“This is a moment that is going to be looked back on 50 years from now, 100 years from now, and what is going to be said of us is how we came out of this moment,” says M4BL organizer M Adams. In this episode of “Movement Memos,” host Kelly Hayes talks with Adams and community organizer Montague Simmons about the last decade of Black-led organizing, the state of movements against police violence, and where prison and police abolitionists should go from here.

Music by Son Monarcas, HATAMITSUNAMI & Guustavv

Note: This a rush transcript and has been lightly edited for clarity. Copy may not be in its final form.

Kelly Hayes: Welcome to “Movement Memos,” a Truthout podcast about organizing, solidarity and the work of making change. I’m your host, writer and organizer Kelly Hayes. Last month, activists and organizers in Ferguson and St. Louis marked the 10-year anniversary of the murder of Mike Brown, who was gunned down by a police officer, and the uprising that followed. In the years since Mike Brown’s death, Black organizers have challenged police violence, targeted police budgets, created new community safety projects and built solidarity across movements. In spite of those efforts, police killed a record number of people in 2023, and officials have doubled down on police budgets in many municipalities, and at the federal level. With the Democratic Party lurching further to the right, this feels like an important moment to take stock of what movements against police violence have endured and accomplished over the last decade, and to talk about where police and prison abolitionists should go from here. Today, we will be hearing from M Adams and Montague Simmons. M Adams is a community organizer and the movement infrastructure executive with the Movement for Black Lives (M4BL). M Adams has been a leader in Wisconsin politics as the Co-Executive Emeritus of Freedom, Inc., and the Take Back the Land Movement. Montague Simmons is a community organizer and human rights activist based in St. Louis. As director of strategic partnerships for the Movement for Black Lives, Montague is responsible for expanding movement relationships across M4BL’s broader movement goals.

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[musical interlude]

KH: Montague and M, welcome to “Movement Memos.”

Montague Simmons: Thank you, Kelly. Good to be with you.

M Adams: Thank you. I’m excited to be here.

KH: Can the two of you introduce yourselves and tell the audience a bit about your work?

MA: Sure thing. My name is M Adams, just the letter M, and I use all gender pronouns said respectfully, and I’m one of the co-executive directors of the Movement for Black Lives.

MS: My name is Montague Simmons, I use he/him pronouns, and I direct strategic partnerships for the M4BL ecosystem. And I’m born and raised in St. Louis.

KH: Well, so glad to have you both on the show. In August, protesters in Ferguson marked the tenth anniversary of Mike Brown’s murder and the uprisings that followed. In the decade since Mike Brown’s death, we have seen waves of mobilization around police brutality, including the uprisings of 2020. In spite of heightened awareness of police killings, and aggressive organizing in Black communities, at least 1,232 were killed by US police in 2023, making it the deadliest year for victims of police violence in over a decade. Montague, in the local context of Ferguson and St. Louis, can you talk about what’s changed since Mike Brown’s death, and how police and public officials have escalated the violence of policing over the last ten years?

MS: So in 2014, in the wake of the uprisings, there was actually a significant response, both to the scale of uprisings locally, but I think even more so to the spotlight that was placed on the city nationally. A lot of questions came or I think governance to wrestle with, but also movement literally took advantage of the moment. Initially, just before, in August 2014, forces on the ground had been fighting just for basic things like a civilian oversight board and for more transparency. They were able to within, I want to say, 12 to 18 months actually win a civilian oversight board in the city of St. Louis. But within the municipalities surrounding Ferguson, in St. Louis County, there was not as much significant transformation. What we did see were in some of those municipalities layers of consolidation.

And we also saw, I’ll say for a period [of time], there was less aggressive policing, meaning during the ’90s and well before that and the 2000s, you literally would have ongoing police interactions, whether they’re pulling you over in stops, but also doing checks to verify insurance, checks to verify sobriety, and we saw a decline in that type of activity. But what also emerged during that period on the movement side was a fight in courts around the way folks had actually been treated, a fight around holding people just for inability to pay bail. And we actually were able to, in some places, lessen the amount of people that had actually been incarcerated. But what I’ll say, right now, I think we are in a period of assessment around what’s actually shifted in the decade because some of what’s also been noticed is the police have actually… I don’t want to make a claim that we can’t fully track, but we’ve noticed a pattern of less or different kinds of responses from police.

And what I would assess from that is that that is part of framing a narrative that violence has increased as a result of the work that we’ve been doing since the uprisings in 2014. I think organizers and attorneys, analysts, policy makers have actually been trying to reach for data to verify what’s real. But what we know is in the large scope, crime has actually continued to go down. The people who’ve honestly been affected and been working with our bail programs show up whether there’s money, whether there’s actually bail or not, in high numbers.

But there is still a dominant narrative that police are directly connected to safety that is still under deep contention. And as a result of that, we’ve seen more funds go into policing and increasing recruitment and different weapons and, what do I want to call it? Deployments. Like what we’re seeing now in Atlanta, this being stood up in Cop City. We’re seeing models like that appear around the country and those things feel like a direct response to the demand that came out of Ferguson in 2014 around demilitarization of the police and re-prioritization of those funds.

KH: M, what do you feel has changed at a national level, over the last ten years?

MA: I think that’s an interesting question to ask: well, what exactly is different, or what really changed in the last 10 years? In some ways a lot of things changed. The public consciousness and broader narrative was challenged and in some ways shifted. So you had, prior to 2014, abolition was not a popular idea. It was not a popular concept. Most folks didn’t discuss it, didn’t know what it meant. And the tenants of policing or questioning the legitimacy of policing was still seen as a more fringe issue despite the important organizing and abolitionist work that had been happening for decades.

Due to the uprisings of 2014, and even more so with the uprisings in 2020 related to the murder of Black people by the police, that ideological shift happened in many ways. You had everyday people at home, at kitchen tables discussing should we actually defund them? Well, what really is the point of policing? Are police actually kind or good to Black people? And you have people from all different identities, socioeconomic statuses, experiences, asking those questions. And that’s huge. You don’t usually see that kind of ideological shift happen so quickly. It usually takes a generation or generations to create that kind of ideological shift. And that culturally felt different in terms of being able to interact with other institutions and organizations who were beginning to prioritize or appearing to prioritize the acknowledgement of the carceral state as violent, as anti-Black, as something that needed to be abolished.

What is also different is there was a proliferation of Black organizing and Black organizations. Prior to 2014, there were not as many Black organizations. And in fact, most Black-led organizing work had to really fall under the banner of people of color as there wasn’t specific resources, time, attention given specifically to Black people. And after 2014, you saw very clearly initiatives that focused on the Black community organizations that are dedicated to the Black community and Black leadership running and governing those organizations. And so there was, I can speak for the Movement for Black Lives… dozens of organizations have been created between 2014 and now. And that creates a real shift in local communities, in the national landscape, et cetera. So in some ways we’re on very different terrain.

The reason why that question is interesting is, the other side of that is in some ways a lot of things haven’t changed at all. I think we have done a lot of work around a cultural shift and narrative power building and popularizing the concept. So we can call on NBA, NFL, folks taking knees in solidarity with the struggle on the ground. We can look at academic institutions that have dedicated resources to Black studies or Black leadership advancing scholarship in this area. We can look at public health institutions that talk more focusedly about social determinants of health of Black people. So we’ve had impact.

But then if we do a measurement of, well, how has that really transformed to Black communities having more power and Black communities being in a greater position to self-determine what actually happens to us, not a lot has actually shifted. And so we still have a lot of work to do. And I want to be clear, that shift didn’t happen around power, not because we took our work any less serious or that we didn’t fight hard for it. It is because the opposition and the dominant narrative and power structures of the United States and the world are based upon white supremacy, gendered, racial capitalism and patriarchy.

KH: Montague, how has Black organizing changed in Ferguson and St. Louis over the last ten years? What are the organizers in those communities up against in 2024?

MS: Since 2014, honestly, Black organizing has actually transformed in many ways. Before 2014, on one hand, there were only a handful of organizations who were around to respond to issues specifically around police violence and issues of divestment. But the other thing around that reality was there was little to no investment in those organizations. August 9th changed that dramatically in that there was actually a courageous front of folks who actually did make an effort to support some of the organizing work, not only in terms of philanthropy, but people began to donate in different ways. In the wake of Ferguson, a very new ecosystem of organizations came to life and began to work strategically together, many of them moving directly in a divestment framework. And in doing so, were able to build the power, on one hand not only to respond directly to police violence as it continued, but even specifically to close, say, the jail in St. Louis city, The Workhouse, which everyone knew for a long time was a dungeon, and it had actually been a 40-year campaign. A constellation of organizations took that on from different vantage points of both organizing, litigation, and then around both bail and supporting clients to make the case that not only was it inhumane to hold these people, but it was unwarranted because most of the folks in the jail were pre-trial.

In addition to that, part of what we’ve seen is more capacity on the ground. I think so many people have actually been inspired by the uprising, that many of the folks who at the time may have either been students, or in many cases just witnesses in the community, were actually transformed and activated. Some of them went on to do organizing, like we see in the case of specifically Kayla Reed of Action St. Louis, other folks stepped into different arenas. Some of the folks I can think of would be Rasheen Aldridge, who’s currently an Aldermen in the city, Alisha Sonnier is actually on the St. Louis City School Board, and........

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