Patrisse Cullors Quotes
I have been arrested several times protesting.
Cullors, Patrisse, and asha bandele. When They Call You a Terrorist: A Black Lives Matter Memoir. St. Martin's Press, 2018.
The two were in the Dublin suburbs when others seized the Dublin Post Office and began the Easter Uprising without their knowledge. They were desperate to get to Downtown Dublin and have a role in the activities and get arrested with the more militant leaders.
This quotation illustrates a new tactic adopted by the Immigration Reform Movement (FIRM) in 2014. They trained very young children (with their parents permission) in how to handle themselves in a protest when the police arrive and tell them to disperse. By having children as young as 11 protesting shutting down streets in Washington so that they would get arrested. Coping with young children committing civil disobedience was something the police were not used to and involved much more complex procedures than arresting adult demonstrators. In addition, the sight of such young children being arrested for civil disobedience attracted much attention from the media, thereby publicizing the immigration issue. Elias and his mother were both U. S. citizens. In 2006 Elias’s father, an undocumented Mexican immigrant, returned to Mexico to apply for a visa to visit his wife and son. He was denied, so he crossed the border without papers. He was deported from the family home in 2008 and Elias and his mother had not seen him since then. Under the then existing immigration rules and laws, even a person whose spouse and children were U. S. citizens residing in America, could not even get a visa to visit them much less get citizenship. The Obama administration’s “family friendly” policies collapsed with immigration where the policies broke up otherwise intact families.
This quotation is used by the moderate Egyptians and other moderate Arab leaders as well as Israelis and other experts in combating Islamic Fundamentalism to illustrate the thinking process of the Muslim fundamentalist terrorist leader. They are more than willing to sacrifice those they lead (though rarely themselves) if they think that something is to be gained. But if there is nothing to be gained, their “moral” responsibility requires not “wasting” their followers’ lives. Therefore, the way these experts believe they should deal with the radicals is to face them with overwhelming force (a variant of the Powell Doctrine) and never concede anything or let them gain anything from violence. A single concession makes the terrorism, sacrifice and violence worthwhile, but if there is no gain, the leader has wasted the lives of his followers and is less likely to initiate another attack.
He was trying to justify the arrest, torture and mistreatment of 15 trade union activists in Zimbabwe, and in the process showed himself for the brutal dictator that he had become.
This quotation was documented by an FBI illegal wiretap of King and his associates. The illegal wiretap had been insisted upon by FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover who was a racist and somewhat of a paranoid about communists. However, Attorney General, Robert F. Kennedy personally approved the illegal wiretap.
Patrisse Cullors is an American artist and activist and a co-founder of the Black Lives Matter movement. Cullors created the #BlackLivesMatter hashtag in 2013 and has written and spoken widely about the movement. Other topics on which Cullors advocates include prison abolition in Los Angeles and LGBTQ rights. Cullors integrates ideas from critical theory, as well as social movements around the world, in her activism. She is the author of When They Call You a Terrorist: A Black Lives Matter Memoir.
