When They Call You a Terrorist

When They Call You a Terrorist is a nonfiction memoir published in 2018 by the American authors and activists Patrisse Khan-Cullors and asha bandele. Subtitled A Black Lives Matter Memoir, the book chronicles Cullors’s early life in Los Angeles and her role in cofounding Black Lives Matter, a decentralized racial justice movement established after George Zimmerman’s acquittal in the Trayvon Martin shooting. The book’s title refers to accusations of terrorism lobbed at Cullors and her fellow Black Lives Matter leaders, despite the authors’ contention that the real terrorists are those who inflict pain and suffering against Black men and women with the power afforded to them by the state.

This study guide refers to the 2018 edition published by St. Martin’s Press.

Plot Summary

In 2016, after Micah Johnson kills five police officers during a racial justice protest in Dallas, an online petition seeking to label Black Lives Matter a terrorist organization garners over 100,000 signatures. Cullors points out that Johnson was not a member of any Black Lives Matter chapters, nor was the protest in question organized by Black Lives Matter. Cullors traces contemporary efforts to discredit Black Lives Matter as terrorists to the FBI’s aggressive COINTELPRO operations targeting civil rights groups, feminist organizations, and anti-Vietnam War demonstrators in the 1960s and 1970s.