Spotlight: M. Adams and the BLM Movement

Issue: Racial Justice

I am what is often referred to now as a first‐generation college graduate. But my parents always emphasized education. My mom graced the halls of colleges and continues to aspire toward that elusive higher learning that slipped through her fingers as a teenage mother and wife. My father was offered a scholarship to college but thought he needed to have an income so instead became a Marine. They both talked about college as an honorable path, one that required hard work.

When time came to look for a college, I knew I wanted to go somewhere in DC. It seemed fitting that I should be near the halls of power if I was going to change things. I chose the University of Maryland because their financial aid package offered more scholarships, grants, loans, and work study. In college, I spent my time like most of my peers. I dabbled in the Greek ecosystem as a Kappa sweetheart but couldn't justify asking my parents to financially support these activities formally. I joined the Black Student Union and worked to divest the university from South Africa.

But mostly, I worked. I had an administrative work study within the university; I worked to “tutor” or take classes and exams for student athletes (which was completely legal back then); I catered for the alumni association and loved the traditional alumnae crab feasts and homecoming events; I worked for the local supermarket; I was a regular guinea pig for research departments from providing lung samples and participating in a “skipping” study. I pretty much took any and every job I came across.

I was impatient to finish undergrad and go to law school. I'd known I wanted to be a lawyer since I was five, and these forays into political science and African American studies felt like a necessary stepping stone, the requisite appetizer before the meal. During my junior year in college, I learned about the Woodrow Wilson fellowship in public policy and international affairs. It offered to pay for graduate school for those that attended a selected policy institute at a university away from your home school and finish an internship in public policy. It wasn't law school, but it was free.

As a successful applicant, I chose to attend the policy institute at Cal. Berkeley. It was another world, nothing like home. I loved it. I learned about the Black Panther Party from children of Panthers who were my age. I hung out in places frequented by the likes of rappers and entertainers whom I only vaguely paid attention to: Too Short, Hammer, En Vogue, and even once Tupac. At the institute, I was able to live with students of all ethnicities. Academically, it was enthralling. I came away convinced that legislative and judicial change was necessary, so I knew I had to go back and get both my law and master's degrees.

For my qualifying internship, I worked at the NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund, which was then led by civil rights attorney and activist Elaine Jones. She joined the NAACP Legal Defense Fund in 1970 and in 1993 became the organization's first female director‐counsel and president.

While working with Elaine, I was assigned a few cases of interest, but the work that really spoke to me was on the “motor voter” legislation. It was a simple concept: when someone went to get their driver's license, they would be able to check a box to register to vote. The change would save all voters time and would increase access to voting for those who might miss voter registration deadlines for many reasons.

But our colleagues on the other side of the aisle were not as convinced. Primarily Republican lawmakers insisted that this bill would open our voter registries up to voter fraud, allowing illegal immigrants and those who had committed felonies on the voter rolls. It didn't matter that these cases would be cross‐checked before issuing the voter registration card.

We met with staffers in the offices of those opposing the bill to get intel on their arguments against motor voting to help inform our strategy to get the bill in committee. And Elaine taught me the importance of being a person, not an advocate, in these meetings. She taught me little tricks to get staffers to speak to me. To my surprise, it worked to ask folks to join me for coffee or lunch. It worked to go late in the day and ask if I could walk and talk to people as they left for the day. Elaine suggested that taking notes while talking to a staffer would lose their attention. So, after our conversations, I would walk over to the Library of Congress and pull out my notebook to capture everything. I adopted Elaine's more human approach, looking them in the eyes, making remarks about the weather, laughing out loud when they said something funny. These were natural reactions, not faked to elicit support. When we got to the topic at hand, there was sometimes stiffness or nastiness, but the conversations always ended the way they started, with some gesture of respect.

Elaine showed me the art of policy making and I saw then how it complimented my lifelong dream to become a lawyer.

Elaine is an everyday feminist.

Follow the Feminist Even If She Doesn't Go By That Name

This leads me to the second major lesson that listening to and observing everyday feminists in action across the globe for more than three decades taught me: feminist leadership is crucial for impact.

In Chapter 1, we discussed the likelihood that many of the everyday feminists highlighted in this book do not label themselves as a feminist or even a leader. Years after my brief time working with Elaine Jones, she told Julian Bond, a popular civil rights leader, that she doesn't even consider herself a leader. After winning voting, education discrimination, and death row cases that improved the lives of all people, particularly Black people and other people of color in the United States, she says, “The whole idea of leaders means looking to one or two or three people who can lead a segmented community. Even when our communities are more fragmented. I don't think it's going to get us anywhere. We've got to develop leadership in everyone.”

Everyday feminists may not call themselves feminists, despite doing feminist work. And if they do now, they, like me, may not have really considered that a part of their core identity growing up. There are several reasons the label feminist may not resonate with some everyday feminists. For example, in many parts of Africa and Asia, a lot of women have considered feminism a Western concept that continued to perpetuate patriarchy, colonialism, and inequities that did not serve their communities that were seeking transformative change.

Today, there are so many versions of feminism that depend greatly on where you come from in the world, the identities you claim, and even the language you speak. Currently, there is a growing body of feminists that have branded their own feminist evolution that is bolder and considers their own histories and realities. This is what an everyday feminist does: creates her own narrative and definitions. Aminetoue Mint El Moctar, a Mauritanian women's rights activist and politician, whom I would call an everyday feminist, describes it this way in her discussion with the African Women's Development Fund: “African feminism is a conception, a political awareness, a strategy and a code of ethics that militates for women's rights.”

I encourage funders not to get bogged down with terminology and instead seek out and support everyday feminists, whatever they call themselves.

We didn't get traction on the federal motor voter bill while I was in DC that summer. With quite a few years behind me at this point and staring down the barrel of numerous and ugly attempts by politicians to disenfranchise communities of color, I see why this bill was a problem for many Republicans. It would allow communities, including and especially everyday feminists, a vehicle to exercise their right to vote for more politicians focused on equality and justice. But I later watched with glee as state by state introduced some aspects of the bill. And eventually, the National Voter Registration Act was passed in 1993. That was another lesson I learned from the feminist leadership of Elaine Jones: sometimes it takes decades of work before achieving success—and this is especially true in the long struggle for racial justice.

The Long Fight for Racial Justice

Throughout the history of the United States, racial justice movements have continually emerged and declined, most often in response to egregious events, laws or lack thereof to address the racial discrimination endemic in the society, or key awareness raising moments in current affairs.

According to GFW's MCAT, the civil rights movement of the 1960s progressed through all of the movement stages: emerging, taking off, formalization, and decline. Organizations like the NAACP, also involved in the broader racial justice movement, are in the formalization stage (see Chapter 2) and have become synonymous with its key roles, particularly in US society. These include the abolition of segregation and discrimination in housing, education, employment, voting, and transportation. And yet, despite many decades of progress, we have not yet achieved racial equity—in the United States or globally.

The struggle goes on.

We are currently living through the next wave of the racial justice movement in the United States. In 2020, the murder of George Floyd by a Minneapolis police officer ignited the world's biggest protests for racial justice in a generation. Long‐simmering anger over the deaths of African Americans in police custody brought an international reckoning with systemic racism. This current racial justice movement fits within the broader history of the US civil rights movement, yet its efforts differ from past initiatives in terms of ending racism, full stop. The focus is on the equal importance of all human rights for African Americans together with other marginalized groups, nationally and globally.

Ultimately, I believe that the process of truth and reconciliation is the pathway to racial justice. Bryan Stevens at the Equal Justice Initiative points out that in countries such as Rwanda and South Africa, where significant racial trauma took place, akin to the North American slave trade, there had to be a moment of recognition of the atrocities and opportunities for story telling on both sides.¹ Unfortunately, this prescription for the broader racial justice movement is often discouraged by opponents through both explicit and institutionalized resistance.

A Racial Reckoning for Feminist Movements

The current moment of racial reckoning has prompted important conversation and reflection about racism within feminist and other social justice movements. It was clear that organizations that considered themselves feminist by design had to come to terms with their own histories of racism and more recent biased treatment of women of color within their ranks. In Chapter 10, I talk about Planned Parenthood as an organization that has had to rationalize its white feminism with the work it does with and for people of color. There were shake‐ups in colleague organizations, such as Women Deliver and the International Women's Health Coalition. Even the Women's Funds themselves had to tackle the important idea that even feminists can be racist and further agendas of discrimination based on color, origin, and immigration status.

Intersectional feminist movements must address racial injustice whenever they find it—including in their own ranks. Everyday feminists understand that anti‐Blackness, Asian hate, Muslim fear, and other manifestations of racial bigotry must be tackled head on. Its tolerance is a slippery slope for those who desire justice at any level. Funders who support social movements but ignore problematic racial dynamics ingrained therein risk further entrenching racial prejudice and diminishing years of work by marginalized communities of color.²