Executive Director of the African American Roundtable in Milwaukee unpacks their journey from local reform work to a national focus on the prison abolition movement.
In April 2014, I witnessed firsthand the ways that white fear, hate and systemic power enable police to end the lives of Black people in our country with impunity. On April 30, 2014, Dontre Hamilton was shot 14 times and murdered by a cop in downtown Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Little did I know that through this act of violence, my life would also take a turn.
I was watching the evening news after work one day and saw that Dontre’s family was hosting a rally at Red Arrow Park where he was murdered. Witnessing the anguish, sadness, and disgust of Dontre’s mother Maria, and brothers Nate and Damieon, alongside our community, was gut-wrenching. It was as if I was pulled from my couch and led to the streets to join them. Little did I know that Dontre’s death would lead me straight to my purpose. As I thought of my own child, nieces, and nephews, I decided to join them. After the rally that day, I went looking for his family and met Ms. Maria Hamilton, Dontre’s mother, and his brothers Nate Hamilton and Dameion Perkins. I told them, “I’m not sure what I can do to help, but I’m here.”
From that point on, they embraced me alongside countless others who answered the call in that moment to support and fight for police reform and police accountability under the name Coalition for Justice. The Coalition for Justice fought for many changes over the next couple of years that I now know to be reformist ideas and policies, like body cameras and community policing, which, at the time, felt like our best opportunity to ensure nobody else was killed by police.
We connected with many community-led organizations during our fight including the African American Roundtable (AART). During that time another Black man, Syville Smith, was murdered by the Milwaukee Police Department (MPD) and caused a major uprising in Milwaukee’s Sherman Park area.
During the day I was the office manager at a nonprofit I worked for, and after 5 p.m. and on the weekends I was learning the ins and outs of grassroots organizing, exposing the violent systems that oppress and kill countless people in our communities, and advocating for justice for Dontre through police reform efforts. Eventually, my commitment and activism led me to co-chairing AART in 2016. I became director of AART in 2017, and although I didn’t feel prepared to be a director or that I was closest to the current conditions, I leaned in and stretched myself to lead.
That year another Black man, Adam Trammell, was tased 18 times and murdered by West Milwaukee police. Then, that same summer, a Black teen, Terry Williams, was shot in the head by a Milwaukee County sheriff at the city’s lakefront. It didn’t stop in 2017. Donte D. Shannon, another Black man, was murdered by cops in Racine, WI. I continued to see Black men murdered by police, and I knew then something had to change, especially after being introduced to the Milwaukee city budget and seeing that policing was the biggest line item in our city’s budget. Even now in 2024, our community experienced yet another heartbreak and Black man murdered by police when the Republican National Convention and 4,000 non-Milwaukee law enforcement officers convened on our city, leaving behind a trail of tears. Five Columbus, OH police officers murdered Samuel Sharpe, Jr., a Black unhoused man who lived outside of the security zone.
In 2017 AART convened a strategy session led by M Adams, former co-director of Freedom, Inc. in Madison, and now with Movement for Black Lives, with several of AART’s core members. M walked us through a spectrogram activity and asked us many questions like, “Do you think more Black police in Milwaukee would improve things?” or “Would having body cameras reduce police violence?” Our answers were split. Some of us still believed that police could be reformed—that we could change policy and create more equitable policing. Then there were those of us who were over police reforms and accountability efforts and, after years of working towards reforms, we realized that reforms were not going to change the violent nature of policing.
While all of us were not abolitionists at the time, one thing that we agreed on was that the police are receiving too much money. After learning Milwaukee police received close to 45% of our general operating budget each year, we knew it was time to create spaces for our people to think about and imagine, not about whether or not police needed to exist, but what our communities needed to truly thrive and be safe. On Juneteenth 2019 we launched LiberateMKE, a campaign to divest from Milwaukee Police Department and invest in neighborhoods and community programs.
We took time to canvass our neighbors, hold community meetings and invite people to imagine, verbalize, and even sketch out what their communities would look like if their needs were met. People talked about access to fresh food, family sustaining jobs, green space, opportunities for young people, but I never remember hearing many people at all say or draw sketches of communities with police. We were encouraged to see our communities and see the possibilities of what a world could look like with no police. It was a game changer for our city and allowed us to educate and organize hundreds of residents to fight for resources to support what helps keep neighbors safe, like resources for youth employment, affordable, quality housing, and violence prevention.
Since 2019 we have been raising awareness about the inequities of Milwaukee’s city budget, running budget campaigns, building organizational infrastructure, organizing and strengthening our organizing community, and fighting for tangible investments to shift the trajectory of our community.
This journey led me right down the path of becoming an abolitionist. This was not a journey I was on alone. So many others have joined AART along our abolition journey with questions, curiosities, theories, and, most of all, one another. I’ve learned so many lessons on my journey.
Here are six I’d like to share:
-M Adams taught me years ago that our movements need more people, and building a strong base around our values was key. In Milwaukee, we needed to build a multigenerational political home for Black people. We simply could not absorb the amount of people who we activated in 2020, because we didn’t have the infrastructure. We only had three paid staffers in 2020, and most of our organizing work was done through coalitions. We did not have a base. While we know the power coalitions can have, we also know coalition work is hard. In Coalition Politics: Turning the Century, Bernice Reagon Johnson said, “You don’t get fed a lot in coalition.” We were not getting fed, and over the course of 2020 and 2021, we experienced the exhaustion that comes from maintaining a coalition.
Also, with Wisconsin being a swing state, electoral politics were always ongoing and made sustaining and maintaining issue-based coalitions even harder. Time, capacity, money are all swallowed up into the next election cycle. Learning from organizations like Black Youth Project 100 (BYP100), Dream Defenders, and Southerners on New Ground (SONG), we launched a membership program in 2022 to grow our base and create more leaders. As we bring in new members, part of our orientation is around our values. We simply ask “that folks are willing to be transformed in the service of the work,” as Mary Hooks said in her Mandate for Black People. That question allows us to go on a journey together of learning and unlearning.
The nonprofit industrial complex structures and funding cannot be the main source of our long-term sustainability. Black-led abolitionist organizations and movements are different from other social organizations and movements in several ways. Many of our organizations tend to be smaller in size and have less revenue than our counterparts. Our work is also far more dangerous, especially when taking on an inherently evil and powerful entity like policing. In Wisconsin, funders typically prioritize elections. We haven’t delved much into electoral politics, because we refuse to bow to the demands of funding that fuel cycles of work centered around elections, rather than Black people’s liberation.
Backlash is real, and our organizing and path to powerbuilding is weakened when we do not prepare for it. After George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and other Black and brown folks were killed in 2020 during the uprisings and the onslaught of COVID-19, elected officials and foundations lived in the moment. After the protests ended, they went back to the status quo and, in some cases, worse and more violent stances. In Wisconsin since 2020, we have seen an increase in police funding on the state and city level. Most recently, the state passed a bill that punishes any city that cuts police and forces Milwaukee Public Schools to add police back to the classrooms. These bills are in response to our organizing and highlight the fact that we haven’t built enough power to sustain our wins. This backlash hasn’t limited our demands but sharpened our organizing. We now recognize that we are going to have to win multiple times over the years to ensure our wins are enacted.
While building and organizing campaigns, you must not forget infrastructure, and having well-defined organizational vision and values are just as important. Over a two-year period, we have taken time to establish and define our vision and values and, more importantly, describe how we want to practice them as a staff alongside our board using the In It Together Toolkit that Interrupting Criminalization and DragonflyPartners co-authored. This process helped us strengthen relationships and grow in our alignment. We also created a three-year strategic plan, which is something we hadn’t done before. In times where the pace of the work seems to be increasing, establishing our three-year plan gives us direction and clarity on what our work is. Having a plan will keep us focused on when to say yes, no and not at this time.
Deepen your skills and load your toolbelt with learning and lessons to support you and your people around conflict and accountability. Conflict happens in our movements, but we have to be able to navigate and deal with conflict. AART was not exempt from this and has had to navigate conflict within our work and community. When we managed to move through conflict, we examined ourselves and admitted we probably caused some of it, recognized we experienced harm and realized we weren’t as well-equipped to move through it as we thought. From this we saw an opportunity to repair the harm, participate in possible restorative work, and get training and education to support us when conflict arose again. Thereafter, AART contracted Weyam Ghadbian, who led us through a four-part Conflict Transformation Workshop & Mapping Series, where we learned to identify our conflict habits and practices to interrupt them. This is ongoing work that not everybody is ready to engage in, but it’s the necessary work to maintain relationships in this work, mitigate conflict and reduce harm.
Consensus decision-making is slower but useful, and AART uses this process internally and externally. As an organization we have access to people and systems where we can speak up and speak out against things that don’t support a thriving community. We recognize Black people are not a monolith group of people, and AART staff shouldn’t be the only voices speaking up about what we need. Externally, we create processes and provide tools to residents to ensure they have the access we have so that they can show up and speak up for themselves. Creating space for these processes can take more time, but it’s necessary in the work to build power and broaden our base of voices. Making space for deeper curiosities, transparency and additional conversations made for a much slower but productive process that produced lessons that will support future hiring processes.
I invite you to reflect on these themes I’ve shared and consider the following questions that could be useful in your work of transforming your organizations and communities and building what’s necessary for them to thrive.
- What does your organization need to pause or sunset in order to build what it really needs to support reaping a harvest that will transform the communities you serve?
- What is needed in order to develop and sustain a culture that prioritizes and supports deep, individual self-work? What benefits can you name that our movements would see when we actually “transform in service of the work?”
- Does your organization need to prioritize focusing more of your energy on what it will take to not only expand your base, but to sustain your base?
- Have you clearly named and defined your values? What does it look like to be in and out of practice of those values? How do you move through misalignment of your values?
- What suffers when we don’t have conflict and accountability practices and frameworks in place? How can we make space to support establishing the practices and framework within our organizations?
The time is now for us to rise up in every community across the country and demand what we deserve–liberated, full lives, communities that are invested in, and our own self-determination. Our liberation is intertwined, because, as Fannie Lou Hamer taught us, “Nobody’s free until everybody’s free.”
