Matthew T. Rader via Wikimedia Commons
A Black Lives Matter protest in Dallas, Texas, following the police murder of George Floyd.
More than a year after leading the largest social uprising in U.S. history, initially sparked by the police murder of George Floyd, the Black Lives Matter movement is exploring new possibilities of organizing with local activists to directly aid their communities.
At the federal level, Congress has shelved a police reform bill known as the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act, which passed the U.S. House of Representatives in March after bipartisan negotiations broke down. The latest setback came after Republican Senator Tommy Tuberville, of Alabama, filed an amendment calling for federal funding to be pulled from any city council that attempts to defund their police departments.
Even after protests slowed down, Brown said the movement had changed the conversation about policing in Texas.
The national conservative backlash was already visible in states such as Texas, where, coincidentally, George Floyd grew up. In June 2020, Governor Greg Abbott made a public commitment to Floyd’s family “to ensure we never have anything like this ever occur in the state of Texas.” Abbott even suggested that the state might pass a version of the George Floyd Act “to make sure that we prevent police brutality like this from happening in the future in Texas.”
But a year later, the Texas state legislature passed HB 1900, which penalizes cities for defunding their police departments. Under this law, the governor’s office can reallocate state sales tax revenue from cities with a population greater than 250,000 to the Department of Public Safety if the city adopts a budget for police spending that is lower than the previous year’s allocation.
And yet, amid the passing of HB 1900, the activists who mobilized for a world without police haven’t backed down.
In 2020, Azreal, whose last name is omitted by request for privacy reasons, was working at the George W. Bush Presidential Library in Dallas. When they heard about the BLM protests, they didn’t think much of it, at first, and brought a friend’s child along with them.
Little did they know that the “entire downtown Dallas would be barricaded and blocked off,” Azreal recalls, remembering the sight of police tear gassing the crowd.
Afterward, Azreal began leading marches and holding educational events under the name “People Against the System.” Their goal was to bring people together to learn about policing, abolition, and state-sanctioned violence by agencies such as U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
The growing movement took over streets in the city for 100 consecutive days, and in June 2020, Dallas City Council members signed a memo asking City Manager T.C. Broadnax to reallocate city funds for public safety to community social services. In September 2020, Broadnax signed a budget with a $7 million cut to overtime pay for police officers, but a nearly $8 million increase to the total police budget.
Despite the setback, Azreal says that people continued turning out “because there’s nothing else that you can do in a pandemic.”
In June of last year, images of protesters injured by police “non-lethal” munitions were being widely circulated on social media. Cindy Folefack, a first-year medical student at the University of California San Francisco, realized when she was a senior at University of Texas at Dallas that if a similar injury had happened to her, she would have been left unable to pay her medical bills.
“I don’t have the money to lose an eye right now,” Folefack remembers thinking.
Spurred by the financial needs of the young activists on the street, she co-founded an organization called the Activist Medical Fund to provide mutual aid to injured activists. “There are probably tons of people who are getting injured at these protests and can’t afford care,” she says.
Similarly, Tramonica Brown had been aware of the Black Lives Matter movement since Trayvon Martin’s murder in 2012; but after protests broke out in the wake of George Floyd’s murder in May 2020, she founded Not My Son DFW, which does community cleanups, voter registration drives, food and gift drives, career training, and rapid rehousing of families.
Even after protests slowed down, Brown said the movement had changed the conversation about policing in Texas.
But it was also obvious that the state refused to budge on protester demands; HB 1900, for example, was first filed in March 2021. Still, community organizations like Not My Son continue to imagine a community-focused future where black communities are represented by Black leaders with anti-carceral visions of change and funding for social services is increased.
Since its founding in 2020, the Activist Medical Fund has raised about $20,000, with the first $10,000 coming within the first two months, Folefack says. But while some organizations are still doing neighborhood cleanups and rehousing efforts, others, like the Activist Medical Fund, are now shuttering.
“The donations slowed down, and recently, our accounts are empty, so we’re going to have to shut the fund down,” Folefack says.
Brown says that grassroots activists helped to get President Joe Biden elected, hoping that the George Floyd Act would become law. With that bill shelved, Brown believes it’s now extremely important for Black people to pursue community alternatives.