Black Lives Matter is finally seeing long-sought wins
Activist group’s recent victories after tent city the result of more than a year of prolonged efforts
When Black Lives Matter Toronto ended its tent-city occupation at police headquarters, the group left behind a sign: “You are on notice. Your anti blackness has been exposed. We are not finished.”
They weren’t finished, and they weren’t starting, either.
The group has been putting police “on notice,” using the exact same language, since organizing under the banner for the first time in November 2014.
Recent victories, such as the fulfilment of its demand for a coroner’s inquest into the police shooting death of Andrew Loku, have come after prolonged efforts going back far beyond the encampment.
“We’ve been trying to get attention on this for almost a year. Some of these demands extend longer than a year,” Sandy Hudson, one of the group’s co-founders, told the Star recently. Though the recent protests were sparked in part by a Special Investigations Unit decision not to lay charges in Loku’s death, the group and its overarching demands — overhaul the SIU, end carding, address anti-black racism — are nothing new.
Toronto’s Black Lives Matter chapter has taken up the fight for police accountability, a movement that stretches back decades in this city, with the support of an international network that began forming in 2012.
And it’s starting to stand out. “I’m really proud of (them),” Patrisse Cullors, one of the network’s founders, told the Star. “I think they’re doing some of the most cutting-edge work in our network.”
“I’m really proud of (them). I think they’re doing some of the most cutting-edge work in our network.” PATRISSE CULLORS BLACK LIVES MATTER TORONTO CO-FOUNDER, ON GROUP’S PUSH FOR POLICE ACCOUNTABILITY
“If we stay on the current trajectory, the (black) communities will have no trust in the mayor or the police chief.” ANDRAY DOMISE REXDALE ACTIVIST
It’s a network with distinct goals and guiding principles, including privileging women and queer and trans people, and an infrastructure to support local action.
Cullors — who is based in Los Angeles and married to Toronto organizer Janaya Khan — officially launched the project, along with Alicia Garza and Opal Tometi, in 2014 with 18 chapters. It has since expanded to include more than 30 in the U.S., Toronto and Ghana.
Though iterations have cropped up in other Canadian cities, including Montreal, Halifax and Vancouver, none has officially signed on yet.
The network provides support, from fundraising help to dispatching people to join actions in other cities (L.A. members attended Toronto’s tent city), to hosting strategy retreats for leaders.
The guiding principles include a commitment to diversity, tackling misogyny and heteronormativity, dismantling patriarchy, and unapologetically privileging black voices.
“We are working to (re) build the Black liberation movement,” reads the group’s website.
For Cullors, an out queer woman, bringing marginalized voices to the forefront and championing diversity in all its forms wasn’t a calculated decision. “We weren’t sitting around the table saying, ‘These are the people we need to add,’ ” Cullors said. “It was like: These are the people who have been left out.’”
Toronto joined the network in 2014, following a vigil that Hudson, Khan and others held to remember black people killed by police in the GTA and the U.S., including Jermaine Carby in Brampton in 2014 and Michael Brown in Missouri in 2014.
In the time since, the group has held press conferences, panel discussions and marches.
But it was the Allen Rd. shutdown last July, soon after Loku’s death, that changed its course.
“People really seemed to be paying attention to what was happening,” Hudson said. “We thought, ‘OK, that’s it then.’ ”
They committed to becoming, as she puts it, “impossible to ignore.”
Most recently, that action came in the form of a 15-day occupation outside police headquarters.
Though sparked by the SIU decision, the tactic took its lead from Los Angeles and Minneapolis, where chapters have camped at police precincts and politicians’ houses. “(It) wasn’t this brilliant action in a vacuum,” Cullors said, but the continuation of a legacy of creative activism.
“As human beings we are creative, and as black folks we come with a creative pulse to whatever we do,” she said.
Protests from the U.S. civil rights movement to marches in Soweto, South Africa, have employed nonviolent civil disobedience to get across their points, she says.
“It’s a naive and destructive assumption that the first place black people go is violence,” she said.
In Toronto, Kingsley Gilliam has been marching, meeting and pushing for police accountability since the 1970s, through work with the Black Action Defence Committee. Among its tactics, that group has launched lawsuits against three GTA police forces, alleging racial profiling.
Gilliam credits Black Lives Matter for their energy and urgency.
“What they have done is pick up on an area that needs sustained effort, because racists have never taken a holiday since they went to Africa and captured my ancestors,” he said.
The work of Gilliam and others led to the creation of the SIU in the 1990s, but he’s not satisfied with the state of affairs today.
“As long as police can kill people with impunity, society will always be faced with these kinds of protests,” he said.
Gilliam supports renewed calls for a more transparent SIU, which he calls a “toothless tiger,” echoing the language of a 2008 report by Ontario’s ombudsman. And he calls the recent backlash against Premier Kathleen Wynne for acknowledging systemic racism another example of its pervasiveness. “Is there any dummy around that don’t know that racism exists in Canada?” he said.
When Black Lives Matter packed up its tent city and issued a 300-hour deadline for the demands to be met, the timeline may have sounded un- reasonable. But months had passed since some of the demands were first issued, organizers say.
Along with other civil-rights groups, BLM members have been calling for a meeting with Mark Saunders since he became Toronto’s police chief a year ago. Calls for public meetings with Mayor John Tory and the premier go back that far, too.
Tory instead has convened a meeting for Saturday with black community leaders and Chief Saunders, not including Black Lives Matter. Andray Domise, a Rexdale activist among those invited, insists the group be included in future discussions, and in public meetings.
“If we stay on the current trajectory, the (black) communities will have no trust in the mayor or the police chief,” Domise said. Wednesday night, both sides seemed to be softening their stance, with BLM saying it would consider attending Tory’s meeting, depending on its format and focus.
The main difference after the tent city isn’t the group’s goals or progress, Hudson says. It is BLM’s visibility and strength in numbers.
(A recent Forum poll, released after Hudson spoke with the Star, speaks to her point. It suggested a majority of Torontonians support the movement and agree there is systemic racism in Toronto.)
“Politicians are aware that they need to make it look as though they’re doing something about it. Now we need to get that to translate into actually doing something about it,” Hudson said.
The inquest is a start, but the group has bigger plans. The next steps are where the new movement departs from traditional tactics.
Hudson and her counterparts remain steadfast in their requests for public meetings, one of their more unorthodox tactics, and demands for sweeping changes, despite backlash from critics.
“Where people are denying that something needs to be done or trying to blame the organization for not being set up exactly the way they want us to be set up — you don’t control us,” she said.
“I know that may suck for politicians, because we’re making certain people look bad.”
Portrayals of the movement as an “Occupy-style” group with no central leadership, no readily available contact information and no focused demands fail to recognize the elaborate mechanics operating behind the banner.
The project to overhaul the SIU and policing is going to be “major, huge,” Hudson says, requiring vast resources and political will.
“(Politicians) know that it’s going to be difficult for them to undertake this and it’s going to be a long-term, difficult project that may not result in their typical voter base being particularly excited about it,” she said.
She suspects that those who portray the group as unreasonable or undeserving of a meeting do so as a deflection.
“I truly believe that they know what it’s going to take, and they want to turn their attention to the group to make it easier to talk about why they’re not doing anything about it. They’re placing the blame on us.”
Ultimately, though, it’s policy-makers, not Black Lives Matter’s actions, that Hudson wants at the centre of attention.
“We are not accountable to anybody but ourselves. But these folks are accountable to entire populations that they are not serving.”