“You’re gonna make me cry,” Patrisse Cullors warns when I ask how she feels about being criticised by other Black people. Then the co-founder of Black Lives Matter (BLM) turns away from the webcam and starts to sob, hand to her mouth. “I’m crying because I was prepared for rightwing attacks. I wasn’t prepared for Black people to attack me. And I think that’s probably the hardest thing in this position, to lose your own people. The people that you love the most, the people that you do this work for. The human being feels betrayed, the leader feels like: ‘Yeah, welcome to Black leadership. This is the fucking hazing.’”
It’s almost 10 years since Cullors, 38, helped to launch what has been described as the largest global protest movement in history. In that time she has gone from local community organiser to international activism A-lister. But with celebrity has come controversy, including complaints about a lack of transparency about the huge sums of money that have flowed BLM’s way. She has also been called a hypocrite for amassing a property portfolio inconsistent with her beliefs as a self-described “trained Marxist.” She has called these attacks: “Not just a character assassination campaign, but a campaign to actually get me assassinated.”
She has had plenty of time to brood on all this since she stepped down as executive director of the Black Lives Matter Global Network Foundation (BLMGNF) last May. But she has also written a book, An Abolitionist’s Handbook: 12 Steps to Changing Yourself and the World. The central assumption is that the police cannot be reformed – they must be defunded, disarmed, disbanded and replaced by other systems of public safety.
“I’ve been an abolitionist for 20 years, even before I started identifying as an abolitionist,” Cullors says. “What I hadn’t seen was a more robust conversation about how we practise abolition. What does it mean when we say ending the police state, no more jails? What does that mean as an everyday practice? The values that are in that book. I practise them every day.”
When we begin the first of our two chats on Zoom, it is early morning in her home town of LA, and she is cool and slightly formal, reluctant to turn on her camera. But she thaws quickly, chatting to me as she moves through the house she shares with her partner, the activist Janaya Khan, and her six-year-old son. The camera comes on, and she eases into herself, breaking off briefly to message a friend who is going through a bereavement, and joking with Khan about needing too much coffee to get through the day.
She is not a naturally guarded person. “I was one of the first people in my friends group to go to therapy,” she says. “I grew up with a father who was in 12-step AA. I’ve sat in those rooms and heard grown men cry. I’ve always seen vulnerability as the way towards transformation and healing, and that’s difficult because we don’t live in a world that cares for Black people’s vulnerability.”
Vulnerability defined her 90s childhood and drove her to activism. “Some of this is personality and some of this is nurturing,” she says. The third of four siblings, she was raised by a mother who was preoccupied by working and paying the bills. The man she thought of as her father “wasn’t there a lot and was a big headache for my mother,” she says.
She grew up feeling different from her siblings, then discovered that she was – her biological father was someone her mother had known during a brief separation from her siblings’ father. Cullors didn’t meet this man until she was 12. She never refers to the man she grew up with as her stepfather, but as “the father that raised me.” For all his faults, she says, “when it comes to his children, his words of affirmation are words that keep me going still. He never made me feel different or apart.”
Still, meeting her biological father explained a lot. Until then, she says, she felt “pretty much like an alien the whole time. I love my family and siblings, but I was nothing like them. They’re all introverts. I was rambunctious, loud, extrovert – wild hair and wild clothes.”
Her difference was further accentuated by her sexuality. Cullors came out as queer at 16, and was promptly kicked out by her mother – a woman who, according to Cullors, “doesn’t believe in queerness and transness.” “We have very different accounts of what happened when I came out as queer,” Cullors says. “My account is that I was kicked out. Her account is: ‘I never kicked you out.’ I was pretty much houseless during my last two years of high school.” It wasn’t a straightforward falling-out, though. Cullors’ mother still checked in on her “all the time.” “I was hurt but I have so much compassion for my mom because of everything she went through as a parent.”
Poverty and policing moulded the rest of her personality. “It felt like we were being hunted as kids,” she says. “I remember waking up in the middle of the night and hearing the helicopters and seeing them shining their light in our window.” The light was trained on her brother Monte and his friends hanging out outside.
“Everyone talks about the war on drugs; we don’t talk about the war on gangs,” she says, recalling a time in the 90s when disproportionate resources were mobilised towards inner-city gang policing. Helicopter policing is “fucking expensive,” she says, and a sign that the campaign was “essentially the federal government declaring a war on brown and Black children and calling them domestic terrorists. We were living in a literal war zone. That is the context that made me an abolitionist.”
Monte was arrested in 1999 at the age of 19, and spent six years in LA prisons, after which he emerged with stories of torture, beatings, starvation and bed-chaining. His family lost him within the prison complex, where he would be moved between jails without notification or explanation. When they asked to visit or speak to him, Cullors says, information about his whereabouts was withheld. “They would do this thing where they would beat the shit out of somebody, almost kill them, then they would hide them in the jails for months. So you couldn’t get a hold of your loved one, because they didn’t want any proof of what they did. My brother was tortured multiple times.”
Against this tumultuous backdrop, Cullors was labelled “gifted” at a young age, and sent to a school in a white, affluent area. Travelling between her poor, working-class life and her new school jolted Cullors into outrage. “In my adolescent brain I was like: ‘OK, I’m living in this neighbourhood, experiencing policing on a daily basis. And then I go to a completely different neighbourhood during the day for school with people who are living a completely different life – they have no understanding of the police state.’ I have access to all these resources. I’m also realising that you can live differently. People have access to grocery stores and green space and I don’t. I was like: ‘This is unacceptable. It is unacceptable that I come home to police sirens and helicopter policing and that I go to school, where all these white kids are doing every drug under the sun and nothing is happening to them. Why not them, when they’re actually the ones dealing the drugs?’ I’m talking about massive amounts of drugs that I would not have had access to if it wasn’t for white communities. That wasn’t right.”
In her early teens, she began to read the works of the civil rights activist Audre Lorde and autobiographies of Black Panther members, coming to the conclusion that there was a golden age of civic rights activism in the 60s and 70s that she missed out on. When she was 16, she went to a social justice camp run by the National Conference for Community and Justice. “It changed my life.” Two hundred young people from across LA county were there, being taught about civil rights, identity and how to challenge racism and patriarchy. In the camp, she was introduced to the first civil rights organisation that she was a part of, the Bus Riders Union, a movement that challenges discriminatory policies affecting the overwhelmingly low-income African American, Latino and Asian users of public transport in Los Angeles county. That introduction was “the pivotal moment”, she says.
She ended up staying at the Bus Riders Union for 11 years. She learned how to take on the state, and began to leverage it for her first passion – fighting and reforming the police. It was in 2013, while she was transitioning to abolition work, that Cullors first tweeted the hashtag #BlackLivesMatter, after George Zimmerman was acquitted of murdering Trayvon Martin in Florida. Then came her call to action, alongside fellow activists Alicia Garza and Opal Tometi. At first, she says, “we didn’t feel like owners of it. We didn’t call ourselves co-founders of BLM until like a year later. The only reason we started to call ourselves co-founders is because it started to be co-opted. It started to be Black men using BLM as a way to tell their message, which was largely anti-woman or often anti-queer and trans. Or devoid of the conversation of feminism. And we were like: ‘We’ve gotta intervene.’”
By 2014, Black Lives Matter had local chapters across the US. “What we did, Alicia, Opal and I, is create infrastructure so that we could have language and a framework around why police violence, vigilante violence, incarceration, were the greatest dangers to our community. We created a language around queerness and transness as not the enemy to Black people. My specific role was bringing people together, going across the country and world to talk about the tactic of protest, the tactic of what we call ‘shutting shit down’, of lifting up Blackness and being OK with saying: ‘Black lives matter.’”
But BLM had grown too quickly. “At a certain point,” she says, “people wanted to start giving us money and we didn’t have a legal infrastructure and we weren’t sure we wanted one.” Then George Floyd died under the knee of a policeman in the summer of 2020, and donations skyrocketed. BLMGNF took in just over $90m (£67m) that year.
Cullors and other BLM leaders have since come under intense scrutiny, with claims that too little of the money raised has reached those in need, while large sums have circulated around an opaque network of companies, some of them with links to Cullors.
She concedes today that her executive position did not match her skills. “I was trained,” she says, “to take a moment and help build a campaign around it.” The problems started afterwards. Not only is Cullors better at motivation than management, she is also prone to abstractions. “I’m really interested in the best and possible ways we can access joy, healing, beauty and transformation,” she says, when I ask what drives her.
We run out of time just as Cullors is about to get into the difficulties of her time at the helm of BLM and agree to chat again the day after. When we speak the next morning, she seems wearier, more deflated than the day before.
She has been thinking about a recent article in New York magazine headlined: “The BLM mystery: where did the money go?”. It noted that in November 2020, 10 chapters of the BLMGNF had called for greater financial accountability, complaining that there was “no acceptable process of either public or internal transparency about the unknown millions of dollars donated to BLMGNF”. The article went on to imply that Cullors had turned her back on high-risk protest and activism in favour of collaborations with corporate sponsors, and of questionable transactions between her other organisations and BLM, none of which has been proven.
It did, however, concede: “The deals could have reasonable explanations.” As for Cullors’ property portfolio, the magazine said: “There is no evidence that Cullors used money sent to BLMGNF to purchase personal property.”
“I’ve worked multiple jobs across many organisations my entire life,” Cullors previously stated. “I’m also a published author, writer, producer, professor, public speaker and performance artist … I work hard to provide for my family.’’
Cullors had been “crying to a girlfriend” about the New York magazine story, she says now, before she starts crying with me too.
Attempts at greater transparency in the two years before she left BLM failed, she admits. “I think it’s because Black people in general have a hard time with money. It’s a trigger point for us.” She also thinks that they didn’t do “the best job of telling our story. A lot of that has to do with being socialised as a woman and just wanting to do the work, not bragging about what we’ve done, what we’ve accomplished. Which is, I want to say on record, a great error. I do want to make it really clear that millions of dollars were put back into the community.”
And she still thinks she can make a contribution, as she focuses on police abolition. “I was thrust into a global spotlight, but at the end of the day I’m a local community organiser. I can sustain local organising work. I think being the face of a global movement was turning me into something I didn’t want to be. I didn’t want to be a shark. I don’t have the emotional bandwidth.” She is also done with the internecine conflict between Black movements that she sees happening on social media. “If I were a young person watching, I’d be like: ‘Keep me away from that shit. That is drama and trauma. I have enough of that. Let me go be an influencer on TikTok.’”
Cullors seems constantly to be treading a fine line between humility and hurt, between letting go but also claiming what is due to her. “You’re catching me at a place of deep, deep self-reflection,” she says, “but I look forward to many more years ahead where I can look back with more fondness. I think right now I have a lot of hurt and resentment and I feel like I’ve been treated as the fall guy for a movement that is much bigger than me. And some will say: ‘Well you let yourself be Time 100, you let yourself be in the forefront and you’re about to be on the cover of the Guardian – kinda comes with the territory.’ True.”
But then comes a final plea: “We need to treat our leaders better.”
Patrisse Cullors will launch An Abolitionist Handbook at the WOW festival in London on 11 March. It is published by Own It!, price £16.99. To support the Guardian and Observer, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
