa Clemente.

• 15 Directed by Kathryn Bigelow and written by Mark Boal, Zero Dark Thirty (2012) dramatizes the manhun (...)
• 16 See also Courthouse News Service for other claims as late as 2014.

8In its title, the memoir flaunts an equally radical interrogation about the “rhetoric of terrorism” used by the government (WT 8). Terror is what young black children experience when growing up, as Black people—contrary to whites who benefit from a certain benevolence—are framed as terrorists even though they are the actual “victims of terrorism” (WT 157). The chapter dealing with Cullors’s brother Monte, entitled “Zero Dark Thirty” (WT 111-138), military slang for when darkness sets in, refers to Kathryn Bigelow’s film on the hunt for Osama bin Laden that explicitly portrays acts of torture.15 Chapter ten reflects on torture as an act of terror inflicted in the United States (“torture is terrorism,” WT 157), as Cullors understands what her own brother has gone through: “That is to say that Abu Ghraib was first practiced on this soil…” (WT 157). Chapter eleven reports the acts of torture and physical and sexual assaults performed on prisoners at the LA County Jail that surfaced in 2011.16

• 17 Lorde’s work is a powerful reference throughout the text (WT 74, 88, 211). Cullors reads Sister Out (...)
• 18 These words were uttered by Javier Ambler, Manuel Ellis, Elijah McClain, and George Floyd (Baker et (...)

9As early as the introduction, Cullors, who was born in 1983 and grew up in Van Nuys, Los Angeles, links her own situation to the legacy of slavery: “I am the thirteenth-generation progeny of a people who survived the hulls of the slave-ships” (WT 4). She rewrites Audre Lorde’s powerful words—"We were never meant to survive” (31-32)—in the first-person singular: “I was not expected or encouraged to survive” (WT 5).17 Black Lives Matter comes out of a refusal of a programmatic, and programmed, death. When she was twelve, she was arrested for having used drugs. Although deeply attached to her dad, Alton, she learned from her mother that she was another man’s daughter. She then reunited with her biological father, Gabriel, and met his extended family, notably Grandmother Vina. She enjoyed these new relatives until the day when her father disappeared; he had been arrested for drug possession, she suspects. A long passage in italics asks rhetorical questions, such as these, “Do even words exist to explain some forms of devastation, are there pictures to approximate in real-world terms what the shattered heart of a Black girl looks like?” The passage ends: “This is why sometimes you think, I can’t breathe/I can’t breathe/I can’t breathe” (WT 46). These are the last words uttered by Eric Garner whom Daniel Pantaleo, a New York City Police Officer, put in a chokehold, in 2014. Garner was unarmed. Since then, the words have become a slogan for the BLM movement and have been uttered at least 70 times by Black men, dying at the hands of the police.18

• 19 Cullors explains how major brands benefit from this free labor by prisoners.
• 20 "I Am Prepared to Die" is Nelson Mandela’s statement from the Dock at the Opening of the Defence Ca (...)
• 21 Founded in 1964 in Jonesboro, Louisiana, the Deacons for Defense and Justice protected civil rights (...)

10The text juxtaposes childhood memories, recreated in the first person, i.e. dramatized, and reflections by the adult narrator. This division, a recurrent feature of self-writing, takes on a specific slant in militant autobiography: “Our autobiographers consider childhood as a time of initiation; but the anecdotes that relate to it are filtered by the author’s retrospective gaze, since the only features selected are those relevant to a future commitment” (Chamorand et al. 297). Figures, statistics, and readings place the autobiographical moments in perspective, and instruct on how individual lives and private experiences, i.e. the personal, translate into the reality of sociological and historical facts. For example, Cullors writes that “in the state of California a human being is killed by a police officer roughly every 72 hours. Sixty-three percent of those people killed by the police are Black or Latinx” (WT 186). Cullors’s fate, her brother’s fate, are not isolated, but are the result of the war on drugs, the war on gangs, the prison system,19 the criminalization of black men, the unequal treatment of Blacks and whites in the school system, and in society, in short, they are the unavoidable outcome of systemic racism. She quotes excerpts from Nelson Mandela’s 1964 Rivonia trial speech to explain that his analysis of apartheid perfectly applies to racial relations in the United States (WT 51-52).20 She also underlines that at the time of her early political engagement, certain academic studies had not come out and Barack Obama had not been elected. In other words, the necessary tools to understand and fight were not available and the context was much different. Cullors’s text simultaneously inscribes BLM in the history of a Black struggle that goes back to Ida B. Wells and her anti-lynching and suffragist activism, the Deacons for Defense and Justice and their fight against the Ku Klux Klan in the 1960s, and the Black Panthers and their crusade for self-defense (WT 185-186).21 She reclaims for the movement the long legacy of a radical civil rights activism with a local anchoring.

• 22 Cullors describes how her brother is paradoxically safer in the mental unit of the prison, rather t (...)

11Centering her report on herself as a child leads to an emphasis on the loving relationships Cullors entertains with her family members. It also brings to the fore the devastation of poverty and racism on a child’s psyche, the shame that she feels. Her brother Monte, first arrested for burglary, suffers from mental disorders made worse by ill treatment and lack of medical care in prison.22 After a whole chapter dedicated to her biological father Gabriel, a veteran who eventually died of a heart attack at 50, she dedicates the following one to Monte and his inability to regain some semblance of a normal life after three breakdowns and imprisonments. Cullors stresses how the dislocation and outright severing of family ties lead to mental disorders, drug taking, estrangement. Black youth are left on their own because mothers work many jobs, fathers are imprisoned, and teenagers must act the roles of adult nurturers. Cullors attends a school for gifted children where there are very few Blacks and has a white girlfriend whose father turns out to be their own slum lord (WT 53). Hers is a devastating testimony on the ongoing travails of the Black family that go back to slavery and the repeated traumas of Black childhood that extends beyond her own personal plight.

• 23 The term “school-to-prison pipeline” (SPP) describes the disproportionate number of minors and youn (...)
• 24 Here is a presentation of the Movement Strategy Center: “Since 2001 MSC has challenged systemic rac (...)

12When They Call you a Terrorist is also a text about refusing the hypocrisy of religion (the Jehovah Witnesses who cast her teenage mother out for having a child out of wedlock), about coming out as queer when still in high school (Grover Cleveland Charter High), but also a denunciation of the “school-to-prison pipeline,” as school policing after the Columbine shooting targets more specifically Black and Brown children.23 The abyssal failings of the justice system are powerfully dramatized as Monte receives a life sentence, although he is evidently prey to bouts of schizophrenia when arrested, and has not committed a crime that would justify such punishment. Cullors’s relationship to her husband Mark Anthony brings a counterpoint to the harrowing episodes of distress and despair (“No Ordinary Love”). She breaks up a previous relationship to marry Mark Anthony under the auspices of Yoruba religion (WT 153). She builds another “chosen” family composed of her friends, her lovers, and her family members; she also trains as an organizer in the Strategy Center,24 goes to college (UCLA), the first member of her family to do so. The book ends on how her relationship to “Future” or Janaya Kahn, the Canadian nongender-conforming head of BLM-Toronto, and the birth of her child Shine, whom the two women brought up together, heralds indeed a bright future. The personal trajectory to motherhood and parenting merges with the political commitment to change: she fights for the coming generations.

• 26 The trailer for her performance is available at: Accessed February (...)
• 27 The African American Policy Forum (AAPF) coined the hashtag in February 2015 to be present on socia (...)

14What leads up to Cullors’s involvement in BLM is first a performance, “Stained,” to denounce the acts of torture on black inmates under sheriff Lee Baca’s supervision at the LA county jail, then the Campaign to End Sheriff Violence (2012), followed by the founding of the organization Dignity and Power Now.26 ‟The goal is freedom. The goal is to live beyond fear. The goal is to end the occupation of our bodies and souls by a larger American culture that demonstrates daily how we don’t matter,” she writes (WT 148). The final chapters are a vivid testimony of a life-threatening raid by the police (the second one) that she experiences with a friend and his six-year-old daughter when at her home in St Elmo’s Village, a hub for Black artists since the Black Arts Movement (WT 182-183). But it is also a report on how Black Lives Matter joined the protesters in Ferguson after the killing of Michael Brown (“A Call, a Response” [WT 196-210]). What surfaces is the number of organizations, such as Carruthers’s BYP100, that converged on the day of the Ride, and the violence of the protests. The scene is described as a “war zone” (WT 210). Chapter fourteen relates the birth of the social movement #SayHerName to fight against the invisibility of women dying in prison or the murder of Trans women.27 This account is common to both memoirs.

• 28 Here is her definition of queer: “A continuum of possibilities outside of what are considered to be (...)
• 29 Garvey’s second wife, Amy Euphemia Jacques Garvey (31 December 31, 1895-July 25, 1973) was a journa (...)
• 30 These references make up for a coherent Black radical pantheon. Historian Robin D.G. Kelley is the (...)

16Unapologetic is not a history of BYP100, neither is it Charlene Carruthers’s life story. Using the second-person personal pronoun, she directly addresses the reader: “There are at least two ways that you can read this book” (U ix). Unapologetic is a handbook for “principled struggle” and/or “a historical account of the Black radical tradition” (U ix): “Unapologetic exists at the crossroad of retrospection and vision. It is a testament to my own and to our collective past and present as well as a look to our future. It is a work of history, theory, practice, and vision. Use it to help expand your understanding of the Black radical tradition.” (U xvii). This second person responds to the first meaning of “mandate,” a command to act, while the second meaning insists on the authorization given by a base, an electorate. If militant memoirs write history, they also theorize history: “A militant’s autobiography is thus necessarily a historical account, but one where the biographical elements give way to an implicit vision of the direction of history. That is why these life narratives are both an ‘I accuse!’ à la Zola and a plea” (Chamorand et al. 304). Although dealing at times with the private self (“her own […] past and present,” [U xvii]), with her private life, the memoir is directly geared towards theory, collective struggles, and the organization of social movements. She gives definitions of terms such as “ Black radical feminism” and “queer,”28 quotes Barbara Smith’s and Cathy Cohen’s essays, refers to Audre Lorde, to Assata Shakur, goes back to Garvey’s (and his second wife’s) Universal Negro Improvement Association and to the breakfasts served by the Black Panther Party.29 It also requires acknowledging the legacy of others, the forebears. She indeed rewrites Frederick Douglass’s words: “Power concedes nothing without an organized demand” (U xiii, 4, italics Carruthers’s). She relies on Orlando Patterson’s work and the analyses of afro-pessimist scholars Frank B. Wilderson and Saidiya Hartman, notably the exclusion of Black people from the Human. Other thinkers that figure prominently as mentors are Robin D.G. Kelley, Danielle L. McGuire, and Barbara Ransby.30 She also includes a table of the “Violence matrix” (U 34) that highlights black women’s plight (domestically, in the community, and globally) while her Chicago activism goes back to Saul Alinsky’s legacy. A political activist celebrated for his theory of community organizing, Alinsky first worked in the 1940s through the Chicago-based Industrial Areas Foundation (IAF) helping poor communities organize. His struggle for social justice rested on both confrontation and compromise, drew religious congregations and civic organizations together, and bridged community divides (Alinsky, 1946; Alinsky, 1971).

• 31 ‟My intention is to highlight what I have learned and observed as an organizer and a history nerd i (...)

17The sheer number and breadth of references to the Black radical tradition, to scholars, activists, and thinkers turn the memoir into a mixture between a theoretical essay, a report from the activist front, and a call for action based on a political platform. That writing choice leads to several repetitions that mar the structure of the book (U 58, 69, 71). What is missing is a truly subjective reflexive return on her own private self and her personal experiences outside of the political sphere. Carruthers’s positioning, however, is in tune with the Marxist attack on individualism (Marx is quoted in the epigraph of chapter 3, U 43), and its upholding of the collective, of the common fight. Later, Carruthers quotes Mao Tse-tung’s definition of liberalism, an ideology that must be fiercely combatted (U 79). The militant Black Queer Feminist can only write in the first-person plural: “I am one of many […]” (U xvi).31 Indeed, as the other BLM co-founder Alicia Garza wrote in 2014, BLM originates in Black queer feminism and does not intend to see these origins erased. She calls for an explicitly intersectional approach to power:

• 33 In The German Ideology, Marx and Engels explain that the division between mental and manual labor l (...)

20To illustrate what such a commitment to intersectionality means in practice—she uses the Marxist term of “praxis,” i.e., practice and theory—Carruthers focuses on the case of poet and artist Malcom London, the co-leader of BYP100, who was wrongfully arrested, jailed, and accused of sexual assault by a Black woman on the day of his release, after a powerful campaign to free him.33 She recounts a “survivor-led process” that focused on the accountability of the organization to the young woman and to its members, and the creation of the National Healing and Safety Council (Bauer). Her espousal of the Palestinian cause (and the acknowledgment of the discrimination of African-Palestinians) as well as her embracing of the legacy of slavery place her in line with Black Marxism, which she modulates in light of current studies. Another illustration of how she aims at correcting the record and act in accordance with her ideological positioning is her development on Mrs. Recy Taylor’s rape (U 48). An African American woman from Abbeville in Henry County, Alabama, Taylor was raped on September 3, 1944, at gun point, by six white men who were not prosecuted after two grand jury trials. She was 24. The case, in which Rosa Parks was involved on behalf of the NAACP, is now credited as one of the catalysts for the Civil Rights Movement.

• 34 On the founding of STAR in November 1970, see Corbman.
• 35 See excerpts of the debate: www.youtube.com/watch?v=WdbQKjr9Bu4. Accessed February 25, 2025.

21For Carruthers, the Black imagination must be revived since its killing has been systematic. She dedicates a few pages to the Haitian revolution started as early as 1791 and culminating in the independence of the island in 1804 (U 36-38). History must be completed, revised, rewritten, and corrected, by unearthing what has been marginalized and erased. It must never be romanticized. Indeed, the roles of female leaders, such as Ella Baker, Rosa Parks, the action of gay activist Bayard Rustin, or of the founders of STAR (Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries), Sylvia Rivera and Marsha P. Johnson, should be brought forward and placed at the center.34 Black feminist history should be taught as integral to the history of Black liberation. Contradictions that existed in the previous movements should be probed, confronted, and not brushed aside. A case in point is the debate between Malcolm X and Bayard Rustin (separation against integration) or the opposition between reform and revolution.35 Her program means answering the following set of questions: Who am I? Who are my people? What do we want? What are we building? Are we ready to win? (U 87-110). On the level of personal involvement and development, she insists on self-work, i.e. acknowledging where the urge to be politically active comes from. The “angst” with which one comes to the movement must be faced by the activist for him/her/them to truly understand the basis of his/her/their commitment and, as a result, to be efficient in the long run. One also needs to be clear about the project and one’s capacity to govern from the outset. Ultimately, she wants to inspire revolutionary action:

• 36 On March 21, 2012, an off-duty Chicago police detective shot 22-year-old Rekia Boyd while she was i (...)

22Unapologetic concludes on a defense and illustration of the “Chicago Model” of community organizing and a mandate for future struggles. Chicago, a city defined by the Great Migration and home to Emmett Till, is central to the black radical tradition and black culture, with figures such as Langston Hughes, Richard Wright, Lorraine Hansberry. The Chicago Model managed to bring together organizations and institutions that were not necessarily politically aligned. They successfully demonstrated against the 2013 police conference, an action that gave birth to #StopTheCops and #FundBlackFutures campaigns. Carruthers’s report on the actions around the death of Rekia Boyd (#SayHerName), and the killing of 17-year-old Laquan McDonald that led to the ousting of attorney Anita Alverez, is a description for the historical record of a long fight in Windy City that captured the nation’s attention.36 It also details how organizing worked in Chicago itself, and with other organizations in other cities. The fight is both for abolition (U 104) and reparations; it aims at “redefining humanity” (U 136). Like Cullors, Carruthers insists on the plurality and convergence of sundry organizations and on grassroot activism. She also highlights the local vibrant legacy of militancy.