Patrisse Cullors helped start a movement. One of three original founders of Black Lives Matter, she says she’s been involved in activist efforts for her community since she was 16 years old, and what brought her into activist spaces in the first place was the people who had come before her.
“What was so important for me as a young person was having generations above me really spend the time with me to talk about organizing and activism and spend the time with me to help me shape what my role was going to be,” she tells Teen Vogue in a phone interview on February 22.
That’s part of why she’s bringing her project Power: From the Mouths of the Occupied to New York on Sunday, February 24. Originally conceived in 2014, while she was an artist in residence at Kalamazoo College in Michigan, Power uses a documentary performance format to give black people the chance to share what happened before, during, and after interactions with law enforcement.
“I really wanted to talk about the impact state violence had on black people, on our bodies, on our spirits, and just the impact of law enforcement interactions on us,” she says.
Drawing on the impact felt by Mike Brown’s killing by police in 2014, she sought to give survivors of police encounters a voice: “I really wanted to have a conversation with survivors, with people who have survived incidences because there’s so many of us who have.”
Cullors says the project gives people a chance to share these stories in “an artistic format,” which means, “What you’re going to get from each piece is not really a rhetorical speech about policing but a much more tender, intimate entryway into what happened to that person.” She adds that the project gives people a chance to ask questions like, “Was there ever any resolution? Did they get any support? Did they get any justice?”
After its inception in Kalamazoo, Power has gone to Seattle, Cullors’s hometown of Los Angeles, and Granville, Ohio, the home of Denison University. In each of these cities, local people were centered as they shared their experiences as part of Power.
The Public Theater in Manhattan makes New York the latest city to host a performance, and it will feature former cast members Marcel Baugh from Seattle and Thandiwe Abdullah of the Black Lives Matter Los Angeles Youth Vanguard, as well as Donnay Edmund, a member of the Truthworker Theatre Company who was born and raised in Brooklyn. Cullors says she’s spent months working with the speakers to craft the stories they’ll tell.
Those three storytellers — the combination of which Cullors says technically make for an “abridged” version of a full Power performance — will be followed by a conversation between Cullors, legendary activist Angela Davis, and Gen Z powerhouse Yara Shahidi. She says bringing together an intergenerational conversation about the movement for black lives is crucial.
“Angela Davis is a mentor of mine,” she says, explaining how they typically end up doing at least one talk together each year. She says that adding Yara, a mentee of hers, into the conversation was natural, given Yara’s affinity for Davis.
“The first time I actually met her was at an Angela Davis event that I was doing in L.A.,” Cullors shares. “She walked up to me with this picture of Angela, and her grandfather was standing next to her, and she said, ‘My grandfather helped the Free Angela campaign.’” Yara told Cullors at the time that Davis was one of her idols.
“I thought it would be amazing to get three generations of black women who are activists in their own right to talk both about the performances and talk about how art really shapes how we view the world, but also talk about our own understanding of this moment,” she says. To Cullors, the chance to fight back against the historical erasure of black people’s stories about their own experiences is “incredible.”
As far as her own understanding of this moment, Cullors is still building on the work she’s been doing with Black Lives Matter since 2013. She tells Teen Vogue that her latest victory came in Los Angeles, where she helped coordinate a massive campaign to stop the construction of two new jails. JusticeLA — a coalition of existing organizations — was fighting long-term plans for two new jails in Los Angeles County: a new jail for women far from town and another plan to rebuild an existing jail, turning it into one that houses and treats prisoners requiring mental health considerations.
Activist pressure played a huge role in the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors' February 12 decision to scrap the plans for a women’s jail and commit to replacing the existing Men’s Central Jail with a mental health treatment facility “focused on healing, not punishment” — although the Los Angeles Daily News reports some are still concerned that the hospital could just be a jail in a nurse costume.
“It’s my life’s work. It’s the reason why I started this work to begin with,” Cullors says of the grassroots success in opposing the jails. “My brother was incarcerated inside those jails. He was diagnosed with schizophrenia and schizoaffective disorder inside those jails, and he was brutally beaten inside those jails. And so, to know that we are going to change the material conditions for those at the margins — they won’t have to suffer inside a jail cell — is huge.”
“There’s still more work to be done,” she continues. “We’re actually fighting for a decentralized mental health model.” She explains that Los Angeles County has five districts, and her coalition would rather see community-based mental health facilities in each of those districts as opposed to one central location — especially given L.A.’s reputation for terrible traffic.
Cullors is also the chairperson of a political action committee called Reform L.A. Jails, which aims to take the plan for decentralized mental health care facilities to the March 2020 ballot as a ballot initiative. She says legislative interventions like this are part of a two-pronged approach to BLM’s activist efforts. For Cullors, the combination of disruption and reform is central to the movement’s path forward.
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“We call it non-reformist reforms. The reforms that are going to get us closer to [prison] abolition — those are the reforms that I’m most interested in. A reform to stop a jail and to build a hospital is a huge reform,” she tells Teen Vogue. “We’re not going to just be able to get rid of prisons in one day, overnight. This is going to be a process.”
Cullors says she faces down the challenges of her work by dancing, walking, and going to therapy — she adds that she would make access to a therapist part of her reparations package for black people. She also stresses the impact of spending time with her community.
“We should not be doing this work alone,” she says. “We should not be doing it in silos. We need the support and we need the care of a team.”
Editor's Note: This article has been updated to include the names and affiliations the performs involved in the project and clarify Cullors's roles at Kalamazoo College and with Reform L.A. Jails.
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