Black Lives Matter co-founder Patrisse Khan-Cullors is busy promoting her best-selling book When They Call You a Terrorist: A Story of Black Lives Matter and the Power to Change the World, recently sat down with Elle for an interview.
During the sitdown, Khan-Cullors went into depth about the literary offering and the inspiration behind it. Khan-Cullors used her old journals as fodder for the book.
“I’m looking at my journal entries as an adult and really loving on myself. I was a very intense kid, and I took anything social justice-related very seriously,” she told the publication.
“There were things I wrote that I was like, Oh my god. I can’t believe this is what I was thinking as a young person. I was already talking about police brutality and reflecting on police terror and the impact it was having on my community. There’s literally a journal entry in the book that says, “Police don’t keep us safe,” and 20 years later I’m having the same conversation.”
Kahn-Cullors says she wants young people to know that her activism began when she was a youth. She says she would have loved to have had a book like hers to read when she was a youngster. The recent adaptation for young readers has a forward by Angela Davis.
“I would have loved this book as a young person. Honestly, I would have felt so seen. I would have felt so taken care of, and I would have been reminded that what I’d been going through as a young person isn’t my fault and there’s something you can do about it beyond just pulling yourself up by your bootstraps,” she explained. “You can join organizations. You can get involved. You can be a volunteer. You can show up to transform the very conditions you’ve been living in.”
Click here to read the full interview.
