Month: July 2020

By JAZMIN KOPOTSHA,

There’s something particularly special about seeing black love on screen. Granted, a significant part of that is because we don’t see it happen anywhere near as frequently as we should. Narratives around the black experience often zoom in on the pain and hardships of our community’s past rather than the joy and strength in our hearts and relationships. But there are some gems which manage to celebrate everything it is to love and be loved as a young black person – regardless of the issues that challenge it. 

There are new films that redefine what ‘black love’ looks like, extrapolating a romantic narrative purely for what it is – romance. There are old films that shaped many of our understandings of the nuances of black love trying to blossom in surroundings that want to stamp it out. There are also stories that challenge black masculinity, the resilience culturally enforced in black women, and downright sexy ones that find the fun in straightforward attraction.

These are some of our favourite films in the canon of the greatest black love stories ever told:

The Photograph (2020)

Any film starring Lakeith Stanfield as the romantic lead is an automatic winner in my mind. Paired with the incomparable Issa Rae, we have a couple worthy of our unquestioned adoration. Period. 

When her estranged mother dies, Mae (Rae) finds a photograph hidden in a safety deposit box. It triggers a determined investigation into her mother’s life and relationships, which inadvertently leads her into the arms of a young journalist called Michael (Stanfield).

Queen & Slim (2020)

There’s not been a film that has made my heart ache as fervently as this one. Jodie Turner-Smith and Daniel Kaluuya star as a couple who, after their first date, find themselves on the run after killing a white police officer in self-defence. There’s a complicated magic that comes from watching their love blossom from the most painful of places – the kind of love that immortalises them as a couple forever. 

If Beale Street Could Talk (2018)

A mist of frustration and distress surrounds the context of Barry Jenkins’ beautiful film. We’re taken back to 1970s Harlem when racial tensions are high and injustice is both rife and anticipated. Tish (Kiki Layne) is pregnant and her boyfriend, Fonny (Stephan James) has been sent to prison for a crime he didn’t commit. Their love is resilient but we know it’s not enough to conquer a justice system built to oppress them. What is wonderfully overpowering, though, is the fierce and unwavering love Tish’s mum (Regina King), dad (Colman Domingo) and sister (Teyonah Parris) have for Tish and each other despite the strain and struggle placed before them.

Moonlight (2016)

It’s slim pickings for films that celebrate black love through an LGBTQ lens, but that’s not the only reason why Barry Jenkins’ Oscar-winning film remains so impactful. With brilliant disregard for the typical parameters of films about love, Moonlight offers a stark and moving look at masculine sexuality in a coming-of-age narrative that’s not easily forgotten. Mahershala Ali, Naomie Harris, Alex R. Hibbert and Janelle Monáe are all stunning. 

Southside With You (2016)

Nothing quite competes with a real-life love story. Particularly when it’s the story of how our favourite president of the United States and forever first lady came together. Here we get to watch the story of Barack Obama (Parker Sawyers) and Michelle Robinson (Tika Sumpter) play out on the big screen and get a peek at how the world’s most powerful black couple came to be after one fateful date back in the summer of 1989.

Love And Basketball (2000)

I don’t know about you, but there was a period of time at school when Love And Basketball was the only acceptable answer when asked to name your favourite film. Following pre-teens Quincy (Omar Epps) and Monica (Sanaa Lathan) navigate life, love and, yes, basketball, was the coolest, most romantic thing to happen at the turn of the millennium. Without it, there would (probably) not have been a Coach Carter either. 

Love Jones (1997)

There were many reasons to want to be Nia Long. She was the black female heartthrob of a generation and one of the reigning queens of black TV and cinema for an impressive amount of time. Watching her opposite Larenz Tate in the unbearably sexy Love Jones, however, was something else. This film was a vessel of understanding the difference between a relationship and a situationship. 

Jason’s Lyric (1994)

Jason (Bokeem Woodbine) wants more than is offered by the rough neighbourhood in Houston where he lives with his mum and brother. When he meets Lyric (Jada Pinkett), however, his life and purpose are given new meaning. Their love blossoms, hits a couple of challenges and is messily interwoven between ongoing violence and tension in the background. It’s wildly melodramatic and almost all the more enjoyable for it. 

Poetic Justice (1993)

All hail Janet Jackson and her incredible style, which so many of us tried to recreate after watching this film. She plays Justice, a woman grieving a murdered boyfriend and writing poetry to deal with the pain (see what they did with the title, there?). Iesha (Regina King) gives her a lift to Oakland and on the journey she meets Lucky (played by the Tupac Shakur), who challenges her to open up her heart to romance once more. 

Original article was published here.

BY DONOVAN X. RAMSEY; PHOTOGRAPHY BY CHRISTIAN CODY

Killer Mike didn’t want to go to the press conference but felt like he had to. It had been a long day already. He woke up thinking about how a Black man named George Floyd had been lynched in Minneapolis just the day before, and Mike was busy traveling around Atlanta’s Westside in a food truck he and his friend T.I. had recently purchased, “shaking hands and kissing babies” to create some buzz. But then T.I. got a surprise call from Atlanta mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms, who was soliciting the rapper’s help to ease tensions after a peaceful protest in downtown Atlanta started turning into a riot. T.I. asked Mike if he wanted to come along. Mike said no at first, according to T.I.: “Absolutely not” and “It’s not our motherfucking job”—but T.I. wore him down over the course of an hour, and Mike felt duty-bound to support his friend. Which is how Killer Mike ended up at city hall to speak on live television, standing alongside legislators and law enforcement, still wearing a T-shirt that said “KILL YOUR MASTERS.”

He spoke extemporaneously and said what was in his heart, touching on everything from his personal relationship with the police to Atlanta history to public policy and a potential path forward.

“I’m mad as hell,” Mike told the room full of reporters. “I woke up wanting to see the world burn down yesterday because I’m tired of seeing Black men die.” He also repudiated the violent protests: “It is your duty not to burn your own house down for anger with an enemy. It is your duty to fortify your own house so that you may be a house of refuge in times of organization.”

He added, “Now is the time to plot, plan, strategize, organize, and mobilize.”

Mike’s stance against violent demonstrations, especially in the birthplace of Martin Luther King Jr., who famously said, “A riot is the language of the unheard,” was unconvincing to many people, including myself. It’s a side of King that’s often overlooked by history—and a phrase Killer Mike himself quoted in 2015 when addressing the riots in Baltimore after Freddie Gray died from spinal cord injuries while in police custody. Now here Mike was taking another tack, saying Atlanta is “cut different” from other cities.“If we lose Atlanta,” he asked, “what else we got?”

The speech went viral almost immediately. Some praised it as sensible and right on time; critics said his shaming of protesters was out of touch and that the speech was overly sympathetic to a police apparatus broken beyond repair. The mixed reaction is a testament to the deep divisions that exist in this country, even among people who tend to agree on most things. It’s also a testament to who Killer Mike is as a person and as a personality. People like their public figures to fit into neat boxes—conservative, liberal, capitalist, socialist, rapper, activist. Killer Mike is hard to put in any single one, and by his own design. He is as comfortable talking to Joe Rogan as he is to Charlamagne Tha God. He is as critical of centrist Democrats as he is of Republicans. He’s just as willing to debate the likes of Trump-supporting provocateur Candace Owens (at a televised summit in Atlanta, hosted by Diddy) as he is veteran reporter Joy Reid (live on her morning MSNBC show) and will go to war with anyone.

“I don’t give a shit about liking you or you liking me. What I give a shit about is if your policies are going to benefit me and my community in a way that will help us get a leg up in America.”

Mike has been that way his whole life—a mix of ideas, beliefs, and styles all competing in one large body. It’s this very eclectic nature that has made him one of hip-hop’s most nimble figures. He crossed over from trap music to agit-rap as one half of Run the Jewels because, in his words, Why not? The duo released their fourth studio album, RTJ4, in June, and the project has been heralded by critics for its timeliness and raw power. Rolling Stone called it “perfectly apt for 2020 America.” Craig Jenkins of New York magazine wrote that RTJ4is “an album of prickly, prescient conversations and explosive noise.”

The album is a showcase for Mike’s many faces. He’s enjoying the spoils of his riches one moment and apoplectic the next. On “holy calamafuck,” he rhymes, One time in the big ol’ South / Lived a li’l chubby kid with a big ol’ mouth / Lame writers gave him big ol’ doubts / Now the same lil’ boy in a big ol’ house. On the very next track, titled “goonies vs. E.T.,” he’s out for blood: Ain’t no revolution that’s televised and digitized / You’ve been hypnotized and Twitter-ized by silly guys / Cues to the evenin’ news, make sure you ill-advised / Got you celebratin’ the generators of genocide.

In recent years Mike has become increasingly known for his activism in politics. It started in August 2014, when he appeared on CNN to discuss the killing of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, and the unrest that followed. People responded to his charisma and eloquence, even if they ignored the warning coming out of his mouth: “Whatever this country is willing to do to the least looked-upon…to Black people, to those males, will eventually happen to all Americans.”

He became a surrogate for presidential candidate Bernie Sanders in 2015, stumping for the senator at rallies around the country and sharing Sanders’s vision with Black voters. Mike continued to speak up about social issues after Sanders lost the primary in 2016, leading to his very own Netflix series, which premiered in 2019.

Trigger Warning, starring and executive-produced by Mike, is like a roller-coaster ride through his busy mind. Over the course of six episodes, it follows Mike as he conducts IRL social experiments, attempting to put some of his most revolutionary ideas into practice. In the first episode, he tries to shop at only Black businesses, to varying degrees of success. In another, he creates his own church, one free of the prosperity gospel and white Jesus. And in another he helps Crips and Bloods launch their own legitimate businesses. The final and perhaps most layered episode of the series sees Mike experimenting with the concept of utopia as he and a small crew of volunteers attempt to form a secessionist community in rural Georgia.

It’s funny and instructive, swinging back and forth between documentary and satire. Watching it, one has the feeling that Mike is both dead serious and having a lot of fun stirring shit up. “He is a genuine character, and he’s a complex character as well,” says El-P, his Run the Jewels partner. “I think that Mike deserves for people to understand how complicated he is and how much depth he has.”

It’s a sentiment shared by just about everyone who knows him, from his old friends to his new ones. Former Ohio state senator Nina Turner met Mike in 2016 while campaigning for Bernie Sanders. The two became fast friends, “like sister and brother” almost immediately, she says.

“Michael is an intellectual, and he’s a man of the people,” Turner says, placing him in a lineage of Black teachers and activists. “He comes from the best tradition of the Talented Tenth, but also from the Ella Bakers, Fannie Lou Hamers. You can have all of those things in one person, and he personifies all of that. And to know Michael is to see those various dimensions play out, in glory and majesty and purpose and love, for Black people.”

In early June, on the day of the Georgia primaries, I show up to Mike’s home in Atlanta, a big and stately house hidden behind a wrought-iron gate. He likes the place because it’s “far enough the robbers don’t want to come but close enough that if my sister call me I can get there.” I expect an assistant or a publicist to greet me at the door, but Mike does instead. He’s a little taller than I am, and I’m six feet tall, but he’s heavier. Piercing eyes and a furrowed brow make him look mean and impressive when he’s not smiling—and he isn’t when he answers the door. He looks a little like my uncle Roger, my mother’s youngest brother. Then he smiles and invites me in, and the resemblance is solidified.

After a quick tour that included a neatly organized shoe room full of clear storage containers and Nike boxes, and a gun closet that’s under construction, we sit down at his kitchen table. Before we can get into it, his phone starts blowing up. A friend of his in prison calls to check in. Then another friend, a prominent Atlanta strip club owner, calls him from the voting booth, confused about the way a ballot question is worded. Next is his daughter, who needs exactly $248 for a new cell phone. (He makes her commit via text to 40 hours of work at his barbershop before sending the money.) Chris Paul, the NBA star, calls at one point, eager to discuss politics.

He promises to call everyone back and offers me a drink from the bar and a perfectly rolled joint from a pile he keeps on the table. I decline both, despite the voice in the back of my head that says that I should just enjoy the free weed. I eventually submit to his Southern hospitality and accept something, a Topo Chico, and he’s finally put at ease.

Before he became Killer Mike, Michael Render was born in Atlanta in the spring of 1975. It was a sweet time in the city. Voters had just elected their first Black mayor, Maynard Jackson, and things were looking up as Jackson set policies in motion to make Atlanta’s moniker, the City Too Busy to Hate, a reality. When he expanded Atlanta’s airport, for example, Jackson insisted that 25 percent of all contracts be set aside for “minority firms.” (“You can have 75 percent of this project or you can have 100 percent of nothing. What is your choice?” Jackson reportedly told white contractors.) The policy was a boon for Black businesses and Atlanta’s Black professional class, both of which, alongside Jackson’s aggressive move to more fully integrate the Atlanta Police Department, added to the city’s image as a Black mecca.

Mike grew up on the mecca’s Westside. His neighborhood, Collier Heights, is yet another testament to the Atlanta Way. It was a village of more than 1,700 single-family homes—financed, designed, and constructed by middle-class Black Atlantans for other middle-class Black Atlantans. His neighbors were doctors, lawyers, businesspeople.

His family was cut from a different cloth, though. His parents were young when they had him, so he was taken in by his grandparents, who owned a small home at the edge of the Collier Heights enclave. The village raised him—a wild-child mother, a straitlaced father, grandparents who grew up in the Old South, each embodying their generation’s values.

“My grandfather could be best described as a libertarian,” Mike says. “He wasn’t big on affiliating himself with anything, but he believed in small government. Fishing licenses were an abomination to him,” he adds with a laugh.

Mike says he can show me better than he can tell me, so we hop into his everyday ride, an all-black Dodge Hellcat. Although his wife, Shana, has been driving the car and there’s a jar of edge control in the passenger seat, it exudes masculine cool. I know next to nothing about cars, but the sight sends me spinning down another Southern-culture rabbit hole. I think to myself that it looks like a Black cousin of the General Lee, the Confederate flag-adorned muscle car famously featured on the ’80s sitcom The Dukes of Hazzard. It seems like a rude comparison, but I can’t help it when we’re on the road and Mike starts speeding like he’s Bo Duke outrunning Boss Hogg. Just the good ol’ boys. Never meanin’ no harm.

As it happens, it’s primary day in Georgia, a brutal day that would later be described on Politico as a “hot, flaming mess” after citizens are forced to line up for hours to pick their party’s candidate and answer important ballot questions like Question 6: “Should every Georgian that has served their sentence for a crime they committed be allowed to have their voting rights restored?” We drive past a polling place and Mike gets recognized almost immediately. People in the line, mostly Black voters of all ages, point and wave. That’s Killer Mike. Mike waves back like he recognizes them too.

Mike has spoken candidly before about running for office someday, and as we drive around I ask him a theoretical question about what policies he would put in place if he were running the city. He dives right in, like a candidate on the campaign trail. Here’s Killer Mike’s platform: He would insist that a city that is more than 50 percent Black, like Atlanta, do more than 50 percent of its business with a Black-owned bank and create incentives for graduates of Atlanta public high schools to go to the city’s historically Black colleges. He’d also help city employees finance homes in Atlanta to keep them from moving to the suburbs, and he’d make the 16 Fortune 500 companies that call Atlanta home commit to public works.

What about the police? I ask.
“What about police?”
Are we going to defund the police?

“Well, this is the thing. I don’t know if anybody’s ever going to defund the police. I would demilitarize the police. Police do not need to literally look like occupying soldiers,” he says. “In Atlanta, I would focus less on creating a police state and go more back to the community policing.… I would make sure that our police are involved in our communities in a non-police way, meaning coaching, assistant coaching. I would strengthen the Police Athletic League dramatically, because my interaction with police should be more like the Police Athletic League and less like you’re stopping me because three of us are standing on this corner.”

“It is the Black city that, far from perfect, has worked. It worked during reconstruction. It worked through Jim Crow. It worked for the last 50 years with black leadership…. At every stage, Blacks in Atlanta have found a way.”

A few minutes later we pull up at the home of William Murray, Mike’s former art teacher from Frederick Douglass High School, who continued to mentor him after he graduated. Mr. Murray is already outside, in his sprawling vegetable garden. He’s a small, light-skinned man with a plush beard and a full head of curly white hair. He’s wiry and moves with the speed of a much younger man. He’s not expecting Mike, let alone a reporter, but he doesn’t seem to mind our sudden appearance. In fact, he starts telling us a story as though we’d been there all along:

As a child, William Murray would finish his work so fast that his elementary school teacher would send him out on illicit errands, including picking up the teacher’s lunch. Later on, he says, that same teacher tried to spank Murray, as was allowed at the time, but the boy was clever: He was saving receipts from his errands all the while, and the spanking was averted. That, says Mr. Murray, is how he learned to organize.

On the way to our next stop, Mike explains to me how Mr. Murray taught high school art for decades despite owning a successful funeral home. Over the years he mentored Mike and scores of other students, teaching them painting, photography, history, and how to grow their own food. “He didn’t invest five years into me for me to fail or be silent in a time of need,” says Mike. “He ain’t teaching me gardening just so I can grow food in my yard. He understands I have a podium.”

One of the more interesting contradictions lurking inside Killer Mike is that he is a proud “compassionate capitalist”—a small-business owner and landlord with multiple barbershops, a restaurant, and about $2 million in property across Atlanta. But he’s also backed democratic socialist candidates like Bernie Sanders, who, Mike has said, operates in the spirit of Martin Luther King Jr. Killer Mike says he has “love and respect for police officers,” but on songs like “Close Your Eyes (And Count to Fuck),” from Run the Jewels 2, he rhymes, Where my thuggers and my Crippers and my Blooders and my brothers? / When you niggas gon’ unite and kill the police, mothafuckas? / Or take over a jail, give them COs hell / The burnin’ of the sulfur, goddamn, I love the smell.

The most infamous example of Mike’s mixed messaging came in 2018, when he decided to sit down with NRATV, the former online broadcasting arm of the pro-gun organization. The conversation, which, he says, was supposed to be about Black gun ownership, devolved into an exchange about the National School Walkout and youth-led anti-gun protests following the mass shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida. “I told my kids on the school walkout, ‘I love you, [but] if you walk out that school, walk out my house,’ ” Mike says during the interview. “We are not a family that jumps on every single thing an ally of ours does, because some stuff, we just don’t agree with.”

He didn’t know it yet, but the NRA would use that short sound bite to blast protesters, posting it on Twitter a little past noon on March 24, 2018, as the student-led March for Our Lives took place in D.C.

Mike apologized soon after. “I do support the march, and I support Black people owning guns. It’s possible to do both,” he said. “To the young people that worked tirelessly to organize, I’m sorry adults chose to do this. I’m sorry NRATV did that. I’m sorry that adults on the left and the right are choosing to use me as a lightning rod.”

Still, the damage was done. Mike doesn’t apologize for sitting down with the NRA, however. He believes, at his core, that Black Americans should find allies wherever they can. “The greatest gift Atlanta has given me is to be able to judge people solely by the content of their character, because all my heroes and villains have always been Black,” he tells me. Mike repeats this a few times throughout the afternoon. He doesn’t say it about the NRA directly, but it speaks to how he measures allies and enemies. “You may start off with Professor X,” he says, “but Magneto got a fucking point.”

As we cruise around, I ask him if he plans on voting for Joe Biden in November. He demurs, asking me if Biden plans on signing H.R. 40, the bill that would establish a commission to study and develop proposals for reparations for Black Americans, before launching into an impassioned monologue:

“I don’t give a shit if Joe Biden the person is moved to the left. I don’t give a shit about liking you or you liking me. What I give a shit about is if your policies are going to benefit me and my community in a way that will help us get a leg up in America. That’s it. Because we deserve a leg up, and I’m not ashamed to say it.

“We fucking deserve it. My great-grandmother, who taught me how to sew a button, was taught how to sew a button because her grandmother was enslaved. The daughter of a slave taught me and encouraged me to write, read, sew buttons, take care of myself. So why the fuck am I going to accept anything? I don’t give a fuck if you kneel in kente cloth. Give a shit. What have you got for me?”

It speaks to the philosophy that undergirds all of Killer Mike’s political ideas and positions. Before anything, Mike is a Black man from the American South who is deeply skeptical of how much a white supremacist, heteropatriarchal power structure built on the evils of capitalism will do to ensure his freedom. So he’s willing to embrace methodologies and tactics from across the political spectrum to see what works.

“Why do we all have to be categorized and put in a box?” T.I. asks in defense of his friend. “Why do you want somebody to only be one way, the way that you need for them to be for you, but fuck everybody else? That shit don’t make no sense to me. It’s not realistic.”

“If you talk to Mike, he’ll call himself a mobilizer,” says El-P, “because Mike very much takes his ability to have a voice seriously. At the same time, he recognizes that he’s not the last word on all of this. And he’s also not constrained by philosophical perspectives. This is a guy who’s not frozen in ideology. It’s mobile for him.”

Mike is for Black banks, Black businesses, Black guns, Black colleges, Black homeownership—all things Black Americans can do here and now without passing a law or asking for permission. He’s also for using Black voting power to wrest everything we’re owed from the government. It’s Black nationalism with a hint of socialism and armed to the teeth.

Atlanta is no utopia, but it is perhaps the American city where this vision is best realized. Blacks make up more than half of its population, and that people power has led to the election of six Black mayors since 1973. Atlanta’s leaders have worked closely with the business community since then—companies like Coca-Cola, Home Depot, Delta, and UPS, all based in Atlanta—to create opportunity.

Despite that, there’s still extreme inequity in the city. According to a report from the Brookings Institution, Atlanta’s jobless rates in 2017 sat at 11.5 percent for Black residents and 2.5 percent for white residents. Last year, a Bloomberg article called Atlanta “the capital of U.S. inequality for the second year in a row.” An analysis of census data from 2018 revealed the average income for Atlanta’s top 5 percent of households exceeded $663,000 while families in the bottom half of the population earned less than $65,000—a ratio of more than 10 to 1.

“It is the Black city that, far from perfect, has worked,” Mike insists nevertheless. “It worked during Reconstruction. It worked through Jim Crow. It worked for the last 50 years with Black leadership—controversial at times, other times as smooth as a sewing machine, but it has worked at every stage. At every stage, Blacks in Atlanta have found a way.”

In the 1980s, Atlanta became a major hub for cocaine trafficking, a development that went hand in hand with the rise of its smokable derivative, crack. It was cheap, easy to make, and lucrative to sell, and it took Atlanta by storm, especially throughout Mike’s beloved Westside as boys his age seized an opportunity to make money.

“Nobody who was intelligent wouldn’t have,” says Mike of drug dealing. “When I was 12 years old, I figured out they would pay me $50 if I sit around my cousin’s apartment and shit and yell out ‘12’ when you see [the police] coming. What 12-year-old ain’t going to do that?” Mike was in business for himself selling crack by the time he was 14 years old.

Selling drugs gave him independence, a way to get the things he wanted without having to bother his grandparents, who were, by then, raising him and his two sisters. He hid the spoils of his work, new sneakers and clothes, at friends’ houses so his grandparents wouldn’t know what he was up to. His mother knew, though. She had become something of a queenpin herself, supplying cocaine to dealers in Decatur.

One day, she pulled him aside and schooled him on the game: “Don’t work for no nigga, don’t be a bitch,” Mike remembers. “Don’t let motherfuckers front you shit. Take your own. Don’t talk. Don’t tell.” By then, Mike’s father had already joined and left the Atlanta Police Department. His instructions to his son on how to survive were just as simple: “You see the police riding north, just walk south. If you know it’s their day, give them their day.”

He carried those lessons with him throughout his teen years, especially when he’d get his ass kicked by Red Dog (the brutal Atlanta police unit created to Run Every Drug Dealer Out of Georgia). He avoided major charges and got away with his life.

Mike picked up wisdom along the way. He watched how hustlers, Westside legends like Fat Steve, moved. They flipped their money by reinvesting in the community. They started businesses and bought up abandoned properties, sometimes whole blocks, just to keep the neighborhood secure from outside influence. They warned Mike and his friends to level up and stop dealing out of projects, which they jokingly referred to as “traps.”

“Some white, gentrifying developer didn’t teach us this was the thing to do,” Mike says. “This is what the fuck we saw all Black men do when we were kids.… The men that worked for the city too. They got paid, drove dump trucks, they owned multiple homes. They had rental properties. They knew how to do their own handyman work. This is what we do.”

By the time graduation approached, he was more interested in music and going to college. He got into Morehouse, Dr. King’s alma mater, on a scholarship and attended for two semesters, but it wasn’t for him. He liked rapping too much and, seeing a music scene on the rise in Atlanta, wanted to find his way into the industry. “I needed to prove that I could be a rapper,” he says.

So Mike did what he knew how to do and hustled. He linked up with some friends, bought recording equipment, and produced a mixtape. All of it finally paid off in 1995, when he met CeeLo of Atlanta’s Goodie Mob. Mike gave CeeLo his demo, and the two quickly became friends, connecting on music and the social issues explored on Goodie Mob’s first album, Soul Food. “He was young and a hungry MC,” CeeLo says. “He was highly intelligent, he was articulate, he was passionate, and he was consistent.” At Morehouse, Mike had met a couple of guys named Teeth Malloy and Nikki Broadway while rapping in a dorm room. The two would go on to form a production duo called the Beat Bullies, and they helped introduce Mike to Big Boi of OutKast shortly after.

“He was just an all-around good guy, man. And he was fun,” Big Boi says. “Came to the studio, was very observant, and was really into what we were doing.” Big went on to give Mike a record deal. Mike made his big-label debut on “Snappin’ & Trappin,’ ” off OutKast’s 2000 LP, Stankonia. A year later, he delivered an unforgettable feature on an OutKast single called “The Whole World.” The song won OutKast—and Killer Mike—a Grammy Award for Best Rap Performance by a Duo or Group.

Mike is amazed when he considers his unlikely ascent. “I’m the son of a fucking 16-year-old girl who they wanted to push out of school because she was pregnant and a ‘bad example’ to the other girls,” he says. “I ended up being taught by the same teachers that taught her at Frederick Douglass High School; attended Morehouse; left to become a rapper; ended up becoming a rapper; have all along been active as an organizer, a mobilizer; and learned how to be a businessman on the way.… Where the fuck does that happen at? That’s an Iceberg Slim book. That’s a goddamn BET movie. But that’s for real, you know, that’s for real. So I got to believe everything is possible. I’ve got to.”

His aspirations—whether they be in music, TV, politics—are all integrated into who he already is. There is no big plan. He sits on the board of Atlanta’s High Museum of Art and drops in on classes at Morehouse not out of ambition but because, to him, it’s the right thing to do. His guiding passions in life are smoking good weed, “singing and dancing for a living,” and “fucking off in the Blue Flame,” his favorite strip club. Killer Mike contains multitudes, but if you had to boil him down, you’d get a concerned citizen who just happens to be a rapper.

Mike and I end our tour of the Westside at Bankhead Seafood, the restaurant he bought in 2018 with T.I. and local business mogul Noel Khalil. It’s a large brick structure on Donald Lee Hollowell Parkway. It’s been given a fresh coat of paint and branded with a new logo, but it’s still no-frills. It could be any fish spot in any Black neighborhood in America. I find myself inspired as Mike explains that the 50-year-old business almost closed its doors for good before he and T.I. decided to keep it going. They not only bought the restaurant but purchased the recipes from its original proprietor, Helen Brown Harden. That’s how you honor those who came before you, Mike says, and maintain the integrity of the business.

I don’t know if Mike’s success story could happen anywhere but Atlanta. It seems impossible to replicate, let alone scale up, for all the little Black boys coming up on the Westside today. That won’t stop Mike from trying, though, because—for all the theory he’s read and plans he’s heard—his way, the Atlanta Way, is the only way he’s seen actually work.

A few days after we met, an Atlanta police officer killed a 27-year-old Black man named Rayshard Brooks. According to video footage, Brooks was asleep in a Wendy’s drive-through when he was approached by police responding to a complaint. A struggle ensued, and Brooks attempted to run away with an officer’s Taser. It is unclear why the situation escalated so quickly after 41 minutes of peaceful interaction. What is indisputable, however, is that Brooks ended up dead, with two bullets in his back.

The officer who fired the shots was relieved of duty immediately, and he was later charged with felony murder and aggravated assault. The officer’s lawyers have stated that his actions were justified. Atlanta police chief Erika Shields resigned from her post within hours of the incident. The rapid response didn’t stop protesters from shutting down a nearby interstate, and the Wendy’s where Brooks was killed was burned to the ground.

I call Mike a few days after. I want to know what he thinks, what he makes of this happening in a city he went out on a limb to defend. I also want to know if, in light of the shooting, he would take back his warning to not “burn your own house down for anger with an enemy.” I want to know if he’s changed his mind.

When he picks up the phone, he’s cagey at first, uncharacteristically formal and short. After some loaded “How are you’s” and throat clearing, I finally find the words to ask Mike how he feels about all that’s happened.

“I don’t…I don’t know how I feel,” he responds, at a loss for words. “I don’t.” He’s afraid for his city, afraid that “national political agendas” and “evil policemen” are infecting the decisions being made and, ultimately, the course that’s being set for Atlanta. “I’m afraid that 50 years of Black mayorship may burn to the ground because of things that are out of my direct control,” Mike adds. “I’m afraid all that legacy may be lost because of political maneuvering and the inability for us to reform policing in a progressive way fast enough. That’s what I’m afraid of.”

Regardless, Mike is steadfast in his belief in the Atlanta Way. When I ask what can be done, he goes back to the basics: He talks about the need to hire police officers from within the communities they serve. He talks about swiftly holding cops accountable for their misconduct. He talks about casting votes for progressive leadership to achieve justice and long-term social change, and he says that he’ll use whatever influence he possesses to make that vision happen, to set an example for his city and the rest of the nation.

And what if that doesn’t work? I ask.

“If it doesn’t work,” says Killer Mike matter-of-factly, “then we’re doomed.”

Donovan X. Ramsey is an Atlanta-based journalist. His first book, ‘When Crack Was King: A People’s History of the Crack Epidemic,’ will be published by One World, an imprint of Random House, next fall.

A version of this story originally appears in the August 2020 issue with the title “The Atlanta Way”.

Original article was published here.

BY ABBY AGUIRRE,

ON a rainy afternoon in March, dozens of tween girls filed into an auditorium at New York’s Lower Eastside Girls Club. They were there to hear Simone Biles talk about beauty standards. She arrived fresh off a plane from Indianapolis, where she had spent the morning training, and the room went bananas when she walked in, a four-foot-eight powerhouse in a color-block turtleneck and blue jeans. She sat on a couch at the front of the room. Her feet, in pearly ankle boots with Lucite heels, barely touched the floor.

Biles delivered her remarks in the dutiful and direct way that athletes and coaches give interviews. She loves gymnastics, she said, but not the beauty competition that comes with it: “No matter how good you are in your sport, in life, in work, the number one thing people talk about is how you look.” She urged the girls to handle such pressure by ignoring it. “You’re still going to thrive. You’re going to become somebody amazing and great. You guys are all beautiful, inside and out.” Whoops and cheers all around.

This was, of course, early March, which is to say a million years ago—before the coronavirus pandemic all but shut down New York City, before the Olympics were post-poned, before it was clear that nobody should be in a confined space with a crowd. The Lower East Side talk was the first of several appearances Biles was making on behalf of the Japanese skin-care brand SK-II. She and a few other Olympians—including the table-tennis player Ishikawa Kasumi, the badminton duo Ayaka Takahashi and Misaki Matsutomo, and the surfer Mahina Maeda—are the faces of an ad campaign that proclaims beauty should be “no competition.”

SK-II is a sponsor of the Tokyo games—which, as of this writing, have been postponed until July 2021, unless they are moved again or canceled altogether—but that isn’t the only reason Biles signed on. She is deliberate about her endorsements. She works with Mattress Firm because the company donates mattresses, pajamas, and bedtime books to foster kids. (Biles spent time in foster care.) The #NoCompetition campaign is similarly personal for Biles, who has faced demeaning and repulsive attacks about her body from spectators, competitors, and relentless online trolls.

It was time for questions. A short girl in a blue sweatshirt that said GOD IS DOPE wanted to know if Biles received rude comments when she began competing. Yes, Biles said: “They focused on my hair. They focused on how big my legs were. But God made me this way, and I feel like if I didn’t have these legs or these calves, I wouldn’t be able to tumble as high as I can and have all of these moves named after me.” A tall girl with red braids asked Biles how she felt about being a Black gymnast.

Biles nodded. “Growing up, I didn’t see very many Black gymnasts,” she said. “So whenever I did, I felt really inspired to go out there and want to be as good as them. I remember watching Gabby Douglas win the 2012 Olympics, and I was like, If she can do it, I can do it.”

Hands flew up. How many medals did Biles have? “I should probably memorize this answer, but it keeps changing,” Biles said. “The most!” someone called out. “Yeah, I do have the most,” Biles said. “I think it’s at 25, but I’m not really sure. I would have to google it.” (She has 30.) A girl in the back wanted to know how many injuries Biles had gotten. “I’ve been very fortunate in my career that I haven’t had too many injuries,” Biles said—just bone spurs, a broken rib, toes shattered and cracked. The girls gasped.

Another asked, “Do you think you’re obligated to stand up when something bad is going on in society?” The question summoned the specter of Larry Nassar, the longtime USA Gymnastics doctor who is now serving a sentence of up to 175 years for the sexual abuse of athletes, including Biles. For two years and counting, she has been trying to hold officials in her sport accountable. “Personally, for me, I don’t think of it as an obligation,” Biles said. “I think of it as an honor to speak for the less fortunate and for the voiceless. I also feel like it gives them power.”

Biles posed for a group photo. Then she and her small entourage got into black SUVs and headed for Times Square. Biles rode with her mother, Nellie, a petite woman with a no-nonsense manner and kind eyes. I rode with a team from SK-II. As we flew up FDR Drive, word arrived that, because of the rain, Biles would not be doing a split leap at the event. (No risking injury.) The group reconvened in a hotel lobby and proceeded to Broadway and Seventh Avenue. Biles, now wearing gray leggings and a cream puffer coat, stood on a platform, enveloped by a growing crowd. She said a few words, and then an anime film began to play on enormous digital billboards. In it, a small cartoon Biles faced off with a 200-foot-tall monster whose blobby body was composed of comments made about her on social media. As Biles confronted the towering troll, the comments flashed across the frame: “Her calves errrrhmygod.”

The rain died down to a drizzle, and Biles started giving short interviews to a succession of news crews. Between them, she obliged crowd requests for high fives, and every time she did, a tall blonde woman (her agent, Janey Miller, it turned out) doused Biles’s hands in Purell. A fire truck pulled over, and six firefighters got out—to get a photo with Biles. Along the Broadway side of the plaza, a young gymnast pressed against a crowd barrier. She held up a handwritten sign:

I LOVE Simone!!
(Level 3, Jr A)
watch me KIP!!!

The reference to kipping—a swinging pull-up on the uneven bars—worked like a smoke signal. Nellie walked over, got the sign, and ferried it to Simone for autographing. As the girl waited patiently in the drizzle, I asked her why she loved Biles so much. Her gaze remained fixed on Biles when she responded, “Because she’s the strongest.”

SIMONE BILES is the strongest gymnast—the greatest of all time, male or female, and this is no longer a matter of opinion. In the individual all-around category, Biles hasn’t lost a meet since 2013. As of October, when she won her fifth all-around international title, Biles became the most decorated gymnast in World Championship history.

But the statistics, rankings, and records obliterated don’t fully capture how she dominates her sport. Her tumbling passes in particular seem to involve trompe l’oeil. Wearing an expression of stoic certainty, eyelids at half-mast and ponytail bobbing, she barrels into a force-gathering series of roundoffs and handsprings, then explodes into the air as if an invisible hand has pressed an eject button. Biles appears to have a different relationship with gravity; she seems to bend both space and time.

From the start, Biles was poised to maximize the possibilities of a new scoring system in gymnastics, first adopted in 2006, when she was nine. Where gymnasts once aspired to a perfect 10, they now earn two scores—one each for difficulty and execution. The second is capped at 10, but the first is limitless. Try a harder maneuver in competition and you can get a higher maximum score. Biles has made a career of that.

Her triumph at Rio 2016 came with a dash of swagger. “I’m not the next Usain Bolt or Michael Phelps,” she said. “I’m the first Simone Biles”

Going into the 2016 Olympics in Rio, Biles, then 19, was already in rarefied air. Some teammates admitted that they were all competing for second place. Even Biles seemed astounded. “I kind of blow my own mind,” she told one reporter. She won four gold medals that summer, the first female American gymnast to do so at a single Olympics, and one bronze. She did it with a smile, as is the norm in her sport, but also with a dash of swagger. “I’m not the next Usain Bolt or Michael Phelps,” she said. “I’m the first Simone Biles.”

Female gymnasts typically peak as teenagers. And yet, when Biles returned to competition after Rio, at 21, she won national and international titles with almost workaday consistency. When Biles introduced a dangerous new skill on the competition circuit last fall—a “double–double” beam dismount, involving two flips and two twists—the International Federation of Gymnasts gave it a lower difficulty value than expected, in part to dissuade other gymnasts from trying it.

Comparisons with athletes may irritate Biles, but they are unavoidable, since gymnastics—whose punishing rigor is cloaked in glitter and sequins—requires some translation. She is often likened to living legends like Bolt, Phelps, Serena Williams, Tiger Woods. But a more apt reference may be Wilt Chamberlain, the imposing NBA center and statistical phenomenon who was so tall, so fast, and so sensationally good, the sport of basketball preemptively outlawed his mythical foul-line dunks.

In recent years, Biles’s rise has taken place against a horrific backdrop. The revelation that Larry Nassar sexually abused hundreds of gymnasts, including all five members of the 2012 Olympic team and four of the five members of the 2016 team, was the first horror. Then it became clear that Nassar had enablers—at Michigan State, where he was on faculty, but also at USA Gymnastics and the U.S. Olympic and Paralympic Committee. Amid the fallout, Biles emerged as a powerful check on her sport’s governing body. She is the only Olympic gymnast who disclosed abuse by Nassar and continued competing at the elite level. Her willingness to speak out from within the sport has made her an even bigger hero and invited yet more comparisons to iconic athletes with iron moral codes, like Muhammad Ali, though even this parallel is inexact. Sexual abuse inflicts a uniquely isolating mix of stigma and shame.

And that’s what this story was supposed to have been about: an athlete of unprecedented dominance returning to the Olympics, where to compete at all she has to represent the very organizations that wronged her, and which she has spent the last two years staring down. But then something even more unprecedented happened. The Olympics—well, they disappeared. Overnight, years of carefully laid plans were thrown into limbo.

In the unforgiving timeline of an elite gymnastics career, a year’s delay is an eternity—especially for an athlete four months away from retiring, as Biles was when I first met her in New York. At 23, Biles is already unusually old for an Olympian. Next summer, she will be 24. The road to 2021 will require another year of punishing training and avoiding injury, if there is such a road at all.

BILES’S SOVEREIGNTY seems almost inevitable now, as an old-world sport long dominated by bouncing pixies has evolved to reward innovation. But none of it was inevitable. When she was born—in 1997 in Columbus, Ohio—her biological mother was struggling with drugs. Her biological father was out of the picture. Biles was three when child-protective services placed her and her three siblings in foster care. Their foster parents, Miss Doris and Mr. Leo, had a beagle named Teddy and a trampoline that Biles was not allowed to jump on. Instead, she would play on a swing set in the backyard. Imitating her older brother, Tevin, Biles would swing high and then dismount midair by doing a backflip.

Eventually, the four kids—Biles, Tevin, her older sister, Ashley, and her younger sister, Adria—went to stay with their maternal grandfather, Ron, a retired Air Force sergeant who worked as an air-traffic controller, and his second wife, Nellie, a regional nurse who had emigrated from Belize. (When Biles was born, it was Ron who had suggested the name Simone, she writes in her 2016 memoir, Courage to Soar: “He’d liked the sound of it ever since he was a teenager listening to Nina Simone records in the housing projects in Cleveland.”) Ron and Nellie lived in Spring, a suburb north of Houston. They had two sons of their own—Ron II, who was 16, and Adam, 14. They also had a trampoline, and this time, Biles was allowed to jump on it.

Biles and Adria formed an attachment to Nellie. In her memoir, Biles affectionately recalls how, on her first day in Spring, Nellie wedged Biles between her knees and redid her hair, washing and combing and brushing and braiding: “I loved the feel of my grandma’s hands in my hair. I loved the look of concentration on her face as she worked.” After a failed reunion with their mother and another stint with Miss Doris and Mr. Leo, Simone and Adria were officially adopted by Ron and Nellie in 2003. (Tevin and Ashley were adopted by Ron’s sister, Aunt Harriet, in Cleveland.) Grandma and Grandpa became Mom and Dad.

Biles has extraordinary air awareness, a knack for knowing where your body is in space as you flip and twist. This is more innate sense than acquirable skill

A media consensus seems to have formed that 2018 was the year Biles “found her voice,” but Courage to Soarsuggests she always had one. Self–assertion is a prevailing theme throughout. Biles describes her three-year-old self as “just plain stubborn” and a “bossy little thing” who lorded it over her younger sister.

Biles was also remarkably physical. During the girls’ first stay in Spring, Nellie would often enter their room in the morning to find Biles sleeping in Adria’s crib. Nellie assumed Ashley was letting down the side of the crib at night, until one day she walked in and saw Biles hoisting herself up, one leg slung over the rail. Later, Biles made it a habit to roll out of bed in the morning, grab her overalls, and head straight to the trampoline. Ron II and Adam would double-bounce Biles to see how many times she could flip before she landed. Another favorite game was to see how many pull-ups she could do on their outstretched arms. When Biles was six, Nellie enrolled her in classes at a local gym. She spent only a few days in recreational before she was transferred to team.

Biles was already muscular. (By the third grade, boys at school had taken to calling her “swoldier,” a portmanteau of “swollen” and “soldier.”) She also had extraordinary air awareness, a knack for knowing where your body is in space as you flip and twist in flight. This is more innate sense than acquirable skill—it can be practiced but not taught. But Biles did not always advance at warp speed. She sometimes fell in competition and was occasionally uninterested in doing the tedious work of perfecting her routines. Her longtime coach, Aimee Boorman, didn’t push her to conform. Boorman had coached Biles since she was eight and understood her temperament: She wouldn’t do anything she didn’t want to do. It had to be fun, or Biles would quit. Together they had a mantra: It’s just gymnastics.

Boorman’s approach kept Biles in the sport. It also set her up for a rude awakening in elite gymnastics. When Biles was 14, she was invited to a developmental camp at the Karolyi Ranch, the former national-team training center run by Bela and Martha Karolyi, the stone-faced rulers of American gymnastics. “The ranch,” as it was known, occupied a 2,000-acre compound inside Sam Houston National Forest, about 60 miles north of Houston. Biles was expecting campfires and marshmallows. Instead, she was in the gym from 8 a.m. to 7 p.m., breaking skills down to their elements. The sessions were grueling, the repetition relentless.

The formality and rigidity did not suit her. But as Biles progressed, making the junior national team, she had to adapt. There was only one road to the Olympics, and the Karolyis were it. Every gymnast knew that the Karolyis had trained both Nadia Comaneci and Mary Lou Retton. It was Bela who had pushed Kerri Strug to perform her second vault at the 1996 Olympics with a broken ankle, clinching the first-ever team gold for the U.S. in women’s gymnastics, and it was Bela who carried Strug to the podium to accept her medal. Biles learned quiet obedience, or at least the appearance of it. “Being committed meant you kept a straight face,” she writes.

Biles did not keep a straight face at home. Within the family, the stretch of time between the fall of 2011 and the summer of 2013 is still known as Simone’s Bratty Period. There was a lot of talking back, mumbling under her breath, frequent temper tantrums. Part of it was the usual teenage stuff. But the brattiness was also converging with new levels of sacrifice. Biles had already been putting in 25 to 30 hours of training a week. She had to get to 35. To make up the difference, she started homeschooling.

“Not that I wanted to make it a living hell for myself, but I wanted to make it as hard as possible, not just on me but on everybody,” Biles told me. “I didn’t know how to handle it, so I just lashed out at everybody. Like it was everybody’s fault but mine.” It’s hard to pinpoint why the Bratty Period ended when it did. Biles started seeing a sports psychologist that summer, which helped. She also started winning.

Biles first took individual gold at the 2013 National Championships. Since then she has been untouchable. At the World Championships that year, where she also took gold, Biles landed a new trick on the floor—a double flip in a straight body position with a half turn at the end. Because she was the first to perform it in an international competition, the skill was named “the Biles” in the Code of Points. (There are now three more skills named after her.) The story of Biles’s first international win immediately became a story about racism when an Italian gymnast, Carlotta Ferlito, told reporters, “Next time we should paint our skin black, so we could win, too.” (Ron, reached by a reporter, responded: “Normally it’s not in Simone’s favor being Black, at least not in the world that I live in.”) By November 2015, Biles held the most gold medals of any female American gymnast in history. To mark the occasion, she posted to Instagram a photo of herself with 14 world medals draped around her neck and the caption “Work hard in silence let your success be the noise.” After her five-medal haul at the Rio Olympics, Team USA voted for Biles to carry the American flag in the closing ceremony.

Biles has fought for an independent investigation of her sport’s handling of the Nassar case: “We need to figure out why it happened, when it happened, and who knew what, when”

THE LARRY NASSAR story broke three weeks after the closing ceremony in Rio. The first piece was published by the Indianapolis Star—two former gymnasts, one an Olympic medalist, were accusing Nassar of sexual abuse.

Over the following year and a half, the scope of Nassar’s crimes came to light: The longtime team physician for USAG was possibly the worst predator in the history of American sports. But when the Star story came out, many gymnasts, Biles included, had not yet processed what had happened to them. Biles was a new superstar, traveling the United States on a post-Olympic tour.

At that point, it had been a year since Nassar had anything to do with USA Gymnastics. He had been quietly let go as team doctor in 2015, after a coach overheard gymnasts talking about his treatments and reported her concerns to USAG. The organization conducted an internal investigation, then referred the matter to the F.B.I. in Indianapolis. But nobody from USAG told Biles or Nellie. “He had left because he was ill or something like that,” Nellie recalled.

The story left Biles in a disjointed mental and emotional state. “It didn’t feel like real life,” she told me of this period. “And there were little things that I did that I didn’t know why, but I felt like I was just trying to protect myself.” Such as? “Just, like, little quirks. Like I remember on tour, I would have really bad anxiety about nothing. Or like, walking down a hall, I feared that somebody was following me. I just had a lot of issues that were unexplained until I finally figured out why. The dots connected.”

After the tour, Biles competed on Dancing With the Stars. But the drip-drip-drip of developments in the Nassar story continued. Nassar was arrested on child-pornography charges in late 2016. In February, three former Team USA gymnasts went on 60 Minutes and described the abuse Nassar had inflicted on them, how he had passed it off as legitimate medical care. The following month, the president of USA Gymnastics, Steve Penny, resigned.

Inside her family, Biles effectively declared the topic off-limits. “Whenever my parents would ask me about it, or my brothers, I would just shut it down,” Biles said. “Like, No! It didn’t happen! I would get really angry.” Nellie tried to broach the subject. “I asked several times,” she said. “Her reaction was awful. Scream and walk out the door and not want to discuss it.” Did the strong reaction worry Nellie? “Of course it did,” Nellie said. “When somebody responds like that. . . .”

That summer, Biles moved out of Ron and Nellie’s house and into a condo of her own—the beginning of an “adulting” process, she told me. For a while she could do little more than sleep. “I was very depressed,” Biles said. “At one point I slept so much because, for me, it was the closest thing to death without harming myself. It was an escape from all of my thoughts, from the world, from what I was dealing with. It was a really dark time.”

Biles has never described the abuse, and I didn’t press her to. As national medical coordinator for USA Gymnastics, Nassar was present at all major competitions and at monthly training camps at the Karolyi Ranch. This means Biles was likely required to see him from the time she joined the junior national team in 2012, when she was 15, if not before, until his departure in 2015.

Biles ultimately reckoned with her own abuse in early January 2018, after a friend and former member of the national team, Maggie Nichols, told her story to the press. Until that moment, Biles had not considered her experience to be abuse, in part because she thought it wasn’t as bad as what others had gone through. “But I was reading Maggie’s coverage and it just hit me,” Biles said. “I was like, I’ve had the same treatments. I remember googling, like, sexually abused. Because I know some girls had it worse than me. I know that for a fact. So I felt like I wasn’t abused, because it wasn’t to the same extent as the other girls. Some of my friends had it really, really bad. They were his favorite. Since mine wasn’t to that capacity, I felt like it didn’t happen.”

In retrospect, Biles said, there may have been another reason for the mental block: “I felt like I knew, I just didn’t want to admit it to myself, that it had happened. Because I felt like, not that you’re supposed to be perfect, but I just felt like that’s what America wanted me to be—was perfect. Because every time an American wins the Olympics, you’re like America’s sweetheart. So it’s like, How could this happen to America’s sweetheart? That’s how I felt—like I was letting other people down by this.”

Biles posted a statement to Twitter and Instagram on January 15, 2018—one day before survivors of Nassar’s abuse were to give victim-impact statements in a Michigan courtroom. “Most of you know me as a happy, giggly, and energetic girl,” she began. “But lately I’ve felt a bit broken and the more I try to shut off the voice in my head the louder it screams.” Biles, too, had been sexually abused by Larry Nassar: “Please believe me when I say it was a lot harder to first speak those words out loud than it is now to put them on paper.” She added, “It is impossibly difficult to relive these experiences, and it breaks my heart even more to think that as I work toward my dream of competing in Tokyo 2020, I will have to continually return to the same training facility where I was abused.”

“We need justice,” Biles said of the protests sweeping the country in June. “It’s sad that it took all of this for people to listen”

Biles did not attend the sentencing hearing. Still, coming forward was cathartic. “For me, it was a weight that I carried so heavily on my chest, so I felt like, if I shared it with people, then it would be a relief for me,” Biles told me. “And I knew that by sharing my story, I would help other survivors feel comfortable and safe in coming forward.”

Initially, 88 women had signed up to speak at Nassar’s sentencing hearing. As the first day of harrowing impact statements streamed live on the internet, that number began to grow, fueled by the #MeToo movement. By the end of January, all members of the USAG board of directors had resigned, along with the president of Michigan State. In February, the head of the U.S. Olympic Committee, Scott Blackmun, resigned too.

The online gymnastics community, called the Gymternet, seized on an additional development. Four days after Biles posted her statement, USAG severed ties with the Karolyi Ranch. Effective immediately, the ranch—national training center since 2001, Olympic training site since 2011, synonymous with USAG for two decades—was no longer a stepping-stone for gymnasts with Olympic dreams. (“Ding Dong the Ranch Is Dead,” declared the popular podcast GymCastic.) Others had called for the ranch to be shuttered, which only made it clearer that Biles’s post was the catalyst—“the tweet that closed the ranch,” as the Olympic Channel put it. Biles was startled by the sway she had. “I was really shook,” she recalled.

Biles returned to competition in July of that year, and while the big headlines focused on the extraordinariness of her comeback, a subplot was developing. Every time she weighed in with an opinion about what needed to happen in gymnastics, it would happen. Immediately.

When Biles expressed dismay that the new head of USAG, Kerry Perry, had done little to assure gymnasts that the organization was fixing its problems, Perry held a press conference and soon resigned. When Biles disapproved of a tweet posted by Perry’s replacement, Mary Bono—Bono had objected to Nike’s support of Colin Kaepernick—Bono resigned too.

Meanwhile Biles won nationals with broken toes on both feet, and then she won Worlds with a kidney stone, diagnosed in a Doha emergency room the night before qualifiers. (Her solo visit to the ER was “ultimate adulting,” Biles told me. Since the truth about Nassar emerged, she does not normally go to a doctor’s office alone.) Days after her win in Qatar, the Olympic Committee moved to decertify USAG, which then filed for bankruptcy.

This pattern—stunning athletic achievement, bookended by painful revelations about the officials running her sport—continued through 2019. An 18-month Senate investigation concluded that USAG and the USOPC had “knowingly concealed” Nassar’s abuse. (“The more I learn, the more I hurt,” Biles tweeted.) Later, the Wall Street Journalreported that officials at USAG had concealed the 2015 investigations specifically from Biles, even as they learned Nassar might have abused her. (“Numb is becoming a normal feeling,” she posted.)

Where systems of abuse rely on silence, speaking is a revolutionary act. Although she never should have had to speak out in the first place, Biles has changed the conversation within gymnastics and beyond, said Jessica O’Beirne, the host of GymCastic. “She transcends the sport,” O’Beirne told me. John Legend, who wrote a song for Biles’s short film, told me Biles has been “exemplary in every way.” Katie Couric, who appeared on a panel with Biles in New York, applauds her demands for accountability and institutional change. “She’s been an outspoken critic of a culture and system that turned a blind eye to abuse and the trauma it caused,” Couric said in an email.

Biles isn’t backing down. A few days before her trip to New York, she criticized a proposed legal settlement that USAG offered to survivors. (Biles is a plaintiff in the ongoing civil case.) The plan would divide $217 million among more than 500 victims in a tiered payout. It would also release from liability various former officials and coaches.

Over lunch in New York in March, Nellie explained that any removal of liability for USAG and the USOPC was essentially unacceptable—and that Biles and others want a new, independent investigation of the handling of the Nassar case. They and other survivors insist there is more to uncover. “Why doesn’t anyone want to know what actually broke down?” Nellie said. (In a statement to Vogue, USAG reiterated that it has already cooperated with six investigations and that it is “deeply committed” to learning from the investigations and taking measures to prevent abuse.)

“It’s like, at the end of the day, I don’t want your dirty money,” Biles said of the proposed settlement. Nellie interjected that the money would help survivors afford therapy, and there are hundreds of them: “So many girls are affected by this.” It’s just that money alone won’t redress all the wrongs.

Biles nodded. “We need to figure out why it happened, when it happened, and who knew what, when,” she said.

The battle is about the future of gymnastics, she added. “We can’t feel comfortable promoting our sport if we fear that something might happen like this again because they’re not doing their part. And the hardest part for us is we’ve always done our part. We’ve always represented the U.S. to the best of our ability, and all the time, most of the time, every time I’ve represented, come back with gold medals. It’s like: We’ve done our part. Come on.”

I SAID GOODBYE TO Biles and Nellie, knowing that I would soon be visiting the gym they built in Spring, the World Champions Centre, where Biles trains six days a week. But in the weeks following our lunch, the gym shut down for disinfection. Then it shut down indefinitely. Somewhere in between, the Olympics were put off till at least next year. By then, I had some sense of how crushing a blow this had to be, so I waited a few weeks to call Biles.

In the meantime, I called Nellie. “I spoke to my daughter, and she was just crying,” she told me. “And angry. And yelling. She was so distraught. Her emotions were all over the place because she did not know how she was supposed to feel.” Biles seemed to be going through stages of grief, Nellie said. “The loss is like she got a divorce or someone died, and she lost that person. That’s how deep I believe the loss was.” Nellie and Ron were social-distancing by then, so they could not physically comfort Biles. When she came by their house to pick up her bicycle, she had to stay six feet away. “Poor thing, I know she wanted a hug.”

I spoke to Biles in April. “I felt kind of torn and broken,” she said. “Obviously it was the right decision, but to have it finalized—in a way, you feel defeated because you’ve worked so hard.” There is a science to “peaking,” timing your training to reach optimal shape at precisely the moment you are scheduled to, say, compete in the Olympics. Not only would Biles have to redraw the plan, she would also have to interact with USAG another year. “We were gripping at the bars, and I just started crying. Another year of dealing with USAG. That, I don’t know if I can take.”

At first, Biles wasn’t sure how she would stay in shape. Adria asked if she had any dumbbells at home. (“First of all, in the gym, I don’t even use dumbbells,” Biles told me. “Why would I have a dumbbell set at home?”) Eventually she started improvising. She did a “twerk-out” class she found on YouTube. She went to a local track and did 100-meter sprints (a first). She even participated in an internet meme—the handstand challenge, in which celebrities like Tom Holland and Jake Gyllenhaal did handstands against a wall and, while inverted, slowly put on T-shirts. Biles did a free handstand (no wall) and held it for nearly a minute, removing her sweatpants with her toes.

Biles settled into something of a routine. She had Zoom sessions with her coaches, Cecile and Laurent Landi, three days a week. She walked her French bulldog, Lilo. (Five weeks in, she adopted a second one, a puppy she named Rambo.) And she did more adulting, fully inhabiting a new house she bought last year and expanding her repertoire of slow-cooker recipes (burrito bowls, pork chops). She also processed the breakup of her near three-year relationship with former national-team gymnast Stacey Ervin Jr. They parted ways in early March, just before her trip to New York. (“It’s hard being young and having that long of a relationship and then ending it. But it was for the best.”) Quarantine life wasn’t easy. Aside from a yearlong hiatus after Rio, she had never worked out so little or had so much time alone with her thoughts.

“I think for athletes, it’s hard for us to be out of our element for such a long period of time,” Biles said. “That kind of throws your whole balance off. Because you go to work out and you release endorphins. You get any anger out. It’s kind of our oasis. Without that, you’re stuck at home with your own thoughts. I’ve kind of let myself live in those thoughts, to read more deeply into them. At the gym, it’s a great distraction, so I never really live with my thoughts. Now it’s like, Okay, what are the depths of it? Sometimes I’ll write down little notes about how I’m feeling. Like, Today, it’s shit. Or Okay, I feel good, I feel content with this, this is the right decision, we need to make a plan.And then other days, I’m like, Are you joking? Another 15 months? I don’t know if I can do that. So it’s been nice to be able to live with them because I avoid them a lot of the time. That’s my way of protecting my mind.”

In mid-May, after seven-plus weeks, the World Champions Centre opened again, and Biles resumed training, on a mornings-only schedule. “I felt kind of odd,” she told me. “We had been off for way too long.” But things were starting to feel “semi-normal.” Back in April, Biles hadn’t been sure if she wanted to go to the Olympics in 2021. Now she was sure. “I’m starting to train toward it,” she said.

Nellie, too, is looking ahead. “I believe we’re going to come out of this stronger,” she told me. “I believe next Olympics, it’s going to be, I got here in spite of. Once the athletes get back to training, I believe they will put more than their heart and soul into this. They will really have to prove that even this virus stopping the entire world will not take their goals away from them.”

Among Biles’s goals is a “Gold Over America Tour,” a post-Olympic event she’d planned for this fall after learning that USAG, mired in lawsuits and bankruptcy, would not be coordinating one. “If USAG isn’t having one—not to be cocky, but I draw a lot of the crowd in from just me,” Biles told me. “So we thought, Let’s try to host our own tour and see where that takes us.” The all-women tour was to visit more than 35 American cities, combining athletes and entertainers in a kind of gymnastics spectacular. It has been delayed for now, but if the games take place next year, so will the tour, Biles said.

I last spoke to Biles in early June. The world was now exploding with outrage over the killings of Ahmaud Arbery, George Floyd, and so many others, the disproportionate impact the pandemic was having on Black and brown people, and a horror show of police violence on display at protests from coast to coast. “We need change,” Biles said in response. “We need justice for the Black community. With the peaceful protests it’s the start of change, but it’s sad that it took all of this for people to listen,” she said. “Racism and injustice have existed for years with the Black community. How many times has this happened before we had cell phones?”

It was the morning of what would have been Breonna Taylor’s 27th birthday, and tributes to the emergency medical technician—killed in March by Louisville, Kentucky, police officers who barged into her home without warning just after midnight and shot her eight times—were flooding the internet. “With everyone speaking up and the traction that Ahmaud and George are getting,” Biles said, “Breonna will be remembered. She’s going to find justice. They’re already reopening her case. I’m happy for that. But I just don’t understand. She was sleeping. How do you feel threatened when you’re a police officer and they’re sleeping? Come on now.” Media debates over protest tactics also struck Biles as odd. “We tried peaceful protesting. Then Colin Kaepernick—he lost his job. He lost his career. They took his whole entire career away from that poor man. And look at us now,” she said. “It’s working. You just have to be the first and people will follow.”

Original article was published here.

By Ryan Pickrell,

The US Navy’s first Black female fighter pilot has earned her wings, the service said.

The Chief of Naval Air Training celebrated the officer for her achievement on Twitter, writing: “BZ to Lt. j.g. Madeline Swegle on completing the Tactical Air (Strike) aviator syllabus. Swegle is the @USNavy’s first known Black female TACAIR pilot and will receive her Wings of Gold later this month. HOOYAH!”

BZ to Lt. j.g. Madeline Swegle on completing the Tactical Air (Strike) aviator syllabus. Swegle is the @USNavy’s first known Black female TACAIR pilot and will receive her Wings of Gold later this month. HOOYAH! @FlyNavy @NASKPAO #ForgedByTheSea #CNATRA #CNATRAgrads pic.twitter.com/FKSlURWQhJ

— Naval Air Training (@CNATRA) July 9, 2020

BZ is short for “Bravo Zulu,” a naval term meaning “Well done.”

Others in the Navy also praised Swegle. “Very proud of LTJG Swegle,” Vice Chief of Information Rear Adm. Paula Dunn said. “Go forth and kick butt.”

According to the Navy, which has only released limited details on this aviator, Swegle is currently assigned to the Redhawks of Training Squadron (VT) 21 at Naval Air Station Kingsville in Texas.

The photos that accompanied the Navy tweet celebrating Swegle’s historic achievement were taken following her final flight in the Tactical Air (Strike) program, a flight taken in a T-45C Goshawk training aircraft that can be seen clearly in one of the two photos.

It is unclear where Swegle will go next, but as a graduate of the TACAIR training program she will move on from training aircraft to Navy tactical planes, like the F/A-18E/F Super Hornet and F-35C Lighting II Joint Strike Fighter.

Swegle, a 2017 US Naval Academy graduate, follows in the footsteps of other remarkable women in the armed forces, such as the late Capt. Rosemary Mariner, an aviation pioneer who became one of the first female Navy pilots to fly Navy tactical aircraft in 1974.

Other outstanding predecessors include Sen. Martha McSally, a retired Air Force Lt. Colonel who became the first female US military fighter pilot to fly in combat, and Lt. Cmdr. Brenda Robinson, who became the Navy’s first Black female pilot in 1980.

Swegle’s historic accomplishment comes as the Navy takes a hard look at discrimination amid growing nationwide concern about racial injustice and works to, as Navy leaders said last month, “identify and remove racial barriers and improve inclusion within our Navy.”

Original article was published here.

By Alex Horton,

More times than she can count, Mary Tobin walked the verdant grounds of the U.S. Military Academy past Lee Barracks dormitory, named in honor of Robert E. Lee, the Confederate general who killed thousands of U.S. soldiers. But the traitor symbology didn’t end there, or at the paintings and names etched on plazas.

Tobin, who is black, was assigned to inspect the living quarters of fellow cadets during her junior year, a responsibility given to rising leaders. In one dorm room, a white male classmate hung a Confederate flag on a wall to get a reaction. She yanked it down and handed it back without showing emotion, she recounted.

“I never addressed that it made me feel horrible,” said Tobin, a 2003 graduate.

The police killing of George Floyd has triggered a wave of reckoning over racism and identity coast to coast, including at the U.S. Military Academy, among the most isolated and traditions-bound institutions in the country.

Black alumni have described racist encounters with their classmates loud and subtle, from the chow hall to the parade field. But a letter to administrators from recent top graduates underscores the entrenched racism that minority cadets endured to become part of the Long Gray Line.

Several cadets in the Class of 2020 said they were called the n-word, according to a letter signed by nine recent graduates, some of whom are black and all held leadership positions. “I was told that I was going to rob someone because I was Black,” one unnamed cadet said.

Others reported similar language and veiled threats, such as nooses hidden in desks as bleak practical jokes, followed by inaction by faculty.

By not rooting out racism that “saturates its history,” the officers said, “West Point ultimately fails to produce leaders of character equipped to lead diverse organizations.”

In interviews, five black graduates whose time at the U.S. Military Academy spanned decades said their experiences ranged from pride in entering an elite university to the sadness of feeling they could not be their full self in a mostly white school.

The alumni recounted moments of suppressing black cultural and social references among white classmates, fielding questions about black hair and hearing whispers that athletics — not their academic rigor — led to their offer to attend.

“I love West Point,” said Tobin, a former Army signal officer. “But it is a beautifully painful experience.”

The academy takes the long view in minority admissions. In 1968, when the equal opportunity admissions office opened, only 68 African Americans had graduated since the U.S. Military Academy’s founding in 1802, said Maj. Kendrick Vaughn, who recently left his position as the diversity admissions officer.

There were 72 black graduates in Vaughn’s own Class of 2008, he said. This year’s incoming class saw 214 admitted African Americans out of 1,240 total cadets.

In a statement, the academy said it launched an inspector general review “of all matters involving race,” spokesman Lt. Col. Christopher Ophardt said. That review was partly prompted by the letter, along with other initiatives at higher levels, Ophardt said.

“We take seriously all forms of racial inequality that marginalize or devalue members of our team,” he said.

Tobin, an adviser for the officers who penned the letter and a mentor to some, said the group was emboldened after Defense Secretary Mark T. Esper called on leaders last month to weed out racism. “A diverse and inclusive DoD draws out and builds upon the best in each of us,” Esper said in a video message. “It brings out the best in America.”

But the rising number of black cadets hasn’t spurred enough change, alumni said. The letter was a time machine back to the halls where white cadets made subtle comments and jokes “that you have to smile and suffer through,” said Michael Armstrong, a former infantry officer in the Class of 1987.

“The more things change,” he said, “the more they stay the same.”

Jamal Robinson, a 2010 graduate and former chemical officer, said a stark reality for black cadets was the realization that a commission would never be enough for some classmates.

“As much as I love my country, and the U.S. Army, it hurts someone can treat you in a racist manner on the same team,” he said. “You know racism exists in your country, but it’s the same country you’re willing to lose your life for.”

The experience is doubly trying for black women navigating the mostly white, mostly male culture of the Army officer corps, alumni said. There was a record high of 38 black women graduates in a class of 1,107 this year, officials said.

Shalela Dowdy, a former air defense artillery officer, Class of 2012, said there were times she was either the only woman or only black cadet in a class, where her classmates urged her to be less outspoken about her blackness. In a search for mentors, she flipped through previous yearbooks and wrote down the name of the few black women listed and got in touch, she said.

Those earlier black female graduates had been in even smaller numbers, said Paula Browning White, a former quartermaster officer who recalled around a dozen black women in the Class of 1987. Passionate about church choir, White was advised by her mother to avoid hanging out and singing with only black cadets, she said.

The protestant choir was all white, she said, and she gravitated to the gospel choir as a humming refuge.

“You could let your hair down and be yourself,” she said.

The graduates also recommended to divest from all Confederate traces that dot the grounds, such as Lee Barracks, a plaza bearing the name of Confederate officers and several paintings — including one of Lee on a white horse led by a slave, which resides in a library.

Further reminders of the Confederacy await the Class of 2020. About a third of them have left for training at some of the 10 Army installations named after Confederate commanders, academy officials said.

“We’re honoring people who were traitors to our country and keep my ancestors as slaves,” Dowdy said of the names. “It keeps their memory alive.”

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Original article was published here.

By Cherise Johnson

On Independence Day, heavily armed Black men and women from the Not Fucking Around Coalition, or NFAC, marched through Georgia’s Stone Mountain Park. They’re calling for the removal of a giant Confederate rock carving of late Confederate President Jefferson Davis, and Southern generals Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson. 

Video footage of the demonstration made rounds on social media Saturday (July 4). Clips show militia members, dressed in all black, equipped with rifles and military-type artillery.

Over time, Stone Mountain Park has become a rally site for white nationalists and Ku Klux Klanmembers. In 1915, the KKK assembled and burned crosses at the park as part of their rebirth.

“I don’t see no white militia,” one man can be heard saying in a clip. “We’re here. Where … you at? We’re in your house. Let’s go.”

NFAC Founder Grand Master Jay says that the group is not affiliated with the Black Lives Matterorganization, but that they are a Black militia. He commends the Stone Mountain police for escorting them as they exercised their constitutional right to carry.

“Threats don’t mean shit to us! You all been threatening us since Birmingham! I ain’t seen shit!…

…No white malitia, boogeyboys, 3 % or the rest of those scared ass rednecks, we here, where the fuck you at, we’re in your house? #NFAC Motherfucker!”pic.twitter.com/iRAKgUCvR0

— SquirrelNut (@SquirrelNut5) July 5, 2020

“Our initial goal was to have a formation of our militia in Stone Mountain to send a message that as long as you’re abolishing all these statues across the country, what about this one?” he told Newsweek on Sunday (July 5).

Since the Memorial Day police killing of George Floyd in Minnesota, protests against police brutality and systemic racism have taken place across the globe. In some instances, emblems of America’s Confederate past have either been forcibly removed or taken out by the government.

According to Stone Mountain Memorial Association spokesperson John Bankhead, the NFAC was peaceful and orderly. 

“It’s a public park, a state park,” he told WXIA-TV. “We have these protests on both sides of the issue from time to time. We respect people’s First Amendment rights. We understand the sensitivities of the issue here at the park…so we respect that and allow them to come in as long as it’s peaceful, which it has been.”

Stone Mountain Park reopened this weekend. The sculpture that the NFAC is calling to be removed sits nine stories high and is the largest monument in the country dedicated to the Confederacy.

Original article was published here.

By BreAnna Jones,

When the protests broke out in Los Angeles on May 29th, I was sitting on my couch, cuddled next to my boyfriend in our brand new apartment in the heart of Downtown. We moved in just one week earlier with dreams of how this big step together would lead to marriage, family, and beyond. Cloud nine, as it were.

We heard the chaos before we saw it. The loud roar of helicopters circled above, the explosions of fireworks boomed below, and the crashing of windows shattered all around us. It was truly terrifying. The pain, fear, and anger that I held in my heart after the loss of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Ahmaud Arbery and countless others, was now personified outside my window in the form of fire, glass, rubber bullets and tear gas.

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I’m consistently amazed that amid true horror, our community has always discovered ways to find strength, joy, and LOVE.

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And there we were, sitting silently, because for Black people, what’s understood doesn’t need to be explained. Frankly, this terror is not new to our people—chaos, crisis, and killing: welcome to Black America’s origin story. I’m consistently amazed that amid true horror, our community has always discovered ways to find strength, joy, and LOVE.

As the Digital Media Manager here at Black Love, I get to see and share positive images of Black Love and family daily. But the Black Love reality I see in my love life and work life is not the picture painted in this society. America has been at war with Black Love for over 400 years in the forms of enslavement, mass incarceration, police brutality, and racial injustices. And despite every systemic attempt to separate us, from the auction block to the prison block, love in our community still prevails. 

In alignment with the mission of the Black Lives Matter movement, the Black Love team produced this Black Love Matters photo-series. Black Love, in all of its beauty and power, is a form of protest. Our acts of love and joy equate to resistance against every attempt to keep us from healthy marriages and families.

Love on, BL family. Love on.

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Original article was published here.

On July 5, 1852, Frederick Douglass gave a keynote address at an Independence Day celebration and asked, “What to the Slave is the Fourth of July?” Douglass was a powerful orator, often traveling six months out of the year to give lectures on abolition. His speech was delivered at an event commemorating the signing of the Declaration of Independence, held at Corinthian Hall in Rochester, New York. It was a scathing speech in which Douglass stated, “This Fourth of July is yours, not mine, You may rejoice, I must mourn.” 

In his speech, Douglass acknowledged the Founding Fathers of America, the architects of the Declaration of Independence, for their commitment to “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness”:

“Fellow Citizens, I am not wanting in respect for the fathers of this republic. The signers of the Declaration of Independence were brave men. They were great men, too, great enough to give frame to a great age. It does not often happen to a nation to raise, at one time, such a number of truly great men. The point from which I am compelled to view them is not, certainly, the most favorable; and yet I cannot contemplate their great deeds with less than admiration. They were statesmen, patriots and heroes, and for the good they did, and the principles they contended for, I will unite with you to honor their memory…. 

Douglass states that the nation’s founders are great men for their ideals for freedom, but in doing so he brings awareness to the hypocrisy of their ideals with the existence of slavery on American soil. Douglass continues to interrogate the meaning of the Declaration of Independence, to enslaved African Americans experiencing grave inequality and injustice: 

“…Fellow-citizens, pardon me, allow me to ask, why am I called upon to speak here to-day? What have I, or those I represent, to do with your national independence? Are the great principles of political freedom and of natural justice, embodied in that Declaration of Independence, extended to us? and am I, therefore, called upon to bring our humble offering to the national altar, and to confess the benefits and express devout gratitude for the blessings resulting from your independence to us?”

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I say it with a sad sense of the disparity between us. I am not included within the pale of glorious anniversary! Your high independence only reveals the immeasurable distance between us.

FREDERICK DOUGLASS
“What to the Slave is the Fourth of July?”

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“…Would to God, both for your sakes and ours, that an affirmative answer could be truthfully returned to these questions! Then would my task be light, and my burden easy and delightful. For who is there so cold, that a nation’s sympathy could not warm him? Who so obdurate and dead to the claims of gratitude, that would not thankfully acknowledge such priceless benefits? Who so stolid and selfish, that would not give his voice to swell the hallelujahs of a nation’s jubilee, when the chains of servitude had been torn from his limbs? I am not that man. In a case like that, the dumb might eloquently speak, and the ‘lame man leap as an hart.’ 

But such is not the state of the case. I say it with a sad sense of the disparity between us. I am not included within the pale of glorious anniversary! Your high independence only reveals the immeasurable distance between us. The blessings in which you, this day, rejoice, are not enjoyed in common. The rich inheritance of justice, liberty, prosperity and independence, bequeathed by your fathers, is shared by you, not by me. The sunlight that brought light and healing to you, has brought stripes and death to me. This Fourth July is yours, not mine. You may rejoice, I must mourn…”

—Frederick Douglass, July 5, 1852

This speech given by Frederick Douglass would be remembered as on of his most poignant. Read the speech in full on PBS.

BY MEGHAN ROOS

A leader of Black Lives Matter’s New York chapter on Wednesday said the movement was prepared to “burn down this system” if the U.S. does not work with participants to enact real change.

“If this country doesn’t give us what we want, then we will burn down this system and replace it,” said Hawk Newsome, chairman of Black Lives Matter of Greater New York, during an interview with Fox News. “I could be speaking figuratively, I could be speaking literally. It’s a matter of interpretation.”

Newsome went on to clarify that while “I don’t condone nor do I condemn rioting,” the measurable change that has occurred in recent weeks began in the wake of property destruction caused by rioters.

“This country is built upon violence,” Newsome said, pointing to the American Revolution and modern American diplomacy as examples. “We go in and we blow up countries and we replace their leaders with leaders who we like. So for any American to accuse us of being violent, it’s extremely hypocritical.”

Newsome drew a comparison between support for the Second Amendment with discussions of Black Americans taking up arms to defend themselves. While white Americans were frequently described as observing their right to bear arms when bringing weapons into public spaces—as occurred earlier this year, when demonstrators were seen holding assault rifles inside Michigan’s State Capitol while protesting the stay-at-home order imposed due to the coronavirus pandemic—the same would not be true in the case of Black Americans arming themselves, Newsome said.

“We’re talking about saving lives,” he said. “Nobody’s talking about ambushing police officers. We’re talking about protecting lives. There’s nothing more American than that.”

Since the release of a video showing George Floyd, a 46-year-old Black man who died while in police custody in Minneapolis on May 25, protesters have rallied across the U.S. and around the world. Though many of the protests demanding police reform and an end to violence against Black Americans were peaceful, there have also been several instances in which the protests devolved into property destruction, looting and violent interactions between protesters and law enforcement officials. As word of more Black Americans who died at the hands of police officers or white Americans before and after Floyd’s death has increased, Black Lives Matter organizers like Newsome have pushed for real, measurable change.

While protest movements responding to the violent deaths of Black Americans in previous years lost momentum before such change occurred, this moment seems to be different. Several city leaders across the country have begun reviewing the training and policies in place at their local police departments, and a handful of officers accused of using excessive or unnecessary force that resulted in the death of a Black individual have been fired.

From Newsome’s perspective, that kind of progress is at odds with the due process claims government and law enforcement leaders made previously as explanations for why quick change was difficult.

“The moment people start destroying property, now cops can be fired automatically. What is this country rewarding? What behavior is it listening to? Obviously not marching,” Newsome said.

In an Instagram caption he later posted alongside a screenshot of the Fox News article that resulted from his interview, Newsome singled out the media organization for focusing on his statement about burning down the U.S. system and drove home the final message he voiced on air.

“I just want Black liberation and Black sovereignty—by any means necessary,” he said.

Original article was published here.