When They Call You a Terrorist

Cullors frames her book as a firm repudiation of allegations that she and her fellow Black Lives Matter cofounders are terrorists. These allegations gained purchase following the 2016 murder of five Dallas police officers during a racial justice protest by Micah Johnson. Despite having no affiliation with Johnson or the demonstration in question, Black Lives Matter’s high profile made it a target for these accusations. This frustrates Cullors to no end, given that Black Lives Matter exists to dismantle systems of oppression that, in her view, cause real terror in the lives of millions of Black Americans.

Such accusations, Cullors writes, are nothing new. By framing activists as threats to national security, federal authorities are empowered to investigate, surveil, and disrupt law-abiding social justice organizations as if they were terrorist cells. As early as 1919, the organization that would become the FBI investigated the Jamaican activist Marcus Garvey. In the 1960s and 1970s, as progressive movements devoted to race, feminism, and the environment spread across the country, the FBI’s COINTELPRO operations sought to discredit and sow dissent within the leadership of Martin Luther King, Jr.’s organization, the Black Panthers, the American Indian Movement, and many others.