Shaun King - Make Change ; How to Fight Injustice, Dismantle Systemic Oppression, and Own Our Future

Copyright 2020 by Shaun King

All rights reserved

For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to or to Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, 3 Park Avenue, 19th Floor, New York, New York 10016.

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available.

ISBN 978-0-358-04800-8 (hardcover)

ISBN 978-0-358-04801-5 (ebook)

Cover design by Christopher Moisan

v1.0720

To Zayah, Savannah, EZ, Kendi, Tae, and my dear RaiI love each of you so very much. Thanks for enduring all it took for this book to be written with nothing but endless love, patience, and encouragement.

Change never comes from the top downit comes from the bottom on up. I first learned that lesson generations ago. I was just nineteen years old when I packed up to move out of Brooklyn to attend college at the University of Chicago. It was 1960, and the Civil Rights movement was growing all over the country. People were organizing in courageous ways against the despicable racism and bigotry that had become normalized in the United States.

At the University of Chicago, I became the chairman of the university chapter of CORE (Congress of Racial Equality), merged our group with SNCC (Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee), and helped lead the very first sit-in on our campus against segregated student housing that was forcing my African American sisters and brothers to live in substandard conditions. Following our protests, the university formed a commission to address the problem and, in 1963, officially ended segregated student housing once and for all.

We didnt stop there. All over Chicago, while hundreds of classrooms at predominantly white public schools sat completely empty, young Black children were forced to go to class in overcrowded, dilapidated trailers. They were freezing cold during the winter and scorching hot in the sweltering Chicago summers. And so we organized. We chained ourselves to one another and put our bodies in front of the bulldozers standing by, ready to install more trailers for Black children. We were arrested and thrown in jail.

The problem of police brutality is not new. We organized against it when I was a student and blanketed the city with flyers demanding that it end. I remember the police coming right behind us and taking the flyers down as soon as we put them up. I was still a student when I became an organizer for the United Packinghouse Workers of America. They were early supporters of the courageous Montgomery Bus Boycott and had Dr. King as the keynote speaker at their annual convention in 1962. It was then, nearly sixty years ago, that I first truly understood that civil rights and workers rights were one and the same.

During my life in public service, I have always believed that nothing is more powerful than the power of organizing. Our opponents have organized money, but organized money can be defeated by organized peopleand this book is about how we can all throw our lives into organizing to make this world a better place together. Shaun understands that change does not just happen out of thin air. Its made. Its crafted. Its organized. Its fought for. And when we fight together, we win.

Its not about me. Its not about Shaun. Its about us. If we are going to confront the reality that the United States incarcerates more people than any country in the history of the world, we must organize. If we are going to confront the reality that climate scientists are telling us that we have only a few years left to change the direction of our climate crisis, we must organize for a Green New Deal. The United States is the wealthiest country in the world, but on any given night, at least 553,000 men, women, and children are homeless and sleeping on our streets, 30 million people dont have health insurance, and 44 million Americans are drowning in student loan debt. Greed and corruption put us here, but we can organize so that every single American is housed, is insured, has their student loan debt forgiven, and is able to attend college for free. I truly believe we can do all of those things.

Brothers and sisters: We are in a time that can often feel frightening, but I am convinced that together we will not only endure it, but come through it better than we are today. Shaun and I still have hope in our future because we know that when ordinary people stand together and fight for justice, anything is possible.

Not only has Shaun helped organize on behalf of my campaigns, but together we have organized to elect brave new district attorneys. We have organized to support teachers and workers unions who went on strike for better wages and benefits. We have organized to hold corporations and billionaires accountable to pay their workers a living wage. And through organizing, we have won great victories that we can and must build upon.

But now we need you. Join us. Or start your own cause or campaign, and well join you.

Of course, the naysayers, the corporate elite, and the billionaire class will try to deter and demoralize us, but we cannot let them. There is too much on the line for us to back down. We must commit ourselves to the hard work of organizingand heres the good news: if we stand together, our nations history tells us that there is nothing that we cannot accomplish.

Bernie Sanders

It was a beautiful, cloudless Friday morning in July of 2014. I could smell the ocean and hear the soothing sounds of its waves crashing as I took the first step out of my beat-up Hyundai and slammed the door shut. It was about 7 a.m., and Santa Monica was quiet. Rush-hour traffic in Los Angeles could be maddening, so I had left home super early that morning to beat the snarled highways and make my way to the offices of Global Green, an international environmental organization where I served as the director of communications. I was tempted, as I often was, to walk the extra block to the Pacific Coast Highway and stare out at the blue water that stretched as far as my eyes could see. Something about the ocean centers me. Seeing it never gets old. But I was behind on several tasks at work, and the mounting pressure of deadlines overruled my inclination to be contemplative that morning, so I made my way inside.

The job was a major change of pace for me after years of spearheading my own philanthropic projects. I had become known in charity circles for my use of social media and email listservs to build awareness and raise funds for causes, but doing it for an organization like Global Green was a new challenge, bringing me into a more corporate setting. As I climbed the steps to our cushy second-floor office, I had no expectation that this would be the day that would change the entire course of my life. Everything about it felt just like the day before, and the day before that, and the day before that. Routine. But as I reflect back on that day, and over my forty years on earth, I see my life as split in two, existing one particular way before that Friday and in an altogether different way after it.

For nearly a decade, Global Green had partnered with Vanity Fair to host its annual Oscars gala. The entire budget for the organization hinged on the success of the event. That morning, I organized our donor database, mundane but necessary work that consisted of cutting and pasting and entering data for hundreds of donors. As the hours crept along and my colleagues filed in, I received a push notification on my phone from a former classmate of mine from Morehouse, where I had attended college fifteen years earlier. It was a Facebook message.

Shaun, my friend wrote. Somebody posted something horrible on YouTube, man. The police are harassing this middle-aged brother on the street corner in New York and the dude is just begging them to leave him alone. He tells them over and over that he didnt do anything. The man wasnt armed. He wasnt violent. None of that. And all of a sudden, this plainclothes cop comes up behind him and starts choking the shit out of him, like UFC rear-naked-choke style. The cop chokes the man while the brother was still standing upthen wrestles him to the ground and continues choking him. And Shaunyou can hear the man yell out over and over and over again, I cant breatheI cant breathe. He says it a dozen times. And the guy dies right there on the sidewalk, man.