In Full Color Page 21

  When Esther and I arrived home after moving her out of Larry and Ruthanne’s house, I moved Franklin into the basement with Izaiah and let her have the second bedroom upstairs. After she’d gotten all her stuff moved in, she and I sat down in my bedroom and had a talk. I wanted her to set some short-term life goals that could be achieved within a year. After being institutionalized for five years, she needed some help getting back on her feet. Clearly she’d already thought this through because she didn’t hesitate before telling me her four-part plan.

  “First, I want to get a driver’s license.”

  She explained how the staff at the group home had burned her learner’s permit after she’d taken the house parents’ car for a drive around the block without permission when she was seventeen. The police charged her with grand theft auto, but as a minor she was able to get the charge dropped after being on probation. This problem had an easy fix. I took her to driver’s ed classes, and as soon as she’d gotten her license I let her drive my car whenever she needed to.

  “Next, I want to go to college.”

  She told me that Larry and Ruthanne had enrolled her in Flathead Valley Community College in Lincoln County, but, according to Esther, the entire “campus” consisted only of a one-story building, a tree, a tiny gravel parking lot, and a picnic table. She wanted to go to a “real” college, where she could study music performance. Esther could play the piano and the saxophone, and she could also sing exceptionally well. With all the connections I had at NIC after teaching there for eight years, I was able to facilitate her enrollment process, and I helped her fill out the paperwork for the financial aid she needed.

  “I also want to get a job.”

  Esther had never been employed before, but this aspect of her plan was no more difficult to achieve than the others. One of my hair clients managed a used auto parts business just off Interstate 90, and she helped Esther apply for a position at the company. Despite her complete lack of knowledge about cars, Esther was soon working as a cashier at Pull and Save Auto Parts.

  “And I want to sue Josh.”

  The final part of Esther’s plan puzzled me. “Sue him for what?”

  “For molesting me when I was a kid.”

  Hearing those words felt like a dagger to my heart. I gave her a long hug. “I’m so sorry it happened to you, too.”

  When I told her what Josh had done to me, it freed her up to talk about her own experience. She was eerily matter-of-fact as she relayed the story. Esther never cries. While talking about being flogged with a baboon whip or forced to eat her own vomit, she’ll use the sweetest tone of voice you’ve ever heard. She employed the same incongruously saccharine tone as she told me how Josh had sexually assaulted her more than thirty times while he was living with Larry and Ruthanne in Colorado after getting his masters from the University of Nebraska. She described two occasions when Josh forced her to perform oral sex on him and seven or eight instances when he performed oral sex on her. “Don’t tell anyone or I’ll hurt you,” she told me he’d once said to her. These assaults occurred when she was six and seven years old. Now that Josh had a two-year-old daughter, Esther was worried he might do the same thing to her. I agreed to help her.

  As upset as I was for Esther, I also wasn’t that surprised, given what Josh had done to me and his boyhood fantasies about the topless African women in National Geographic. For me, this was the third strike against Josh. I vowed that I would never forgive him for what he did to Esther and hoped never to see him or speak to him ever again. Not allowing people who have wronged me or who have hurt those I love to occupy space in my mind is my way of coping with trauma. It’s simply too painful for me to think about them. While I will never forget what they did, I quarantine the memories I have of them and put all traces of their existence out of my mind. I just had one last thing to say to Josh before I terminated our relationship. I went on Facebook and sent him a message: “I can’t believe what you did to Esther. Fuck off and get the fuck out of my life. I don’t want to ever speak to you again.” Then I unfriended him and blocked him for good measure.

  It took a while for Esther’s claim to get processed; the assaults had taken place in Colorado, Esther reported them to the police in Washington, and Josh lived in Iowa. When it finally was, Larry and Ruthanne made their unhappiness toward me for helping Esther clear. Years earlier, in an attempt to heal our relationship and pay back the inheritance money she and Larry stole from me, Ruthanne began sending me fifty-dollar checks each month with “Inheritance” written in the memo line. Immediately after I helped Esther file her case against Josh, those checks stopped coming.

  Their displeasure escalated into a threat during Esther’s first semester of college. Assisted by Zach, who was also attending NIC at the time, Larry and Ruthanne showed up at Esther’s dorm and demanded to speak with her. Hoping to avoid being part of an embarrassing scene, Esther agreed to go to lunch with them at Bonsai Bistro. Drop the case, they warned her, or they would ruin my life and hers. Esther recorded the conversation on her phone and sent it to me, but the district attorney I spoke to didn’t seem to think it amounted to much. If he’d predicted a blizzard in Miami in July, he couldn’t have been more wrong.

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Black Lives Matter

  AFTER ESTHER PRESSED CHARGES AGAINST JOSH, he was arrested in Iowa, brought to Colorado, and indicted on four felony counts of sexual assault. Larry and Ruthanne bailed him out by posting a $15,000 bond and accused Esther of lying. The Doležals had become the Hatfields and McCoys.

  As large a role as Esther’s case against Josh played in my life, I was so busy I didn’t have much time to dwell on it. Between raising Franklin, teaching at EWU, writing part-time for the local weekly newspaper The Inlander, and braiding hair, I barely had time to breathe. I felt like I was constantly chasing after a ball that was rolling downhill, its speed always just a bit faster than mine. So when a local activist asked me in the spring of 2014 to apply for one of the open seats on Spokane’s Office of Police Ombudsman Commission (OPOC), a watchdog group for the local police, I brushed off the idea. But after two more people made the same suggestion I started to pay attention.

  Everyone who recommended I do it said much the same thing: the current applicants were mostly older and white, and Spokane needed my voice on the commission. Translation: Spokane needed a strong Black leader who wasn’t afraid to stand up to the police department, denounce police brutality, and demand transparency. Having concluded that the need to reform the culture of policing was at the heart of racial justice activism and seeing that no one else was stepping up to the plate, I filled out the application.

  My decision to apply for the position soon took on greater significance, as that summer was reminiscent of the one in Spike Lee’s Do the Right Thing: hot, violent, and filled with racial tension. On July 17, 2014, officers from the New York City Police Department approached Eric Garner, a forty-three-year-old Black man who was standing outside of a bodega on Staten Island, and accused him of illegally selling “loosies,” individual cigarettes sold on the street. When Garner protested his innocence and frustration at being harassed, Officer Daniel Pantaleo put him in a chokehold and took him to the ground. As Pantaleo shoved Garner’s face into the sidewalk and four officers assisted, Garner pleaded with them, saying, “I can’t breathe” over and over again. An hour later, Garner was pronounced dead.

  Less than a month later, Darren Wilson, a white police officer in Ferguson, Missouri, while responding to a call about a theft at a convenience store, approached Michael Brown, an eighteen-year-old Black male, and his friend Dorian Johnson as they were walking down the middle of the road. When Wilson confronted them, he and Brown reportedly engaged in a struggle and Wilson shot Brown in the hand. Brown and Johnson tried to run away. Wilson got out of his vehicle and pursued Brown. Even though Brown was unarmed, and, according to some, had his arms in the air as if trying to surrender, Wilson shot him at least six times. Brown died in the stre
et in a pool of his own blood, where his body remained for several hours before any medical personnel examined it.

  When people in Ferguson took to the streets to protest, the local police responded with what a Justice Department report later classified as “excessive force,” deploying military weapons and armored vehicles and firing tear gas and rubber bullets into the crowds. What ensued seemed like a never-ending feedback loop, with the police continually failing to respond to the protests appropriately and protestors responding to the police’s botched efforts with increasingly angry demands for justice. A week after the shooting, protestors in Ferguson and all around the country were still marching through the streets chanting, “Hands up, don’t shoot!” and carrying signs that read, “Justice for Mike Brown” and “Black Lives Matter.”

  I’d first become aware of the BLM movement when #BlackLivesMatter emerged on Twitter the year before in response to George Zimmerman’s acquittal. Like a lot of people, I’d been hopeful that it might blossom into an ongoing movement for justice and not just be a hashtag moment. The response to Michael Brown’s death showed just how much the movement had grown in a year. Relying on grassroots activists, Black Lives Matter made its presence felt all around the country in the weeks that followed as it transformed the dying words of Garner and Brown into posters, chants, and T-shirts, and reignited the conversation about police brutality against Black men that had risen to national attention with Rodney King’s beating in Los Angeles on March 3, 1991, then lay dormant for more than two decades without being adequately addressed. The Black Lives Matter movement arose as a response to this dereliction.

  Working with community organizers, I helped coordinate BLM vigils and protest marches in Spokane, hoping to make more people aware of the implicit bias against Black people in our nation’s police departments. According to a study released by The Guardian in 2015, Black men were nine times more likely than other Americans to be killed by police officers that year. Three hundred and seven of the 1,134 people killed by the police in 2015 were Black men, despite their making up only 6 percent of the U.S. population. So many young Black men were gunned down that some might just see the victims as a long list of names on a website. Not me. Every Black life that was taken mattered to me, and as names kept getting added to the list I felt more and more devoted to the cause of demanding police reform and promoting community vigilance. Every time I shouted, “Not one more!” at a rally, I was protesting what had come to feel like an imminent threat against my own Black sons.

  On October 16, 2014, I gave a speech to more than a hundred EWU students and community members titled, “Ferguson and Race Relations in America: Are We Headed toward a Deeper Divide or a Post-Racial Society?” At the end of my talk, I handed out copies of an extremely misguided editorial written by Tanner Streicher, the art director of the campus newspaper The Easterner, in which he argued that in America Black people receive the same if not better treatment than white people. Dividing the room into smaller groups, I asked each of them to discuss the article, and the feedback I got was unanimous: the article was so offensive, something needed to be done. Those who attended the forum got right to work, petitioning the paper, writing letters to the editor, and raising campus awareness about the BLM movement until Streicher was removed from his position.

  I had always supported the Black students at EWU, serving as an unofficial advisor and mentor for many of them, and that fall they issued a public endorsement of my leadership by petitioning the director of the Africana Studies program to remove the Black Student Union’s current faculty advisor, who they believed was doing more to hurt the club than help it, and replace her with me. The student-run coup succeeded, and I was named the BSU’s new faculty advisor even though I technically wasn’t qualified to advise the club because I wasn’t a full-time, year-round professor.

  The role meant a great deal to me—I’d been a BSU member myself during my undergraduate years and had advised the BSU at NIC, after all—and I took it very seriously. I helped the BSU members organize a protest march, and nearly two hundred people attended. We passed out BLM bracelets to be worn as symbols of solidarity. We made signs denouncing police brutality. We walked through campus wearing all black, each of us with one fist raised in the air. We read aloud stories about the long list of Black men, women, and children who’d recently been killed by the police and made memorials commemorating them in three different spots on campus. I also gave a call-to-action speech, and afterward the students and I held hands and sang “Lift Every Voice and Sing”—the Black national anthem.

  Feeling more empowered, the members of the BSU organized a campus forum in November to talk about what had happened in Ferguson, racial profiling in society, and race relations on campus. Yik Yak, a social media app popular on college campuses at the time because of the anonymity it provided, had exploded with racist comments following the BLM protests on campus, so this took up much of the discussion. As part of the panel, I spoke at length, lending my support to the BSU’s desire for race and culture classes to be required for all majors, more Black representation in the faculty and the student body, and a multicultural student center that would serve as a safe space for academic and social enrichment.

  Organizing and attending BLM events in Spokane took so much of my time and energy, I had to be selective about what made it onto my calendar. One of the activities that fell by the wayside for me was the monthly meeting for the NAACP’s Spokane chapter. I went so infrequently I was a little shocked when the chapter’s secretary, who was a friend of mine, nominated me to be president. As honored as I was, I was also hesitant. With past-due fees, no active committees, and a rapidly dwindling membership, the local chapter was on the brink of being shut down, and I knew revitalizing it would be a major undertaking. Given my unique identity, I was also cognizant of the need for me to represent what the Black community as a whole wanted. I considered removing my name from the ballot. But when I was informed that only the incumbent and I were running, and I considered how much more effective my activism would be if connected to a national civil rights organization, I decided to go ahead and run.

  The ratio of women to men in the Spokane chapter was about two to one, and most of the women who showed up at the next meeting in November voted for me. On the strength of their votes I won the election by a healthy margin, becoming only the third female president in the chapter’s nearly century-old history. As honored as I was, I was also overwhelmed by the thought of how much time and energy it would take for me to do the job right. But my fear quickly gave way to excitement. I had a grand vision. I wanted to return the focus of the Spokane chapter to the five NAACP Game Changers, the most urgent issues facing Black America: economic sustainability, education, health, public safety and criminal justice, and voting rights and political representation.

  My biggest short-term goal was simply ensuring the chapter’s survival. Having read the NAACP’s constitution and bylaws, I knew that without three or more active committees an NAACP chapter could be shut down. When I was elected president the Spokane chapter only had one, which was essentially just the president and his hard-working wife. I was on a mission not only to keep the doors open but also to grow the organization to the point where it would never be threatened with closure again.

  Another one of my objectives was to unify the organization. While founding the Inland Northwest Juneteenth Coalition three years earlier, I’d noticed how divided Spokane’s Black community was. There were lots of pastors and lots of ideas, but not very many organized groups of people getting things done on the ground. I wanted to nurture and support grassroots activism that brought about sustainable changes on an institutional level. To this end, I was hoping to serve as a bridge between the NAACP’s Spokane chapter and the local BLM movement, and after being the president-elect for just one week—I wouldn’t officially assume the position until the meeting in January—I was given an opportunity to do just that.

  If Michael Brown’s death was the flam
e that lit the fuse of the BLM movement, Darren Wilson’s acquittal on November 24, 2014, was the explosion. Using the rapid-fire organizational capability of Twitter, Black Americans who were sick of hearing about police officers getting away with shooting innocent Black men took to the streets across the country to express their outrage. I was already a known voice on human rights issues in Spokane; being elected president of the local NAACP chapter just extended my reach. I called for a citywide rally and a “die-in” in front of City Hall, and nearly 250 people participated. While Black men and boys, including Franklin and Izaiah, lay on the sidewalk, their relatives and friends traced outlines around their bodies with chalk. Afterward, we marched through the city, chanting, “Stand up! Stand up! We want freedom, freedom! All these racist-ass cops, we don’t need ’em, need ’em!” “Hands up! Don’t shoot,” and “No justice, no peace! No racist police!” It was very real, very emotional, and very intense. I actually had to assure a few nervous police officers that the protest was going to remain nonviolent.

  My commitment to racial justice ended up costing me one of my jobs. After organizing the protest in Spokane against Darren Wilson’s acquittal, I arrived late to teach the evening session of my Race & Ethnicity class at Whitworth University. That, when combined with the dean seeing me on the news leading the protest, prompted her to call me and tell me to not bother showing up to teach anymore. Essentially, I was fired from my position teaching a class about race for leading a Black Lives Matter protest on one of the most important nights in Black American history in the past decade.