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Abstract
In the wake of the Movement for Black Lives, activists, artists, and scholars have highlighted the need to connect issues of state-sanctioned violence, the historical lack of protection offered to Black women, and experiences of gendered intraracial violence, arguing that these issues are inseparable. Sistas Liberated Ground, a Brooklyn-based campaign in the early 2000s, was an embodied example of this intervention. Sista II Sista (SIIS), founded in 1996, led this initiative. Black and Latinax women organized together to challenge systems that marginalized us and devalued our lives. In this current political moment, the herstory of SIIS demonstrates the power of a politics that creates new cultures, models the world we want to see, builds solidarity across communities, and does the work of Ella Baker–style radical democracy.
Acknowledgments
Thank you to the anonymous reviewers for their generous feedback, the editorial team at SOULS and the editors for this special issue. An extra special thanks to all the Sista II Sista members who continue to share their love and vision with me, especially Adjoa Jones de Almeida and Paula Rojas. Finally, Ujju Aggarwal, Mónica A. Jiménez, Christen Smith, and Cynthia Yaudes read different versions of this article and I am very grateful for their comments, time, and suggestions.
About the Author
Nicole A. Burrowes is an Assistant Professor in the African and African Diaspora Studies Department at the University of Texas at Austin. Beyond academia, Nicole draws on an extensive portfolio of experience in community organizing and documentary film.
Notes
1 This article is partly historical and the marshaling of an archive, group conversations, and my own reflection on my experience with SIIS. I bring in a number of voices to tell this story because I am representing a body of work done by a larger collective of people. I also draw on newspaper and magazine articles, videos, images, meeting minutes, grant proposals, reports, memories, and interviews.
2 Barbara Ransby, Ella Baker and the Black Freedom Movement: A Radical Democratic Vision (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003).
3 Recent works that document these movements include INCITE!, Color of Violence: the INCITE! Anthology (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016); Joy James, Resisting State Violence: Radicalism, Gender, and Race in U.S. Culture (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997); Barbara Ransby, Making All Black Lives Matter: Reimagining Freedom in the Twenty-First Century (Oakland: University of California Press, 2018); Andrea J. Ritchie, Invisible No More: Police Violence Against Black Women and Women of Color (Boston: Beacon Press, 2017); Beth Richie, Arrested Justice: Black Women, Violence, and America's Prison Nation (New York: New York University Press, 2012); Kimberly Springer, ed., Still Lifting, Still Climbing: African American Women’s Contemporary Activism (New York: New York University Press, 1999); Kimberly Springer, Living for the Revolution: Black Feminist Organizations, 1968–1980 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005); and Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, ed., How We Get Free: Black Feminism and the Combahee River Collective (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2017).
4 Ransby, Making All Black Lives Matter, 3.
5 Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, From #BlackLivesMatter to Black Liberation (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2016), 120–26; Kohei Ishihara, Urban Transformations: Youth Organizing in Boston, New York City, Philadelphia and Washington, D.C.: Occasional Papers Series on Youth Organizing no. 9 (New York: Funders Collaborative on Youth Organizing, 2007), 8; Human Rights Watch, “20 Years of Immigrant Abuses,” Human Rights Watch, April 25, 2016, https://www.hrw.org/news/2016/04/25/us-20-years-immigrant-abuses.
6 See Ritchie, Invisible No More, chapter 2 and Jordan T. Camp and Christina Heatherton, Policing the Planet: Why the Policing Crisis Led to Black Lives Matter (New York: Verso, 2016).
7 Michael Cooper, “Officers in Bronx Fired 41 Shots and an Unarmed Man is Killed,” New York Times, February 5, 1999, http://www.nytimes.com/1999/02/05/nyregion/officers-in-bronx-fire-41-shots-and-an-unarmed-man-is-killed.html.
8 Quoted in Ishihara, Urban Transformations, 15.
9 Ibid., 9.
10 Walter Stafford and Diana Salas, Women of Color: Two-Thirds of all Women in New York City Still Invisible in Policy—The 2nd Annual Report on The Status of Women of Color in NYC (New York: NYU Wagner Graduate School of Public Service, 2003).
11 Ibid.
12 Mark Levitan, Poverty in New York City 2003: A CSS Annual Report (New York: Community Service Society, 2003), accessed October 16, 2018, http://lghttp.58547.nexcesscdn.net/803F44A/images/nycss/images/uploads/pubs/PovertyinNY2003.pdf
13 While the “endangered” language has dropped from the public lexicon, the idea that boys and men of color are more affected by poverty, racism and violence has resurfaced through a string of national and local initiatives geared toward boys and young men of color, including the national project, My Brother’s Keeper, launched by former president Barak Obama in 2014.
14 Sista II Sista, “Sistas Making Moves: Collective Leadership for Personal Transformation and Social Justice,” in Color of Violence: The INCITE! Anthology, ed. INCITE! Women of Color Against Violence (Boston: South End Press, 2006), 200.
15 See Sekou Franklin, “The Black Student Leadership Network’s Summer Freedom School Program,” in Teach Freedom: Education for Liberation in the African American Tradition, ed. Charles M. Payne and Carol Sills Strickland (New York: Teachers College Press, 2008), 177–90.
16 Conference attendees packed workshops like: “Voting: It’s Your Right”; “Art as a Tool for Social Change”; “Environmental Racism”; “The Latino Student Movement”; “Technology and Social Action”; “Youth and Handgun Violence”; and “Approaches to Neighborhood and Community Organizing.” Black Student Leadership Network, “Young, Black and Giving Back: Black Student Leadership Conference, February 9–11, 1996” (Washington, DC: Children’s Defense Fund, 1996). Lisa Y. Sullivan, was an African American woman from Washington, D.C. She was a gifted organizer and intellectual. She later became the founder and Executive Director of LISTEN, Inc. She tragically died in 2001 at the age of forty from overwork and health complications.
17 Greene and Sullivan were seen as elders, even though they were in their thirties at this point in time.
18 Franklin, “Black Student Leadership Network’s Summer Freedom School Program,” 185–86. Gale Seller, “The P-O-W-E-R of Children’s Defense Fund Freedom Schools,” in Teach Freedom: Education for Liberation in the African American Tradition, ed. Charles M. Payne and Carol Sills Strickland (New York: Teachers College Press, 2008), 191–200.
19 Sista II Sista, Report to the Ms. Foundation (New York: Sista II Sista, 2001).
20 Sista II Sista, Brochure (New York: Sista II Sista, 2001).
21 Sista II Sista, “Sistas Making Moves.”
22 Sista II Sista, Report to the Ms. Foundation.
23 The Combahee River Collective, “A Black Feminist Statement,” in All the Women are White, All the Men are Black, But Some of Us Are Brave, ed. Gloria T. Hull, Patricia Bell Scott, and Barbara Smith (New York: The Feminist Press, 1982); Kimberlé Crenshaw, “Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and Violence Against Women of Color,” Stanford Law Review 43 (1991): 1241–58.
24 The last 20 years has yielded a rich body of work that examines how women experienced and transformed the modern Civil Rights and Black Power era in the United States, including: Tanisha C. Ford, Liberated Threads: Black Women, Style, and the Global Politics of Soul (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press), 2015; Bettye Collier-Thomas and V. P. Franklin, eds., Sisters in the Struggle: African American Women in the Civil Rights–Black Power Movement (New York: New York University Press, 2001); Ashley D. Farmer, Remaking Black Power How Black Women Transformed an Era (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2017); Françoise N. Hamlin, Crossroads at Clarksdale The Black Freedom Struggle in the Mississippi Delta after World War II (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2014); Faith S. Holsaert, ed., Hands on the Freedom Plow: Personal Accounts by Women in SNCC (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2012); Chana Kai Lee, For Freedom’s Sake: The Life of Fannie Lou Hamer (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2000); Danielle L. McGuire, At the Dark End of the Street: Black Women, Rape, and Resistance—A New History of the Civil Rights Movement from Rosa Parks to the Rise of Black Power (New York: Vintage Press, 2011); Iris Morales, Through the Eyes of Rebel Women: The Young Lords, 1969–1976 (New York: Red Sugarcane Press, Inc., 2016); Mary Phillips, “The Power of the First-Person Narrative: Ericka Huggins and the Black Panther Party,” Women's Studies Quarterly 43 no. 3/4 (2015): 33–51; Barbara Ransby, Ella Baker and the Black Freedom Movement: A Radical Democratic Vision (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005); Robyn C. Spencer, The Revolution Has Come: Black Power, Gender, and the Black Panther Party in Oakland (Durham: Duke University Press, 2016); Jeanne Theoharis, The Rebellious Life of Mrs. Rosa Parks (Boston: Beacon Press, 2015); Rhonda Y. Williams, The Politics of Public Housing: Black Women’s Struggles Against Urban Inequality (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005); and Rhonda Y. Williams, Concrete Demands: the Search for Black Power in the 20th Century (New York: Routlege, 2015).
25 See Paula Rojas, “The F Word: Sista II Sista” Ms. Magazine, February–March, 2001, http://www.msmagazine.com/feb01/feminism-paula.html
26 For a discussion of the collective model, see Sista II Sista, “Sistas Making Moves,” 198–200.
27 Ibid., 200.
28 Sista II Sista, Report to the Ms. Foundation.
29 For a discussion about the limitations and challenges Sista II Sista experienced doing this work as a non-profit, see Nicole Burrowes, Morgan Cousins, Paula X. Rojas, and Ije Ude, “On Our Own Terms: Ten years of Radical Community Building with Sista II Sista,” in The Revolution Will Not Be Funded: Beyond the Nonprofit Industrial Complex, ed. INCITE! Women of Color Against Violence (Boston: South End Press, 2009), 227–234.
30 Sista II Sista, “Sistas Making Moves,” 199.
31 Ibid., 196.
32 Sista II Sista, Sista II Sista: Our Response is Collective (New York: Sista II Sista, 2000), DVD.
33 Adjoa Jones de Almeida and Paula X. Rojas, discussion with author, Oct. 26, 2017, recorded (in author’s possession).
34 Alicia Garza, interview by Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, in How We Get Free, ed. Taylor, Alicia Garza chapter, Location 2129, Kindle.
35 Ransby, Making All Black Lives Matter, 98.
36 Ibid.
37 Ibid., 99.
38 Adjoa Jones de Almeida and Paula X. Rojas, discussion with author, October 26, 2017, recorded (in author’s possession).
39 Jacqui M. Alexander, Pedagogies of Crossing: Meditations on Feminism, Sexual Politics, Memory, and the Sacred (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006), 269, emphasis in the original.
40 Felicia R. Lee, “The Body Beautiful in Diverse Guises,” New York Times, December 19, 1999, https://www.nytimes.com/1999/12/19/nyregion/coping-the-body-beautiful-in-diverse-guises.html
41 While we engaged a lot of this type of work, organizations like Casa Atabex Ache in the Bronx focused centrally in this area and had much deeper practice in trauma and healing work. Women like Eugenia Acuña and Joeritta Jones de Almeida, who served on our board, helped us to incorporate more emotional and movement work into all of our programming.
42 Adjoa Jones de Almeida and Paula X. Rojas, discussion with author, October 26, 2017, recorded (in author’s possession).
43 INCITE!, accessed May 1, 2017, http://www.incite-national.org INCITE! Women of Color Against Violence, “Introduction,” in The Color of Violence: The INCITE! Anthology, ed. INCITE! Women of Color Against Violence (Boston: South End Press, 2006), 1–2.
44 Kali Nicole Gross, “#BlackLivesMatter Should Contend with Community Violence Too,” The Huffington Post Black Voices Blog, April 1, 2015, http://www.huffingtonpost.com/kali-nicole-gross/Blacklivesmatter-should-c_b_6565260.html. Cheryl Hicks unearths the experiences of Black working-class women in New York during the early 20th century with the criminal justice system and reformers. Particularly relevant to this article, she demonstrates their particular exposure to poverty, police harassment, and domestic violence. Cheryl D. Hicks, Talk with You Like a Woman: African American Women, Justice and Reform in New York, 1890–1935 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2010). Kali Nicole Gross also examines the long-standing and present day exclusionary politics of protection for Black women and the criminalization Black women experience for their responses to violence and abuse. Kali Nicole Gross, “African American Women, Mass Incarceration and the Politics of Protection,” Journal of American History 102, no. 1 (2015): 25–33.
45 Ritchie, Arrested Justice.
46 Ricthie, Invisible No More, 3 and 15.
47 “#SayHerName,” accessed May 1, 2017. www.aapf.org/sayhernamereport/
48 Ishihara, Urban Transformations, 16.
49 Adjoa Jones de Almeida and Paula X. Rojas, discussion with author, Oct. 26, 2017, recorded (in author’s possession).
50 Elissa Gootman, “Off-Duty Police Officer Fatally Shoots Brooklyn Woman in Building Where Families Feuded,” New York Times, October 25, 2000, http://www.nytimes.com/2000/10/25/nyregion/off-duty-police-officer-fatally-shoots-brooklyn-woman-building-where-families.html
51 Larry Celona, “Teen Shot Dead Was Auxiliary Cop,” New York Post, January 31, 2001, http://nypost.com/2001/01/31/teen-shot-dead-was-auxiliary-cop/
52 DC TV and Sista II Sista, You Have the Right to Break the Silence (New York: Sista II Sista, 2002), DVD.
53 Sista II Sista, Press Release. “Young Women in Brooklyn Speak Out Against Violence” (New York: Sista II Sista, 2002)
54 This article highlights some of our solidarity work around the violence against young women in Juarez, Mexico. Albor Ruiz, “Sistas Fired Up Over Violence,” New York Daily News, March 7, 2004, http://www.nydailynews.com/archives/boroughs/sistas-fired-violence-article-1.614808
55 Sista II Sista, No More Violence Against Our Sistas! (New York: Sista II Sista, 2005), DVD.
56 Ibid.
57 Ibid.
58 Ibid.
59 Ibid.
60 Thanks to Paula X. Rojas for highlighting this part of the process. Former Young Lord, Ritchie Perez, passed away in 2004. For an important interview with him, see Iris Morales, “¡Palante, Siempre Palante! Interview with Richie Perez,” El Centro Journal 21, no. 2 (Fall 2009): 142–157.
61 Sista II Sista, “Sistas Making Moves,” 204.
62 For a discussion about what led us to this decision, see Burrowes, Cousins, Rojas, and Ude, “On Our Own Terms.”
63 Adjoa Jones de Almeida and Paula X. Rojas, discussion with author, October 26, 2017, recorded (in author’s possession).
64 Burrowes, Cousins, Rojas, and Ude, “On Our Own Terms,” 233.
65 Quote from Nicole Burrowes in Deborah Douglas, “Black Women Say #MeToo” The Crisis (Winter 2018), 5–6.
66 This is the name of a popular gospel song sung by Hezekiah Walker from the early 2000s.
Additional information
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Nicole A. Burrowes
Nicole A. Burrowes is an Assistant Professor in the African and African Diaspora Studies Department at the University of Texas at Austin. Beyond academia, Nicole draws on an extensive portfolio of experience in community organizing and documentary film.