In Full Color Page 18

  Franklin, Izaiah, and Esther, Christmas 2015, two years after Esther moved in with us in Spokane.

  Esther and me, poolside during the summer of 2013, when she started living with us in Spokane.

  Izaiah, Franklin, and Langston outside our house in August 2016, just before Izaiah left to study abroad in Spain.

  Me leading an executive committee meeting as Spokane’s NAACP president, February 2015.

  Keepers of the Dream Award I earned in 2015 for outstanding teaching and mentoring in the Africana Education program at EWU.

  Me and Maryland state’s attorney Marilyn Mosby, whose office I visited while I was participating in the Justice for Freddie Gray protests, May 2015.

  Me and Rev. Jesse Jackson Sr., at the University of Idaho, when he spoke there in 2011.

  A flyer from a lecture I gave at EWU in 2013.

  Hate mail sent to me at the NAACP P.O. box by “War Pig” in the spring of 2015.

  Me with the Spokane Gospel Choir at Bethel A.M.E. after I gave the keynote speech for Martin Luther King Jr. Day, January 2015.

  Me directing Transformations, a summer camp for preteen and teen girls of color, at the Spokane YWCA as part of its Empowering Women and Eliminating Racism initiative.

  Linking arms in solidarity with protestors during the march for justice for Antonio Zambrano-Montes in Pasco, Washington, spring 2015.

  Gathering photos, flowers, and candles before the memorial march I helped organize for Lorenzo Hayes, May 2015.

  Me and Franklin with students from EWU’s BSU marching in a Martin Luther King Jr. parade, 2014.

  Me and EWU students at a Black Lives Matter rally on campus in 2014.

  “Irma Leah,” the sculpture I made when I was seventeen to win the Tandy Leather art scholarship.

  “Tatters of Time,” the mixed-media collage I made when I was seventeen to win the Tandy Leather art scholarship.

  A three-panel painting I did in 2004, the year I left Kevin. It’s an interpretation of William Turner’s “Slave Ship” painting, with the ship representing a sinking parent ship and the two figures in the side panels and middle panel representing a conversation between pessimism and optimism. Critics online accused me of plagiarizing, rather than commenting on, Turner’s work.

  “In a Broken World,” a mixed-media art piece I did in high school, made of eggshells, leather, and wood, which was displayed at the United Nations headquarters in New York City for a year.

  “Taraja,” a portrait I made using eggshells in 1998 when I was at Belhaven College of a little girl from the Mississippi Delta. “Taraja” is Swahili for “hope.”

  “My Place,” a painting I made in 2004, using recycled puzzle pieces and acrylic on panel. The model is a little girl from South Africa, and the setting is a sunset on the mountainside where I was born in Montana.

  Two weeks later, one of my neighbors called the police when he spotted a white male in a hoodie trying to break into my house while I was at work. A year passed. The hate persisted. Another white male in a hoodie approached Franklin at his school and tried to lure him into his car with candy. The police investigated both incidents but never found the culprits. Their response—“Sorry, we didn’t find any suspects”—would become a common refrain.

  I was terrified. Surely there was a connection between these incidents and the incident at HREI. I bought a gun, took shooting lessons, and moved across town with Franklin. The problem moved with us. Soon after we’d settled into our new place, our neighborhood was littered with white supremacy leaflets. Even more discouraging, our neighbors blamed us for it in televised interviews, describing how unsafe they felt now that we lived near them.

  When my new boyfriend, Dexter, invited us to come stay with him in Spokane, just across the border in Washington State and just inside the boundary established by my custodial agreement with Kevin, I quickly accepted. Dexter was a corrections officer at the Airway Heights Corrections Center. He was also six foot three and built like a linebacker. People didn’t mess with Dexter. I had hoped his house was beyond the hate groups’ reach. He’d lived there for eight years and, despite being Black, said he felt safe in the neighborhood. But within six weeks of our arrival his house was burglarized. Thirteen thousand dollars’ worth of property was stolen. Once again, no suspects were found, but I felt confident I understood why we’d been targeted. I wasn’t just perceived as Black but Black and “uppity,” thanks to my growing profile in the community. I was a human rights, social justice “troublemaker.” My suspicions were confirmed the next morning when we walked outside to get the newspaper and found a rope twisted into a shape all too familiar to America’s Black population. A noose lay on our front porch.

  My anxiety skyrocketed. I winced every time I turned on my car, suspected that cars in my rearview mirror were following me, and diligently investigated anything that seemed even remotely suspicious. Never able to fully relax, my health deteriorated. I became ill with mononucleosis, strep throat, and a rare kind of rash called viral exanthemata, all at the same time, and landed in the ER.

  The tension drove an irreparable wedge between me and Dexter. More than anything, I needed to be in a safe place full of love and support, but I was no longer getting that from him. We began arguing. He’d led a quiet life before meeting me and didn’t enjoy being associated with what was an increasingly public situation. The police actually hosted a “noose viewing,” letting the press come to the police station to examine the noose, and some members of the media didn’t seem to believe it was a noose at all. Dexter thought I was talking to the press too much, while I believed I was just running damage control, trying to make sure the story the media was telling was accurate. After Dexter and I decided to go our separate ways, Franklin and I moved back to Idaho, where we stayed with a friend until we could find our own place.

  Responding to the hate crimes directed at me, HREI’s board of directors had security cameras installed in and around the building. Unfortunately, they weren’t working correctly when Donna arrived at the institute the morning of November 19, 2009, and found a swastika sticker that had been affixed to the front door sometime during the night. When I got to work a half an hour later, I asked Donna, who as director of operations was responsible for the security cameras, if she’d looked at the video feed from the night before to see if the culprit had been captured on film. She apologized and explained that she hadn’t set the cameras to save mode. They’d been on but hadn’t recorded anything. The police arrived, removed the swastika as evidence, and scoped out the perimeter of the building, but without any video footage they had no leads to follow.

  In June 2010, Franklin and Izaiah, who was visiting us for the summer, ran through the back door one morning, yelling that I needed to come see what they’d found while picking strawberries in the backyard. I threw on a robe and followed them outside. My heart sank when I saw what had spooked them. From the rafters of the carport hung a noose, and like the first one, the message behind it was clear. I called the police. The officer who arrived wrote up the incident as a hate crime. It didn’t matter how many times we moved; the hate always found us.

  All the publicity these hate crimes generated didn’t sit well with HREI’s board of directors. They wanted to know what I was saying and doing to upset the local white supremacists. I didn’t have an answer for that beyond, “Promoting human rights causes and being myself?” At board meetings, I was asked to carefully examine the words I used while making statements to the press because, the board members implied, perhaps something I was saying was causing the antagonistic responses. Having already been blamed for my own rape, I couldn’t believe I was being blamed for having hate crimes directed at me and my family. The implication added a considerable amount of stress to an already nerve-racking situation.

  Some of the board members suggested that the “negative press” was bad for tourism, a complaint that was anathema in a tourist town like Coeur d’Alene. Others worried that it might hurt our donor base. Soon I b
egan hearing talk about the board wanting “a different face” for the organization, one that was less controversial and less upsetting to the opposition. It didn’t seem to matter that in just two years I’d succeeded in transforming HREI from a local organization with little influence to a regional one with a noticeable impact.

  I was blindsided when the board hired Dan Lepow, an older white man, to be HREI’s development director in July 2010. During his first day on the job, Dan sat me down and told me I was too focused on Black rights. “I want you to know that, although I’m part Jewish, when it comes to the Black and white issue, I’m a white man.” I heard him loud and clear. Within two weeks of hiring him, the board made a motion to promote him to executive director, the position I’d effectively been filling for the past two years and the title I’d been working so hard to attain. Adding insult to injury, the board asked me to train Dan to be my boss. Having documented all my achievements at HREI and stored them in a packet, I gave it to the board and asked them to name me executive director instead of Dan; otherwise I would resign. They responded by having the locks on all the doors rekeyed that night and, when I showed up for work Monday morning, giving me one hour to clean out my office.

  My jobs in academia kept me afloat financially, but the sporadic nature of the work was trying. As a quarterly faculty member at EWU, I got courses added to my schedule (and consequently more pay) when full-time instructors didn’t want to teach them or new ones were added to accommodate demand. By the same token, I often had courses taken from me (along with the income I would have received) by full-time instructors who were unable to fill their own classes. Sometimes these changes would come with as little as two days’ notice before a semester began. I once picked up a course I’d never taught before just two hours before it began on the first day of classes, and I wasn’t even given a syllabus. I had to write the curriculum as I taught the class. Hoping to gain some stability, I applied for a full-time position in EWU’s Africana Studies Program twice during my time there, but both times it came down to me and another person—and the other person always got the job.

  The career setbacks I experienced didn’t detract from my passion for human rights, and in many ways they actually fueled it. I recognized the way HREI’s board had treated me as a common form of institutionalized injustice. I’d worked twice as hard as all the previous executive directors had and received half the pay. I’d also outperformed all of them, but because I was viewed as a poor young Black woman, how was I rewarded? I’d been slapped in the face with a series of isms—racism, ageism, classism, and sexism—which, combined, delivered the force of a punch. My leadership had been stifled, my voice had been suppressed, and in the end I had been replaced, but I refused to give up.

  The normal instinct in such a situation is to want to change the aspects of your character that are holding you back, but the only thing I could possibly fix was being penniless and, trust me, I was doing the best I could there. Everything else involved a permanent aspect of my being, something that couldn’t be changed or removed. If I was looking to live an easier life, this would have been a great time for me to opt out of being Black. Simply by untwisting my braids and staying out of the sun, I could have crossed back over the color line. This assumes, of course, that Blackness describes little more than racialized physical features. But to me, Blackness is a permanent part of who I am, an aspect of my character that had taken me a lifetime to have the courage to publicly claim and openly embrace, and I wasn’t about to give up on me. So I responded to the series of isms society had forced upon me with one of my own: activism.

  As an “academic activist,” I lived and breathed my research and endeavored not just to educate my students but also to change their lives. I also grew more vocal in response to racial injustices in the local community. When a pipe bomb was found in a backpack along the route of the MLK Day march in Spokane in 2011, I pressed authorities to find the culprit. As a member of the Spokane chapter of the NAACP—there wasn’t a North Idaho chapter—I attended the press conference about the incident and called out the FBI as the news cameras rolled. I said I’d lost faith in the process. How hadn’t they found any suspects? When they said, “We’re doing all we can,” was this really true? Or was this going to be just like all the other incidents, many of which I had personally experienced, where the local police and FBI dropped the ball and failed to find the culprit? Finally, two weeks later, the FBI succeeded in tracking down the perpetrator, Kevin Harpham of the National Alliance, a violent group of neo-Nazis who would do just about anything in their effort to establish an all-white homeland.

  The failed bombing attempt was big enough news to attract the attention of the national NAACP leadership. Its president and CEO, Benjamin Jealous, traveled to Spokane to lead a protest march that doubled as a commemoration of the anniversary of Martin Luther King Jr.’s death. It was refreshing to see Jealous in person, for not only was he a greatly admired Black activist but also one whose complexion was even lighter than mine. DNA testing he once underwent on PBS’s Finding Your Roots showed that he is 80 percent European and only 18 percent sub-Saharan African, prompting the show’s host (and Harvard professor, author, filmmaker, and critic) Henry Louis Gates Jr. to jokingly refer to him as the “whitest Black man we’ve ever tested.”

  Jealous identified as a Black man, but would it have mattered if he didn’t? Not according to the NAACP, which, 108 years after its founding, remained the foremost civil rights organization in the country. On its website, it says, “The mission of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People is to ensure the political, educational, social, and economic equality of rights of all persons [emphasis mine] and to eliminate race-based discrimination.” One of its creators, Mary White Ovington, was white. Walter White, its president from 1931 to 1953, was technically Black, but with his white skin, blue eyes, and blonde hair, he could have easily passed as white, which he often did in order to infiltrate KKK meetings. And, although most of its chapter presidents are Black men, more than a few of them throughout its history have been white.

  On April 3, 2011, Jealous led a protest march from the Spokane Veterans Memorial Arena to Riverfront Park, where he spoke about the need to embrace diversity and come together as one nation. I was honored to be invited by the president of the NAACP’s Spokane chapter, V. Anne Smith, to speak as well. That day I publicly called out racism, white supremacists, and institutionalized injustice in the North Idaho and Eastern Washington communities. I specifically focused on addressing the apathy of people “with good intentions” who were sitting idly by and the dangers of the good-ole-boy network, including the police, business owners, and even leaders of some local nonprofits, which was preventing the possibility of any significant change occurring in the region. I also talked about how so many hate crimes in the area had gone unaddressed and unsolved because institutions cared more about keeping up appearances than about protecting Black citizens.

  “We wear race, disability, religious, and gay blinders to edit out what we do not want to see,” I told a reporter from The Fig Tree, a local monthly newspaper. “Our goal is not color blindness because blind love is weak love. We need to see the differences and appreciate them. We need to take off our blinders and love our neighbors as ourselves. This means loving especially people who are different or ‘other.’ Racial hatred exists. We can start to overcome it by taking off our blinders. The greatest tragedy is when good people are silent.”

  Standing up to injustice and hate became my mission. There was plenty of it in the area, but there were also plenty of educated responses to it. One of them was the annual Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Children’s Program, which the KCTFHR, NIC Popcorn Forum, and NIC Human Equality Club started in 1986 as a way of educating every fifth grader in the Coeur d’Alene and Post Falls school districts about civil rights. I first attended in 2009 when I was director of education at HREI, then worked with the schools themselves to find speakers in 2011 and 2012, helping to recrui
t performers like Living Voices’ Dior Davenport, who reenacted scenes from the civil rights era.

  As I was leaving the Children’s Program in my car in 2012, I was confronted by eight members of the White Knights branch of the KKK. They wore military fatigues, had guns on their belts, and waved Confederate flags and signs with vile slogans such as “Martin Luther King Was a Nigger Terrorist,” “If Diversity Wins, We Lose,” and “Honk to Keep Idaho White.” I knew they were with the KKK because I recognized their Grand Wizard, Shaun Winkler, who was one of Richard Butler’s understudies. As I was rounding the corner of Northwest Boulevard in my black Pontiac Vibe, Winkler and his minions spotted me and yelled, “We know where you live, Rachel!”

  Furious that they that would call me out by name and threaten me like that, I did a U-turn and sped home. Unable to find any poster board in the house, I grabbed a thirty-six-inch print of my “AFRIKA” collage, wrote, “Malcolm X is My Hero” on the back with a Sharpie, and drove straight back to where the KKK were protesting the MLK Day festivities. Standing directly across the street from them, I held my poster in front of my chest, flipping it around so they could see both sides, while intermittently texting friends asking them to join me. Standing there all alone, I flinched every time a car honked in response to the KKK’s sign, but I held my ground. I was relieved when “Juice,” one of my good friends, finally showed up. With a Black man standing next to me, the shouting from across the street died down quite a bit. Then another friend, Virgil, arrived, and he got them all riled up again by yelling things like, “You’re so stupid K is the only letter in the alphabet you know!” Some of my students from North Idaho College took an even bolder approach. Two of them, both white males, stood on either side of the KKK protestors with signs that had arrows pointing toward them and read “I’m not with stupid.” Nearly twenty-five people showed up to support me, and once the KKK protestors saw how badly we outnumbered them they packed up their stuff and went home.