More than in any other chapters, Cullors here addresses the terror visited upon Black women by the state. In addition to shooting deaths, an alarming number of Black women die in police custody. According to Vox, in July 2015 alone—the month Sandra Bland was found dead—six women died in police custody under mysterious conditions, five of them Black. (Norwood, Candace. “Sandra Bland’s mother wants you to know the other women who died in police custody.” Vox. 4 May 2016. https://www.vox.com/identities/2016/5/4/11580588/sandra-bland-mother.) They include Kindra Chapman, an 18-year-old accused of shoplifting whose death, only two hours after she was placed in a cell, was also ruled a suicide. Black women are also particularly susceptible to sexual abuse by police officers. According to researchers at Bowling Green State University, 548 police officers were arrested for sex-related crimes between 2005 and 2007. Of these, over half involved sexual misconduct committed while on duty or acting in an official capacity. Twenty-four percent of those cases involved minors. (Stinson, Philip M, John Liederbach, Steven L. Brewer, and Brooke E. Mathna. “Police sexual misconduct: A national scale study of arrested officers.” Criminal Justice Faculty Publications, Issue 30. 2014.)

Cullors points out that the names of these women are often left out in discussions of state violence against people of color. Of victims like seven-year-old Aiyana Stanley-Jones and 92-year-old Kathryn Johnson, she writes, “These few names are only part of a long, terrible list, but, like the horrific history of lynching in this country, when the story is told, women are often out of it even as we are lynched, too” (228). According to Crystal N. Feimster, an associate professor of African American studies at Yale, this erasure of women from the history is partly due to the dominant imagery associated with lynching, which tends to focus on Black men falsely accused of raping White women.

Yet Feimster adds that between 1880 and 1930 there were 130 confirmed cases of Black women lynched and many others that went unreported. Some argue that Black men are so centered in discussions of lynching because of how often false rape allegations accompanied a lynching. Yet the notion that a rape allegation was required to justify a lynching is contradicted by the research of journalist Ida B. Wells. Feimster writes, “[B]y showing that only about 30 percent of the black victims of lynch mobs had actually been accused of rape, Wells challenged the idea that lynchings resulted from it.” (Feimster, Crystal N. “Ida B. Wells and the Lynching of Black Women.” The New York Times. 28 Apr. 2018. https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/28/opinion/sunday/ida-b-wells-lynching-black-women.html.)

Equally subject to erasure are the efforts of Black women in activist movements. This is something Cullors admits she is guilty of herself, having failed to ensure the visibility of Transwomen activists. Of these women, she writes, “The most criminalized people on the planet are Black Transwomen who cannot pass” (215). These efforts reflect one of the challenges of Black Lives Matter’s decentralized structure. By granting a fair amount of autonomy to local chapters, Cullors and other Black Lives Matter chapters might struggle to establish and maintain consistent narratives, including narratives that emphasize the brutalization of Trans bodies. This frustration is echoed by Jonovia Chase, a lead organizer of House Lives Matter, an initiative that seeks justice for sexual- and gender-minority people of color. During the 2020 George Floyd protests, Chase told ABC News that while Black Lives Matter was “created by queer folks, [cisgender] privilege has taken precedent over gay and transgender people.” (Salzman, Sony. “From the start, Black Lives Matter has been about LGBTQ lives.” ABC News. 21 Jun. 2020. https://abcnews.go.com/US/start-black-lives-matter-lgbtq-lives/story?id=71320450.)

That decentralization has been problematic in other ways for the Black Lives Matter movement. Although the movement has rigorous standards for prospective new chapters, many individuals with no affiliation with Black Lives Matter create online communities under its name. At The Conversation, academic Ashley Cole points out that sometimes Black Lives Matter members with strong visibility on social media are misconstrued as leaders of the movement. This happened when Joshua Virasami, a member of a Black Lives Matter chapter in the United Kingdom with a large social media following, was charged with speaking for the broader movement on a series of controversial issues relating to Israel. (Cole, Ashley. “Black Lives Matter: decentralised leadership and the problems of online organising.” The Conversation. 15 Jul. 2020. https://theconversation.com/black-lives-matter-decentralised-leadership-and-the-problems-of-online-organising-140897.)

Yet decentralization can also be a boon for the movement. This is true when taking stock of Black Lives Matter’s activity since the publication of When They Call You a Terrorist. During the ongoing George Floyd protests, Black Lives Matter continued to stage protests around the world in which demonstrators act out the final moments of Floyd’s life. While most rallies worldwide are organized by groups unassociated with Black Lives Matter, the slogan and its ethos are deeply entwined with the widespread calls for racial justice and police reform. Countless individuals with no direct ties to Black Lives Matter nevertheless have the slogan emblazoned on signs in front of their yard. Meanwhile, Cliff Albright, cofounder of Black Voters Matter Fund, points out another advantage of the decentralized model, telling Politico, “In terms of strategy—and this is very real that we have to be honest about this—it makes it harder for those who are against us to do what they did in the ‘60s, which is to target one leader.” (Barrón-López, Laura. “Why the Black Lives Matter movement doesn’t want a strong leader.” Politico. 22 Jun 2020. https://www.politico.com/states/new-york/city-hall/story/2020/07/21/why-the-black-lives-matter-movement-doesnt-want-a-singular-leader-1302934.)

Black Lives Matter’s horizontal structure—which calls itself “leaderful” as opposed to “leaderless”—might be one reason why little of Cullors’s book is devoted to her individual acts of leadership in the movement. The purpose of the book is less to highlight her prowess as an activist and more to detail how her family’s personal experience with racial state violence justifies the movement’s mission while refuting accusations that Black Lives Matter is a terrorist organization.