Unbound

Tarana Burke's memoir traces the origins of the Me Too movement through decades of personal trauma and community organizing. The book opens in the fall of 2017, when Burke woke to discover a friend had tagged her in a viral Facebook post using the phrase "me too" in connection with sexual harassment disclosures. Burke panicked: She had spent over a decade building a movement around those words, and a hashtag threatened to erase that history. She posted a 2014 video of herself wearing a "ME TOO" T-shirt at the Philadelphia March to End Rape Culture. That night, she found a stranger's blog post explaining that #metoo made her feel less alone after years of hidden shame. The post convicted Burke spiritually. She stopped fighting over credit and resolved to share her vision. The rest of the book, she explains, is the story behind those two words.

Burke traces that story to childhood. At twelve, a man in a pharmacy line called her "ugg-ly," and the word lodged in her mind. As a dark-skinned Black girl with an athletic build, she moved through public space defensively. She connects this shame to its source: In the winter after she turned seven, a neighborhood older boy led her to a dark stairwell and raped her. She cataloged every rule she had broken and concluded she was at fault. Her stepfather, Mr. Wes, the neighborhood's patriarch and protector, demanded to know who had bothered her, but Burke, having witnessed Mr. Wes's capacity for violence, buried her secret at seven to protect him from prison. Beginning at nine, another older boy molested Burke using Polaroid photographs as blackmail. The summer before she turned twelve, she finally screamed, broke free, and stole his camera. A trusted family friend gently intuited what had happened but advised caution, reinforcing Burke's silence.

Burke is a third-generation Bronxite. Her grandfather, Joseph Burke, was a self-taught scholar devoted to Marcus Garvey and Malcolm X, and her mother raised Burke steeped in Black consciousness. Her biological father was absent; Mr. Wes filled that role until an accidental shooting led to his imprisonment. Burke grieved the loss of the protection she had sacrificed her secret to preserve. Catholicism offered her a framework for managing shame, but her mother's relationship with Mr. Eddie, a man contemptuous of Burke, upended the household. When her mother failed to intervene against his cruelty, Burke experienced it as betrayal.

At Harry S. Truman High School in 1987, Burke discovered the power of fighting back, accumulating multiple fights and suspensions after a confrontation over a stolen purse. Two discoveries redirected her. Around twelve, she secretly read Maya Angelou's I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings and learned Angelou had been raped at eight, realizing for the first time that this happened to innocent girls. Watching Angelou recite "Phenomenal Woman" on video, Burke confronted a question central to her healing: How could a body holding that kind of pain also hold joy?

After transferring to Herbert H. Lehman High School, Burke found a job that led to a youth leadership trip to Washington, DC, where she encountered the 21st Century Youth Leadership Movement (21C). Founded in 1985 by veterans of the civil rights and Black Power movements, 21C trained young people in organizing. Its cofounder, Rose Sanders (later Faya Rose Touré Sanders), challenged the students to declare themselves leaders. Burke channeled her rage into activism. When her plan to attend Clark Atlanta University collapsed, Mrs. Sanders enrolled her at Alabama State University, a historically Black college or university (HBCU), within twenty-four hours. The Rodney King verdict in spring 1992 jolted Burke into action, and she organized a campus rally demanding students remember Latasha Harlins alongside King.

After graduating from Auburn University at Montgomery, Burke accepted a position with 21C. In the summer of 1996, she led a leadership camp where she met Heaven, a combative twelve-year-old whose exterior masked vulnerability Burke recognized as her own. During a session where girls shared experiences of sexual assault, Heaven dissociated. The next day, she began disclosing that her mother's boyfriend had "done stuff" to her. Overwhelmed, Burke cut her off and redirected her to another staff member. Heaven's face shifted from relief to disgust, and Burke watched the armor she had helped chip away reassemble. After camp ended, Burke stood before her bathroom mirror and said aloud for the first time: "I was raped. They molested me." She resolved to be ready the next time a girl like Heaven came to her.

Burke's relationship with Sean, her on-again boyfriend who had relocated to Alabama, grew violent during her pregnancy. He pinned her down, held her captive for hours, and later initiated sex despite her protests. Realizing her pregnancy had transformed their dynamic into domestic violence, she told him to leave. His parting words, "Tell my daughter that I love her," were how Burke learned she was having a girl.

Burke settled in Selma, Alabama, with her daughter, Kaia, working three jobs. At the annual Jubilee celebration, seven-year-old Kaia approached Burke terrified. Burke's niece identified Malik, a young man connected to the Sanders circle, as the one bothering Kaia, and Burke punched him. That night Kaia disclosed that Malik had rubbed their thigh. When Malik later appeared at Burke's workplace, sent by Mrs. Sanders, Kaia screamed and urinated in terror. Mrs. Sanders dismissed Burke's concerns. Her trust in the Sanders family fractured further when they gave Reverend James Luther Bevel, one of Dr. King's lieutenants, access to youth programs despite knowing he had molested his own daughters.

Burke's disillusionment propelled her toward the work she felt called to do. After a rape crisis center turned her away with brochures, she broke down and felt a calling: "It's you." She founded Just Be, Inc. and its JEWELS curriculum for middle school girls, centered on self-worth and community. The Bevel crisis triggered a deeper reckoning. Alone in her loft, Burke deliberately walked through every memory of her abuse for the first time, experiencing a breakdown lasting nearly two days. When it subsided, her fear transformed into clarity. She picked up a steno pad and wrote two words: "me too."

Burke left Selma for Philadelphia, building "me too" into a traveling workshop and national campaign. During a quiet moment styling Kaia's hair, she told her child that nothing could separate them from her love and invited Kaia to write down anything they could not say aloud. Kaia returned with a note: "IT WAS A BOY AT CAMP. HE MADE ME DO BAD STUFF WITH HIS BROTHER AND I DIDN'T WANT TO. I'M SORRY MOMMY." The assault had occurred at a 21C camp when Kaia was five. Burke held her child and, for the first time, told Kaia that a similar thing had happened to her.

Burke reflects on #metoo's aftermath, noting that Black women largely did not engage in the same public disclosure as white women. She participated in dream hampton's 2018 documentary Surviving R. Kelly, connecting the predation of vulnerable Black girls to patterns from her own life. In the epilogue, Burke returns to her old Bronx neighborhood and spots the man who raped her at seven. He stares past her without recognition. In the taxi home, her mother tells her: "He didn't recognize you because you turned out to be a smart, beautiful, accomplished woman despite him trying to take that from you." Burke cries quietly, recognizing that he had not won. She had.