Speaker at WSU discusses race and activism

The Foley Speaker’s Room at Washington State University was crowded to excess Thursday, as students, faculty and community members gathered to hear community organizer and activist Charlene Carruthers discuss the Black Lives Matter movement.

The event was part of the Foley Institute’s Coffee and Politics series.

Carruthers, who said she has been an organizer and activist for the past 12 years, discussed the experiences in her adult life that led to her current mission with the movement and what should happen next.

“It was actually when I was a first-year student in college that I got the opportunity to go study in South Africa,” she said. “It blew my little mind. I was learning for the first time what it is to be black in an international context.”

That new knowledge, in combination with her life in Chicago – which she described as a “deeply segregated city” – inspired her to get involved.

“I knew what was still happening to black people and I wanted to do something about it,” she said.

Carruthers said people connect recent events to the creation of the Black Lives Matter movement.

“A lot of people say this movement era began in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. … Some people mark it by the killing of Trayvon Martin by George Zimmerman. Some folks start it Aug. 9, 2014” (the day of Michael Brown’s death in Ferguson, Mo.).

For Carruthers, none of those dates marks the movement’s beginnings.

“For me the movement for black liberation started the first moment an enslaved African was forced to a land outside of their home,” she said.

The beginning of her own organization, Black Youth Project 100, was publicly launched Saturday, July 13, 2013, the same day George Zimmerman was found not guilty of the murder of Trayvon Martin.

“The date had been set for a year,” she said. “I don’t believe in coincidences.”

While Carruthers doesn’t call any of the recent dates the beginning of the current movement for black lives, they are meaningful.

“All of these moments lead up to many, many, many moments, and I don’t even know what’s going to happen next,” she said.

Carruthers said she hears a good deal about the importance of peaceful protests, but she maintains the nonviolent practices her group and others employ cannot be effective if authorities don’t follow the same guidelines.

“The most violent entity in this land is the state,” she said. “We cannot have any conversation about nonviolence if we’re not starting with the violence the state participates in.”

Carruthers said as groups move forward in 2017, they need to work hard to increase their numbers, and white activists wanting to help will have quite a bit of work to do.

“You all have a lot of cousins to collect,” she said.

Activists are also moving into territory where it’s uncertain what they will be up against, but it won’t be easy, Carruthers said.

“(It) is wild, and we’re going to lose quite a bit,” she said.