S1E4: Mary Hooks & Kate Shapiro on ending bail in ATL & the Black Mama’s Bail Outs

What does it mean to look at an issue like “bail” and “the criminalizaton of LGBTQ people” through the lens of a campaigner? That was the question for Southerners on New Ground in the lead-up to launching their Free From Fear campaign framework, which they used to pilot successful campaigns to end wealth-based incarceration in the City of Atlanta - which reduced the jail population by over 90% - and inspired the Black Mama’s Bail Outs tactic that has since been replicated all over the United States.  

In this episode, we’ll hear about how they realized they were “doing the most” in their first campaign in Durham, NC ( 13:44), organizing around ‘quality of life’ vs life or death issues (15:30), how agitation from organizers in Ferguson encouraged them to start their own campaign in Atlanta (19:22), ‘glitter bombing’ a judge during a campaign against fines and fees (25:55), landing on two regional demands via a debate between SONG members (35:06), developing a new tactic to help SONG chapters test campaign work and learn more about bail (35:49), how campaign work makes a different kind of community-building possible (1:04:10), the importance of making campaigns “a street fight” (58:21) on grassroots organizers’ terms and avoiding getting “out-paced” by advocates and attorneys (52:06). 

Mary Hooks is a Black, lesbian, feminist, mother and Field Secretary on the field team for the Movement for Black Lives. Mary is the former co-director of Southerners on New Ground (SONG). Mary joined SONG as a member in 2009 and began organizing with the organization in 2010. Growing up in a family that migrated from Mississippi to the Midwest, Mary’s commitment to liberation is rooted in her experiences and the impacts of the War on Drugs on her community.

Kate Shapiro was born in Durham, North Carolina, and raised in Atlanta, Georgia where she still lives with her daughter. She has had the great honor to work in the service of US Southern freedom movements for gender, sexual, racial and economic justice for the last 16+ years. She is a grassroots organizer, trainer, popular educator and strategist. She has worked at Women’s March since 2020 and was on staff at SONG in a variety of roles for 8 years before that.

SONG’s Atlanta campaign team wrote a reflection about the campaign. Kate Shapiro and other SONG leaders also developed the organizing curriculum "We Don't Want to be Stars," which they discuss in the interview.

Check out a writeup for this episode on our website or at The Forge.

Transcript

AWG: Today, we’re going to hear about an organization that has profoundly influenced me as an organizer. About six years ago I founded a grassroots Latine basebuilding organization here in North Carolina, Siembra NC, which did a lot of things that other Latine groups weren’t doing, that helped us build a base and change the conditions for our communities. Our undocumented members raised and distributed tens of thousands of dollars in solidarity funds to families who had experienced ICE detentions. We quickly piloted campaigns when we spotted possible openings, as when we partnered with Black organizers to challenge Democratic sheriffs to change their policies. And we eventually built a power-building muscle, having thousands of conversations with Latine voters to get them to support pro-Black, pro-immigrant candidates. And we made sure to infuse our work with celebrations of Latine culture, that were often queer, and pro-feminist, and culturally working class. 

Probably no organization had as much influence on our choices as organizers for how to wage campaigns, for how to organize differently on new political terrain, and how to integrate a spirit of playful and risk-taking experimentation into our tactics, than Southerners on New Ground. SONG is a multi-racial queer basebuilding and campaigning group that has been around for over 25 years, and watching them grow, and build and take on issues that touched all of our lives in the Southeast, not just those of queer people, has been transformative. 

Today, they’re perhaps best known for kicking off the Black Mama’s Bail Outs tactic, which has actually gone international, inspiring work to abolish bail across the country. 

Today we’ll hear the story of how it came into being. And this particular story has a bunch of twists and turns, unlike others this season which are more straightforward, moving from Point A to Point B over time. 

Mary and Kate share how they zeroed in on the criminalization of queer people, a broad set of life or death issues, to focus their campaigns. They talk about what they learned from their first anti-criminalization campaign in Durham, which at first had dozens of demands. When that didn’t gain traction, they had to back up and rethink their plan. Later on, in Atlanta, they applied those lessons to a different campaign, by slowing down and more methodically using research, direct action and court watching to figure out which policies and which decision makers were responsible for excessive fines and fees being levied on people who had misdemeanor charges. 

We’ll hear about how they developed one tactic, bailouts, which simultaneously released people from jail and used the theory of “show not tell” to knock down the idea that incarceration creates public safety. And they describe how developing a tactic and scouting a local campaign are very different things. 

We’ll hear about how they pivoted to use regional and national uprisings to absorb more people into their campaigns, and how their allegiance to a regional formation with many local chapters forced them to consider campaign demands that could be replicated across the South

And we’ll hear about how they developed a regional campaign framework, Free From Fear, to support their chapters to launch local campaigns using the bailout tactic.  

Mary Hooks is a Black, lesbian, feminist, mother and Field Secretary on the field team for the Movement for Black Lives. Mary is the former co-director of Southerners on New Ground (SONG). Mary joined SONG as a member in 2009 and began organizing with the organization in 2010. 

Kate Shapiro was born in Durham, North Carolina, and raised in Atlanta, Georgia where she still lives with her daughter. She has had the great honor to work in the service of US Southern freedom movements for gender, sexual, racial and economic justice for the last 16+ years. She is a grassroots organizer, trainer, popular educator and strategist. She has worked at Women’s March since 2020 and was on staff at SONG in a variety of roles for 8 years before that.  

Andrew Willis Garcés: Mary Hooks. Kate Shapiro. Very glad to have you here talking Free From Fear campaigns in the south. Can you give us the trailer? If this was a movie, what's this campaign about? What are we about to hear about? 

Kate Shapiro: You're about to hear about intrigue, lust, [laughing] confrontation, glitter, longing, righteous rage, and anger.  We will be talking today about the development of the Free From Fear campaigns at Southerners on New Ground, where we decided as a rowdy band of homosexuals in 2012 to actually build out a whole new apparatus inside of our regional organization so that we could actually, as Paulina Helm-Hernández likes to say, “rip people's eyebrows off and beat them with it”. 

Specifically going after the architects, decision makers, and power holders that are creating policies and cultures that create hostility, death, devastation, and pain in our communities. So we are gonna be taking you through a little bit of our journey. And it's ups and downs of how we were able to do that from Little Rock to Nashville to Atlanta to Durham to Charleston. But we're gonna be zooming in more specifically on the campaign in Atlanta where we live and call home. But giving you a regional overlay so you can remember that our campaign work was much more than just Atlanta.

AWG: This sounds awesome. Since this was 10 years ago, it turns out this is pretty relevant for us in 2022. I can't wait to hear about why you think that is, what are the important lessons that we can draw today. But can you take us back 10 years?  What's the story of this campaign and of y'all coming up with it?

Mary Hooks: This was before I came to SONG, but SONG had developed a five year strategy that included being able to build out the campaign arm inside of SONG to confront power, to use direct action organizing, putting pressure on targets, et cetera, et cetera.

And so some of that work began to be seeded circa around 2011ish. Some raw stallions were brought on part-time to do some of that work and to expand our base in different states, like Alabama and South Carolina, Virginia. And–

KS: You were a raw Stallion.

MH: Yeah, I was a raw Stallion.

KS: She was a raw Stallion.

MH: [laughs] I was!

KS: She was a Raw Stallion ten years ago. [laughs]

MH: [laughs] I didn’t know shit honey! In these streets confused and thirsty to get free. 

MH: The aim was to be able to see, how can we leverage the infrastructure of the regional organization in order to get some concrete wins and material changes for our people, while also embodying and demonstrating what intersectional organizing looks like. Not just the identity politics stuff, that's wack. We can talk more about that. 

Free From Fear was the larger campaign vision. It was the vision for how we were thinking about the south and wanting our people to live without fear, with dignity. Underneath it was the many different campaigns that folks were doing locally to address the concerns that was coming up through the community participatory research that we'd done. As folks was putting their ear to the ground to see what was the issues that was deeply felt, that was widely felt.

MH: Yeah. So when we was talking to people, folks was like, “I don't know about school, I done graduated, but I will tell you I'm struggling in public”. Whether that was a little homie Chewy Garcia, right outta Durham was killed at a skateboard park and it had really energized and charged up a lot of people there. And other folks across the region was raising similar concerns, ‘bout like “Where is public space? I feel policed in public space”. We went to Charleston and I remember,  even the queer clubs were overly policed .

And so it became an issue that we got more clear as we began to walk the path around what it meant to explore this issue around criminalization. 

KS: We started with the banner of ‘Beloved Community’ and that was gonna be our work around public education. And then for all the reasons that Mary's laying out, we decided to  focus more around criminalization under the banner ‘Free from Fear’. Having an aspirational  banner under which to do our work, which we also learned from ‘Not One More’ as well as ‘Black Lives Matter’. 

And so the first campaign that we launched inside of the ‘Free from Fear’ work was this campaign in Durham. And essentially, this is just to like show how kind of ignorant we were. We created this ordinance that had 49 demands in it. [Mary laughs] At least, right. We just took everything we'd ever seen before and we just smashed it together to make what we called the omnibus bill, including like prohibitions on racial profiling locally that had already been federally mandated. We didn't even like get the local versus federal… And coming from the South where so many of the federal policies never have any impact on our lives, we were like, “Put it all in there!” 

And then we ran it through some people and everybody was like, “This is irrelevant. These people don't decide this thing”.   And we had everything from standard operating procedures in there to–

MH: Signatures for the police officer being able to search a vehicle. That ended up getting passed–

KS: As did the SOP.   

MH: The SOPs were standard operating procedures on how to handle queer and trans gender nonconforming folks.

KS: And we also had stuff in there related to undocumented folks. We just packed it all in there and then everybody was like, “You can't go anywhere with this”. And so then it got narrowed down so that we were able to squeak through some of those different demands through city council in Durham.

Also Michael Brown was murdered 

MH: Mhmm, August 9th, 2014.

KS: So we started our campaign, our ‘Free from Fear’ campaign that you should talk about more, in the beginning of 2015 specifically looking at – we did a whole sort of dot voting process with our base. Because we hadn't done a bunch of work in Atlanta, specifically only as SONG before. This was us initiating work as SONG. We had done a ton of coalitional work around the Arizona copycat legislation, 2011. A whole bunch of work around Black liberation organizing. All sorts of different stuff. 

But we never initiated our own work, because we wanted to make sure that we were driving resources to other parts of the region. But then we went through an internal dialogue and debate around if we can and should initiate work in Atlanta. And we decided that we were going to, specifically also because we felt like if we could move the dial in Atlanta, it could also open up other avenues in other parts of the region. Though knowing also that we were working with a lot more resources, a much bigger base, and some different dynamics in a metropolis like Atlanta. 

AWG: OK so, just to summarize Act 1 a little bit, SONG decides, in 2011, to expand your basebuilding work into a few new states, you bring on a few new organizers on staff, and want to find issues you can run campaigns around that exemplify intersectional organizing, how that gets put into practice. That leads you all headfirst into a campaign to win a comprehensive anti-criminalization ordinance in Durham, it was like a wish list of all your possible demands, and you all figure out you’ve got to narrow it down and focus on just a few things, and eventually, the local coalition you all are part of wins new police standard operating procedures for how to engage with transgender people, and also new requirements the police get written consent to search people.  Coming out of that, you all decide to initiate a local campaign in Atlanta, which was a big step for you.

Can you take us through what you learned from that Durham process the previous year and how it also led you to rethink oh, SONG Atlanta is a place to dig in and, let's try also a municipal fight there.  

MH: Yeah, I feel like we immediately started learning some good lessons with the Durham campaign. It was in motion and then Atlanta kicked off. But even in motion, what we – one learned as we immediately was getting feedback around the policy, that it was like, “Yo, y'all doing the most”. And so we knew that there needed to be some sort of scale back or there had to be a separate path for some of  the different demands that was inside of this omnibus ordinance. 

SONG always saw itself positioned to be able to push a more mainstream, mostly white-led LGBTQ organizations more left as it relates to racial economic justice. When you know, here it is… the queers, you know, in Durham saying, “Hey, we need these things to feel safe, to have dignity, for our communities that we're a part of to feel safe”. And then Durham says, “Well, we just got an A star plus rating from the HRC. You know, they say we good with the gays–

KS: [joke voice] “We the best city for gays in the whole country.”

MH: You know what I mean? And so we were also like, what does that mean to sit at those intersections and particularly organizing inside of different sectors and different movements. It was an interesting thing to navigate. And so I think what we had to learn is that we – I remember there being phone calls with HRC, bein’ like, “Wait a minute! How are y'all judging this? Based on what? Oh, cause y'all, ain't considering race in this, huh? You wanna be able to make sure that you can, you know, get married or there's dog parks, whatever the fuck the little white gay boys want.

And so I think that that also helped us to really think about how we hold the other sectors to the mat. When we saw how they showed up around racial justice… [it] was lacking for lack of better words. 

KS: But I think that that's also the point at which we started talking about quality of life versus life and death issues. And that a lot of the HRCs or some of the more mainstream, more elite organizations, be them gay or not, were often pushing around quality of life improvements. And where we were casting our lot was around life and death issues. And so really that allowed us to be able to distinguish, and give shape and voice to a little bit more about where we were wanting to be and who we wanted to have on our team.

I think the other thing, and I don't know if you would agree with this Mary, but it's like, I think also in the Durham fight, we learned the hard way with that ordinance that we need to do our research on targets and decision makers. And again, always, and we've learned this all the time, what's on paper is different than actually how power is brokered inside of our different municipalities in county decision making bodies. But that there's always a tendency to get real deep in the weeds on the research forever and not actually test in real time, who's making the decisions, who are the influencers, et cetera. Cuz there's the research and then there's reality. 

And then the last thing that I think has been a longstanding lesson that we started to learn in Durham and that has carried us through was, just like anything, when you're learning something new, you can go real hard on it. But I think that where we sometimes struggled was like, how to give them the visionary, the culture, the beauty – of SONGs organizing has been so rooted in like kinship, belonging, fun, joy in the face of exile, harassment, et cetera. And so I think it's like we got a little square. So campaigns and make our actions also demonstrate who we are and what our vision is versus just being like, “Oh, the right way to do this is like go to the meetings with the suit. And do what the lawyers tell us”.

MH: [laughs]

KS: Because lawyer's always gonna tell us that our ideas are not good enough, that they're not feasible, that they're not right. And that there's only a particular avenue through which change is made. And we know from history and from our own lives, that that's just bullshit.

AWG: Cool. So can I test out then see where we're at summarizing a little bit of what you all learned or what you were also reacting to because I think for, and for those who don't know, HRC is human rights campaign DC organization, and you're saying that one of the. Dominant stories about gay people organizing that moment as we're organizing for quality of life, dog parks, stuff like that versus life or death issues that you all are bringing, being criminalized, we're being murdered.

Those that's, what's urgent for gay people to organize around queer people, to organize around. And so tried to create this ordinance that would protect. Queer people in really clear, specific ways.  If you could name what some of the things were that you won in Durham that you took into the thinking and research and cutting the issue in Atlanta.

In addition to all the other things you named about, let's bring joy, let's bring ourselves. Let's also narrow our focus when we start, if we start working in another place can you say some more of that as you get into the story, like from what you went in Durham into, then what we did in Atlanta?

MH: So by the time we get to January 2015, we had already been doing some sniffing around, you know? What's the bleeding point?

KS: We'd been doing a bunch of organizing!

MH: Oh yeah, we had now. August 9th, we hit the streets, okay? We was in this thing. And so, a part of all the uprising energy, have rolled out to Ferguson during October weekend, was given a mandate from this, the Ferguson comrades to say, and folks it's clear like, yo, it's going down where you live. You know, it's horrible where you live this.

Folks ain't special about this. So let's go turn up all over. And we were like, say less cause you right. And so we came back you know, had like an affinity group of organizations that were doing all kind of actions. 

And then by the time January came, I remember us saying, “Comrades, we cannot continue to move like this. It is unprincipled for us to continue to mobilize, break folk out, marching – honey, we just be downtown, you know? [Kate laughs] Just mad, without a demand. Without a demand, and a strategy, but can we at least get a demand my friends?”

And so that's when we brought together our base and began to reflect [on] some of the things that we were seeing, that we had initially started seeing as related to fines and fees. It started too, because it was what was happening in our own lives too. It was what was happening in our own lives. But it's interesting how – when something is so normalized, you just think that's the way it is. But then once you start looking at it from a systemic level, then you begin to see, “Oh, this is a setup. This is actually the booby traps”. 

And so once we started doing that research, we did some dot voting, as Kate mentioned before. Let's just go, you know, find the one that actually is resonating with our people. Again, widely felt, deeply felt. And so, that's when –

KS: And that we can do something about!

MH:  And we could do something about.

KS: There’s a target and reach. 

MH: Mhmm. And so that's when we initially took up fines and fees. I remember Baby Dean at the time was also one of the SONG members at the time, and we were like, “Oh yeah, this fines and fees stuff is wild.” And we were doing court watching as a way to also continue to beef up how we understood how it works. We had, I think, immediately incorporated the political education/leadership development. Yeah? 

KS: We read a book about the history of Atlanta, The Condemnation of Little B.

MH: Uh huh. We read it–

KS: By Elaine Brown.

MH: Yeah. We had political education embedded, cause we knew that [we] couldn't just have this and we not doing consciousness raising, building political alignment analysis, et cetera. So we’d read a few chapters of Condemnation of Little B: New Age Racism In America by Elaine Brown. And the first few chapters in it very specifically talks about the history of Atlanta. And we all read Iron Fist…

KS: Velvet glove.

MH: In the Velvet Glove. Oh my god, like yo, we was getting it in!

And so we were court watching as a way to get a better understanding. And part of a good campaign and a demand – the first thing you do is identify your target then ask ‘em for what you want. And I remember initially our demand was no fines and fees. 

KS: Fines and fees based on income. An end to all FTAs, failure to appear. The automatic bench warrant that gets issued when folks fail to appear at court. And then mandatory use of a bench card for judges to determine indigency. And the expansion of dignified community service options.

Cause we had talked to folks that had been forced to wash cop cars as their community service. And we were like, “Oh hell no!” I think that we added the bench card because we saw all the crazy shit in court watch where they'd be like, “Oh, you got a cell phone? You can pay this $700.”

MH: Yeah. That's how they were determining, they were sizing people up like, oh yeah –

KS: “Oh, you got a new backpack for your kid?” But like using all of these arbitrary, insane things and then be like, “Oh yeah, you can pay this thousand dollars.   Oh, you can't? Okay. You're gonna go sit in jail.”

MH: And so we're like, “Yo, let's go ask the target”. And so, while we're doing all this other stuff, still researching, court watching – we reach out to the Chief Judge, Chris Ward at the time, and we say, “Yo, we wanna meet him”. And we reach out again and again, and homie don't respond. And so we escalate our tactics, and we had called all the other judges. Called all the other judges. And he had told them not to talk to us. And so we're like, “Okay, now we gotta show you what these scrappy queers is willing to do”.  

Then we started escalating. And at this point too, we're also like broadening how we were engaging community members. We did like that PMA. The hot and bothered town hall. We're just creating more openings for more folks to be able to engage in this conversation and really get a read of what was going on –

KS: And forcing all of our base and ourselves to talk to people at court, before during and after.  Which I think was really, really, really important. The other thing that was happening though at this point was… we were also getting punted back and forth between city council, the municipal local city judges, and the mayor. Where it was the same thing of like, “No, no, no, we don't make the decision. The judges make the decision.  No, we don't make the decision. The mayor makes the decision”. Literally everybody was telling us  opposite things. They were just trying to play us.  

MH: It was getting played. It was getting played.

KS: So then that's why we were also like, let's actually go after the judges and do a couple of actions to provoke a response. [Mary laughs] It will give us more data versus shuttling back and forth between all of these different offices. 

So we did a two part action because we think we're funny and we think we're smart.  We had one of our members who was an artist build this huge, maybe 14 foot tall – we could find a picture – 14, 10, 14 foot tall canvas failure to appear ticket that looked just like the citation tickets that they issue here in the city. And we filled it out for Judge Ward. And so we had this whole huge ticket outside of the court while court was in session. There's lines around the block, people waiting to go in to have to go to court. And so we were just causing a whole scene about how Judge Ward had failed to appear to the people and that he worked for us and that we needed that meeting that we felt like we were owed. And so that was happening outside. We were causing a whole scene. We tried to get media. I think we got maybe one press hit. So we got a little bit of earned media with our visuals. And then we sent another band of rowdies into Judge Ward’s actual courtroom.

MH: Yeah, and so–

KS: That was Mary, Mary’s on the rowdy side.

MH: So then we had like small little Judge Ward failed to appear little signs. We had rolled them up and of course we put glitter in them! We intentionally sat in the front of his courtroom, so when he said “All rise” we all stood up like everybody else, but we opened up our posters, glitter falls out, glitter bombing, essentially.

And then he kinda looks. He's like, “What is this? This is a courtroom, not a street corner, blah, blah, blah”. And kind of does like this chastising thing. And we kind of like “Answer the fucking phone” and we walk out, right. We're going back outside. He sends the bailiff after us. “The judge wants to meet with you in his chambers.” I think they have us sit in the little jury box area until he is ready, so creepy. And then we finally get to go back there to talk to dude and the bailiff fish telling us how he used to be a Black Panther and all this sort of stuff, interesting.

Another lesson I think is important is that folks who are working inside of the system, depending on how they situate themselves, they too can be organized is what I'm saying. And not everybody should just be taken as you know, like “You're an enemy, you work for the state.” We all are  trying to work and shit under capitalism, whatever.

And so I remember the judge telling us, like, “I can't change that law. My kids need boots and shoes.” And – we got a chance to see what this cat was about and what he wasn't willing to do. And that's all we wanted, for him to be able to look us in the eye and tell us that he wasn’t gonna meet our demands. Great, enough said sir. So now we know we can escalate in good conscience. We recorded the whole thing too. We was good for recording a meeting.

So that's when it really kicked off and we continue with our court watching efforts. We continue to  listen in community, hold town halls, et cetera. And then, I think… the pivot to bail.

KS: Yeah.

MH: Now what I believe happened, cuz we were going to – the failure to appear the different courtrooms, you know, handled different sort of things. But we had, I think, slipped into or accidentally went into like first appearance and we hadn't before. And once we sat in there, I remember thinking, this is a different entry point. Cuz if we can address folks staying in jail cuz they can't afford their bail, they'll be less likely to cop out or take a plea deal or just pay the fine. If we intervene here, we don't even have to perhaps even deal with the fines and fees.

So we're looking at it from a different intervention point or whatever. And I remember doing a lot of research around it.  That's also around the time the Ferguson report dropped, around their police department. And that huge report, I think that was super helpful for us to look at – just seeing how they were looking at numbers, magnitude and scale of how people were profiting off of the ticketing, the bonds, the da, da, da, da, all the things.

But it was sitting in court that we were like, “Yo game changer”. But I will say this too, though, particularly with the bond stuff…It's not as though I haven't been bailed outta jail before we did campaign stuff, okay. Talking in a political sense. Or like folks in our families, my survival had been deeply impacted, all of this shit.

But again, once you start seeing it, when it's not like the crisis normalized thing that you just do. And step into it from a different perspective, like it was a game changer. And I could just see it, eyes wide open on a whole ‘nother level. And I think at this point – cuz we had different tools to figure out we could do something about it, versus just like the times of shit had happened and we’d been mad.

KS: But I think this is interesting. We had to remember our loyalties to a regional formation. And so I do think that also what was happening – while we're chasing down Judge Ward, trying to do this court watching, beginning to build out our plan of attack in real time. We didn't make a perfect campaign plan and then execute it. We were like, let's try things, learn in advance. But I think that also what was happening is we had, you know, the folks in Richmond were working to prevent the expansion of a jail. Durham was doing a whole bunch of other organizing. We were organizing, we were doing organizing in Birmingham, but it was all under the broader umbrella of criminalization of Black queer and LGBTQ people. 

And so what was happening was that everybody was picking different issues, which makes sense. But it meant that for us as campaign newbies, in some sense, trying to support all of these chapters or groups of members that were waging campaigns – they all had different targets. They all had different demands. So everybody was kinda like hunkered down in their own place. And so we were also like, what would it look like with this broader vision? If we utilized with Mary's vision, the bailout. To test a shared demand or a shared issue across the region so that we could better have people feel less isolated and more connected. We could leverage our power, and we could leverage our lessons. Versus being like, everybody's going after a different city manager versus council versus mayor versus judge, municipal judge superior judge, all of that. State legislature.  

MH: 2016, of course, you know, Trump gets elected and everybody's like, “What the fuck?” So we did this regional like scan. And one of the questions that we asked in a regional scan, similar to how folks was talking to people in community locally – we did a regional scan, trying to identify what's the infrastructure, who got this. There was already a knowing that having that asshole in office, there was gonna be some rollbacks and some institutions that was gonna be impacted, whatever, but we raised a question around bail. Cause we were like, the bail shit seems for real. And it seems like this happening everywhere. Let's see.

And across the board, when we put out that regional scan and people responded – I don't believe there was one person who didn't say that they themselves or somebody that they knew had been impacted by bail where they lived at. Now that the system may have operated differently, et cetera, et cetera. But generally, everybody knew that this was a problem. 

AWG: Alright, let me pause you again, and see if I can summarize where we are, from the Durham omnibus bill campaign, to rolling to support comrades in Ferguson after Michael Brown was killed, to kicking off a campaign around fines and fees in Atlanta, to trying to figure out a regional campaign issue. First, you all had figured out criminalization and policing were the ‘burning point’ as you put it, across your base, across the region, and that’s how you got to an overall campaign banner, “Free From Fear”. 

You all had learned a lot from the work in Durham about how to narrow down your demands and do actual testing, at the beginning of figuring out a campaign, to understand how power is actually wielded at the local level. At first you weren’t sure about whether to invest organizational resources in launching a local campaign in Atlanta, but then in August 2014, after your time in Ferguson, you all get a push, and you think, it’s time to build there in a new way. In 2015 you start implementing some of what you all learned in Durham, so that when you pick an issue, which in this case was the unjust fines and fees being applied to people who miss their court dates in Metro Atlanta, you actually do direct actions on potential targets to figure out if the judge, in this case, is the person who can stop the fines and fees, and also to understand how far you’ll have to push him. At first you all think, this is the campaign, but then you realize, wait a second, if people didn’t have to be locked up in the first place because they can’t afford bail, they’re less likely to be forced to accept a plea deal with a prosecutor and then have to pay court fines and fees because they plead guilty. What if we went after bail? And, what if we did that all over the South, and it wasn’t a different campaign in every city, but we had campaigns against bail everywhere? A regional demand. That way we could transfer what we learned a lot faster in more places, rather than having to figure out the power map for a different issue in every place. That’s starting to come together at the end of 2016, as you all prepare for your all-member meeting in early 2017. 

MH: Fast forward January 2017. At our SONG regional membership meeting, we scrapped it out via debate. We like a good debate. We're trying to, you know, build our muscle to debate. And so we debate it and brought proposals around how we could unify around bail and melting ICE. Melting ICE, ‘cause that immigration work was something that we had been doing. And a lot of it, particularly in Georgia, with the leadership and support alongside of the Georgia Latino Alliance for Human Rights, we were able to learn a lot from there too. And we knew that this shit was going to continue to increase given that Trump and all of this, you know?

And so those were the two demands that we walked out with. And then I started the proposal around, “Hey, we should bail our Black mothers for Mother's Day”. As some spirit put on my heart. And that was, I think, the turning point. 

KS: Because it was also about – we had learned from our own experience as well as from  the data and the scans that bail was a shared issue across the region and across our constituency. But then we also were like, what if we actually use an action to further test – use a tactic, a shared tactic. Distributed, in a sense, across the region to give us more information and to identify the entry points to actually advance campaigns locally. You know, locally rooted, but regionally connected.

MH: Yeah.

KS: And so the Black Mama's Bailouts gave us also that opportunity to do something meaningful in real time. That actually was gonna alleviate suffering, in real time. Tthat was also gonna foster joy and center a pro Black and feminist and pro queer politic, and was gonna allow us to learn more about the opportunities to actually fight and win on that issue.

MH: It was so much, it was so much that we learned. So much that we wasn't ready for [laughs]. So much we wasn't ready for. And this is where divest/invest was also a framework that was moving inside of movement. And we were like, “Oh, we're very clear about, yes. Divest from this bullshit and invest”. We could literally say coming out of bail, how many people needed beds in terms of, to be able to get mental health or drugs treatment, how much housing people needed. It was clear where the gaps were. 

KS: Yeah. 

MH: And you know, the resistance of these bastards not to wanna do it. And so it certainly highlighted more targets, but I think it also got more people who was impacted by the issue involved. 

KS: Yep. 

MH: And many of the folks, SONG’s membership in Atlanta, people had different relationships to the issues. So some got up underneath it as advocates. Some got up underneath it ‘cause like “I done dealt with this shit”. But I think what we all were really clear about was that there was all of us had a shared interest and a shared desire for us to be able to win this campaign regardless.

We assemble a coalition locally and then across the region, folks were like – we had voted at the regional meeting to do it. And so folks began to get in formation locally, but then because the actual tactic, there were so many mechanics of it: The fundraising that was involved. The actual people scanning their local communities to see “What are the resources, and what are the gaps and out of the resources that are available, of course, through our lens, are they pro Black? Are they pro feminist? Are they pro-immigrant?” So calling up shelters to say, do you accept X, Y, Z type of people?

KS: Getting clergy in the jails to talk to folks to see if they wanna get bailed out? Cuz some didn't. 

MH: Yeah. This was around the time too, a bunch of – [to Kate] Did you ever get your minister's license?

KS: No. 

MH: A few people in the region got our minister's license, honey. Just like, we gonna try to get in these jails and talk to our people. Even if crews weren't doing the actual tactic of bailout, Jay created that fundraising toolkit. So folks were having house parties and just regionally, you could just feel the energy begin to shake and move, and people could make a meaningful contribution. Rather they were doing an actual bailout or not.

I think one of the most astounding things, just to see how folks were able to get in where they could fit in, and different ones would go to other places to support their bailouts whatevs. And one of the things that I think is important… We had made a commitment to that when we bailed people out, that we also wanted to – you know, we bring our full selves to the work as our scrappy ridiculous selves.

So we pretty much took over the Fulton County jail. Okay. We had our whole shit out there. It was cute. You know, tables, snacks. We had our banners, you know what I mean? We had –

KS: Flowers!

MH: Music and flowers, and the generosity of spirit that folks across community, that organizations – one of the organizations made little badges for everybody, Sister Care Alliance. You know, we had worked with other orgs we had never worked with before. Some came with some hard lessons, but it helped strengthen our muscles to be in coalition, and not always trying to organize with people who think like you and talk like you.

We literally took over the jail, the energy of the jail.  We were traversing rules. I think the officers themselves were surprised and even, you know, they had started giving folks care bags and stuff. We're like, “Y’all don’t be doin’ that shit”. But they rose to the occasion. When they saw how we moved, they tapped into their own humanity. And we had moments and even some folks who would help us later on through the course of the work who we could call upon to get information, you know, from an inside perspective. 

And so, yeah, I think there was something about, the way in which we also, through the process of the bailouts, we remained true to who we were. And also then the big homecoming and the barbecue outside. And it was like, “I want to bring real dishes”, you know, wasn’t nobody eating on styrofoam. And just the, again, a generosity of spirit and folks who hadn't done or been to a thing like that had just shown up, ‘cause it was very concrete, real tangible.

KS: We should have a whole convo on the bailout.  But just to say, the other thing that's interesting about the bailouts – you know, everything that Mary said, so many different sets of communities were activated around this action, because of all the reasons Mary said. But so many more folks got activated around it. But a lot of places weren't able to move that into campaigns. Which is often the issue with mobilizations or tactics, or what have you is… You're like, “Free, free Palestine” or whatever it is, “End the war”, whatever your demonstration is that that you do, your action. And then you can't move that into a campaign. 

And so that was also the case with a lot of the different places. And that's okay, but just to say, that was one of the realities that we were also contending with. We live in a sort of a turn up and a mobilization and an activist culture, and organizing…has moments of that! Moments of actions that are visible, that you can wrap your arms around and that are beautiful, like the bailouts and tactics like that. But a lot of it is carrying the water to sustain work and people and teams and momentum and vision over time.

And so, just to say that that was, I think, an interesting other place. Where some folks made the journey with us. Some folks didn't make the journey with us. But I do think it was also the right call and made the journey more possible when we were like, “We're all doing the same thing”. And sometimes that doesn't make sense because it comes from D.C., and it's an action in a box and it's like, Everybody do the same thing. Whatever.”

But this was a different process around doing the same thing and, you know, testing beforehand and listening beforehand, that allowed it to have a little bit more resonance and depth. I'm not gonna get too deep in the weeds on it, but you know, one of the things that I encouraged and requested from the different members for those of us that were white around the bailouts and and money bail work and the free from fear work broadly, was giving people the mandate to practice the articulation around stake.

And the opportunity to practice, to say, “Hey, I actually have never – I've always, I got bailed out by my daddy. Or that's not an issue that's necessarily affected me, but it's affected my loved ones in this X, Y, Z sort of way”. And to also be able to articulate what it will mean for all of us individually, from our own identity and experience, if, and when we can make these changes. And the shared destiny, the shared possibility  and the power that that's gonna give all of us. 

So I think that that's one of the things too, giving people the chance to practice versus being like, “Talk like Mary Hooks” or “Because you do or don't have a relationship to this issue you can't organize around it”. It's like, no, it's actually about, can you be authentic? And reflective around your own identity and experience and position, and be able to connect the dots. Not in an over justify your position and run your mouth and take up all the space, but in a way where people know, and they can tell from your posture and your cadence, that you don't feel like an imposter. And that we know inside of SONG , that no liberation is gonna come about by one community organizing. It's gonna take so many more of us. And that that's continually an area where we need to step further into our intersectional politics. And it's a place where we have a lot of gaps. Specifically also in this political moment, where there's a lot of questions around legitimacy, and who can and cannot speak or act.

AWG: Thank you for all that. As we move into the lessons that you all wanna offer for us in 2022, that you see as you read the room here, read our movement landscape, our turn up culture versus campaign culture. And you obviously have already offered some of that or at least teasers for what you think we need to do more of or less of in this time.

Just to wrap up the story of what happened.  What you were talking about was the city of Atlanta campaign around ending cash bail. Wrapping up the story of, so 2017, you start this tactic, this bailouts, both as scouting, both as building our muscles organizationally across the region. Also a regional demand around ending cash bail, which went, I think national,  transcended the region, transcended outside of queer, anti-criminalization organizing. Influenced a whole lot of us in other places and parts of movement sectors. 

But if you could just  land both of those plans, and also give our listeners who might not know how many places ended up doing bailouts, how it's actually still a thing that happens on mother's day. But I'm curious about those as you get into… and then what does this mean for us in 2022?

MH: Inside of SONG we like, “Yeah, bailouts. We're gonna try some shit. Let's do this tactic.” Then we were also in a meeting – SONG had been engaged inside of the Movement for Black Lives that had started to emerge in 2014, to be able to connect what was happening with all the uprisings. And begged the question, what can we do that we can't do alone?

So M4BL, Color of Change had come together and held a bail convening. It was actually convening around folks across the country who were doing work around bail. M4BL had just, was in the process of writing the vision for black lives policy platform. So the different organizations like SONG and BYP, all of these organizations was saying, “Hey, this is what we fighting for locally”. And we had also harvested a lot of that information from the Cleveland convening in 2015. 

They brought folks together who was doing bail work. M4BL, Color of Change, bail convening folks say, “Yes, we’re gonna do bailouts as a coalition”, which was also some of the initial seeds of the National Bailout Collective, but folks began to draft a transformative bail curriculum. So that became a offering across the country, for folks to help politicize people around bail through an abolitionist lens. 

And then the national infrastructure begin to emerge the national bailout collective to help black-led organizations who wanted to engage in bailouts, you know, raise money collectively and be able to move it across the country. And to also help folks shape radical demands around it. See what if there was some federal  moves we could make around it. 

I can't tell you how many people engage in doing bailout work. People still do bailouts. We've had folks from other countries who are like, “We trying to bail out our people”. 

What was clear, and what was spiritually clear, was like Black people, we know we've done this before. We've bought each other's freedom before. There is something in that. And this was also in a time, Trump getting office, folks is trying to figure out, “How do I contribute?” And this yeah, just opened up a huge container for people to be able to pour in and get it in.

KS: Like a whole organization. That is staffed.

MH: Whole nother organization that grew out of it.  And more bail funds begin to emerge.  There's always been bail funds since like the 70s, right. And I think that the National Bail Fund Network also saw an increase in the amount of bail funds.

MH: And as it relates to Atlanta, going back and zooming into Atlanta election year. January 2018, Keisha Lance Bottoms gets in office and she's like, “My first 100 days, I'm going to end bail”. We like, “This a lie” so she ain’t never really fuck with us. 

KS: Yeah. She'd been our nemi’, on council.

MH: Yeah, been whack.  But you know, she had some promises to fulfill or else Mayor Norwood, a conservative, would've won,

KS: But she had already forecasted that she was willing to look at bail, I think specifically ‘cause of the bailouts and some of the national climate that we had had our little hands in, helping advance the issues. 

MH: Yeah. Once she announced that we really dug in deeper with our partners at Southern Center for Human Rights, SCHR, who was helping to draft bill. And that's when we were getting some of the, “This is – they not gonna allow this to happen, they not gonna pass this”. So we hit up Law for Black Lives, our comrades nationally, like, “Yo, we need our own ordinance. ‘Cause we ‘unno how to write that shit. We ‘unno how to write policy”. And we were like, and this is what we think it should include. 

And so we brought ours to the table, they brought theirs, and then they were like, “We'll see how far we could take that”. And ultimately we didn't get everything we want. That's – god, I hate the way those stories end. But that's the name of this bitch ass game. But I think some of the things about it was that – immediately –  it made impacts, once they started implementing it. Easily about a year later, what had averaged had been like 700some people a day in the jail,  was reduced to 50, 40 a day. And so Women on the Rise had been saying for years, “They need to close that damn jail. They need to close the jail”.

And so once the bail legislation passed and we are all over here, like tired as shit, like, fuck. And then boom, that's when the comrades Women on the Rise, like no problem. And then they begin to, you know, reassemble and recharge the city with, “It's time to close the jail”.

KS: Cause it's empty.

MH: Cause it's motherfucking empty. And so, business from these cats, it just made – it was financially even more responsible, whatever. And that continues to be ongoing fight. You see the ebbs and flows that happen around that.

KS: I think that there's something that's so interesting here for those of us that are on team justice and on team campaign and keep it scrappy, keep a visionary, and like go big or go home is just that – to be real, one of the things that happened is that we got out paced. 

We got outpaced by the individual activists and the individual lawyer activists, and the advocates. And so they essentially were like, “Y'all cute. You do th  protest, but  we're gonna write the policy”.  We got a beautiful policy, but we were too late. Because they'd already written it and gone back and forth and redlined it with the lawyers. And so they were like, “Ha ha. Yeah, we'll add section 13”. And they did, they added a section 13 that was specifically about advancing some type of task force to do the research around the stabilization and support. 

And then we got them to change some other language, but they were like eating dessert and we like, brought our appetizer, you know, like we were just behind. So there is a question, coalitionally, tactically and organizing wise. You wanna respond to the targets in real time, especially when they sometimes intentionally try to accelerate the process to see if you can keep up. But there is that sort of dance around, like, how do you stay with the process, but also try to slow it down so that actually the people impacted can be part of it. And not get too psyched out by all of the damn lawyers and advocates being like, “Not possible. You're gonna ruin it for all of us. They're gonna close their door in our face and we're not gonna get anything. Be moderate, be reasonable, be logical.”

And so that is one of my other bigger reflections from that period.  When you got a big team as a base building organization, and a lot of folks can't respond immediately: how do you elbow out enough space amongst the suits to be able to have it be meaningful and align with our values, frankly? And also not do the other lefty thing, which is like, “If it's not gonna be perfecthow we want it, we don't want any of it”. The pendulum swings in the other direction and we're like, “We don't want any of it”. There's truth in the fact that  we do have to compromise sometimes, but, that's a tension that we still face right now in major ways.

MH: Mhmm. I think if we hadn't been coming with appetizers and could've been on dessert round two, it would've put us in a different position, to be able to negotiate, to compromise with apps versus like, fuck.

KS: But they don't slow their process for us.

MH: Not at all. 

KS: That's the whole thing with the lawyers. They're gonna do it their way. So it's like, how do you have influence over them internally? To be able to align more closely with the base building organizations versus being pigeonholed. We shifted the conversation profoundly in those council meetings, by who we brought  and who we held space for.  Versus it just being the lawyers and then the random people that always talk at every city council meeting for the last 40 years. We can't undersell our role.

AWG: So as you all move into the larger lessons learned from this period, wrapping up the story about the bail campaign in Atlanta, it sounds like, the bail outs you all started in 2017, there were two in Atlanta that year, in addition to in six other cities where SONG organizers, but it so influences the local political landscape that Keisha Lance Bottoms, immediately upon taking office in 2018, says, I’m going to end bail in my first 100 days. Then you all have to scramble to make sure the ordinance or policy is strong enough. And there’s a real tension between doing that well, and being scrappy, as you all put it, playing a different, rebel role. 

 I'm really curious about what you all think from your position about where we're at this isn't just about 10 years ago, you're telling this story, but what do you think we need more of, or less of today in our movement organizing, if we're talking about how to build powerful campaigns?

MH: So one of the things that I think was super important in this campaign, and what this campaign demonstrated, and many of the free from fear campaigns, was that people love talking about intersectionality – and some of the elders had already put us on game, you know, years ago to be like, “Some people just wanna talk about intersectionality, cuz it just give them more identity badges. Right. And they can feel like the most whatever person in the room”.

And many of us understand intersectionality as, yes we do understand our lives are connected. Our destinies are connected, etcetera etcetera. And systems of oppression are connected, right? And so part of our campaigns and our work is to be able to draw those connections, to be able to have more sophisticated campaign strategies, be able to see what it means for – [to Kate] Remember when we were like trying to hem up the Sedexo folks who were serving food in the county jail?

Really being able to get more sophisticated in terms of how we navigate trying to get wins for our people. And it means being able to bring in communities across age, across race, across class, to be able to, like you were saying, get some stake in the game, and to be able to actually take on stuff that's going to impact all of our communities across the board. And I think that this campaign demonstrated how we actually practice an intersectional approach in doing organizing work. 

KS: And that doesn't mean one size fits all. Everybody's got different talking points, and everybody's got different roles. And there's enough roles for everyone. And everybody has an opportunity to contribute and to be transformed in the doing together.

I have two more. So one, I think, and we learned this also from Mijente, through it’s Not One More campaign, but I still think about it, which is like: Make it a street fight. The most powerful points of these different campaigns and the development of the campaigns was when we were able to do it on our terms and make it a street fight in the street, versus going in with the suits and being like, “Am I the only person not wearing panty hose?”

MH: [Laughs]

KS: The reason why we make the street fight is one, it makes it public, right. ‘Cause they hide, they’re cowards. They wanna hide in these buildings where nobody can find them, and make the policies that ruin so many of our people's lives. And two, so it makes it visible, and makes it public. And it evens the terrain. And it also gives us, like with the bailouts or with the failure to appear, an opportunity to use humor. And to show, not tell, our vision. 

We had this action that we never did that we will one day do when we're old and gray, or grayer, which was around a visionary court action. And this was Mary's idea. And she wanted to do a visionary court action outside of the municipal court, while the hundreds of people are waiting to go into court.  It was gonna be like a damn lounge with some hookah, who knows. Comfortable couches, plants. 

MH: We wanted to make a big gavel and we wanted people to be able to, like, “This is what it means to use a bench card. You come up and say, Hey, I ain't gotten the money. And it's like, okay, cool. But guess what? The community garden, they need some extra hands. Bless up, we even.” 

– Really wanted just to, as the Black Panthers would call it, the prefigurative organizing.

KS: I think that that's one too is, make it a street fight, both for the confrontation, but also for the vision. I think that we're so starved. It's like we're in the desert. We're in an imagination desert right now. Whatever beautiful ideas we have, however weird they are. If people wanna try to make them happen in terms of their tactics and action, just do it. You're gonna spark a sense of possibility in somebody, whether you know them or not, whether they tell you or not. That is the beauty of organizing. And not to expect that everybody that's been impacted is gonna know your name or know you, or that you're ever gonna know them. But it is about, how do we broadcast a sense of possibility in a desert in a lot of ways, that we're living in and that we're vulnerable when it is only on their terms. When all of our negotiations or confrontations are in their offices or on their terms, it brings up our vulnerabilities. 

But then the other thing too that it makes me think about is pick something and try. It doesn't have to be the perfect issue. It shouldn't just be one thing that you and your one friend…

MH: [laughs]

KS: think is important. You do need to explore and build. With our rising political fundamentalism, we also have a rising sense of hesitancy and perfectionism. It's gotta be the perfect issue. We can't pick one cuz then we're gonna be throwing somebody under the bus, et cetera, et cetera. The learning is gonna be in the doing and the trying, and you're gonna be changed and others are gonna be changed, even if you don't quote unquote win. ‘Cause we so often at SONG always seem to talk about culture change and policy change. And that we actually need both. We can't do one without the other. So whatever problem or issue keeps bubbling up, pay attention to that. And throw some shit at it and see what sticks, and know that  it's gonna not go as planned on your paper. But you learn and then you adapt and then you try something else. 

MH: And one thing too, that we kept failing at. We didn't do a good job. But I think where we were part of a vision was, we'd bail people out. We'd bring homecoming and then we'd be able to hold a massive mobilization after the bailout and confronting our enemies. And I think we were never able to leverage that energy and harness that energy. One ‘cause we were like, drenched in doing a lot of direct service, lot of support in that way. And people were generally tapped out. 

But I think what we were also too, because we were developing and moving these campaigns, when there was so much uprising happening. Rapid response, rapid response, 2016, it was mad rapid response. Having a good campaign plan –  again, not perfect, but just some sense of, these are next few steps over some time, people being able to say, “Don't lose the campaign, just cuz the shit popping off, but give people a long term fight that they can engage in.

And how you show up and uprising a moments is the opportunity to absorb people into campaign work. And sometimes people just drop it, say they relevant, but deepen your analysis. What is it about the campaign you moving That resonates or connects to what folks are upset about in this uprising moment and see if it's an opportunity to move people into that instead of just like dropping it and letting it go to the side.

Cause I feel like that's also too where we don't really get to leverage a lot of that momentum into long term sustain fights. When we've already figured out the path forward as much as we can. But not inviting others to be a part of that in those moments of uprising. 

And if your plan was four months, you had a four month plan. Now you got thousands of people in the street. That four month plan can be done in one month, escalating a timeline and making sure you have enough entry points for people , to throw down and be able to contribute to it.

KS: You know what that makes me think about is, if you're building community, you're not necessarily gonna build a campaign. But if you're building a campaign you're definitively gonna build more community, and we need more community. We need more kinship. We need more ties between us. 

But I do think that sometimes we’ve forsaken quote unquote like community building and not pursued campaigns. In the last couple of years, like they've sort of like gone out of style in some circles, in favor of community and I'm like, “Where did we go wrong, where people think that you're not gonna build lifelong relationships through campaigns”. Because then you get to do a whole bunch and learn a whole bunch of different things together. There's something in there for me where we've  gotten a little twisty on the community building over campaign building.

And I'm like, “No, no, no. If we do campaigns. We get both”. 

MH: Now that's a whole nother layer conversation we could have. ‘Cause I certainly have some thoughts about it.  I think that oftentimes when folks just get narrowed into community building outside of campaign, it doesn't encourage you to build community across other communities. You tend to just build with folks who sound like you and talk like you. In a campaign, cut that issue right, baby everybody can get this work. Everybody can get a piece. And you find yourself being able to rock with other people. 

Where we saw after this last election season and the ‘rona, which made sense, a lot of people pivoting. And I hope people ain't conflating community building with mutual aid – 

KS: I’m not.

MH: – though those two things can be vibing and working together, a good campaign is also gonna be considering, how do you meet people's needs in the moment? I think the bailout was a way to demonstrate that. 

But as we see more people engaging in mutual aid but not inviting people to confront the enemies who are causing the suffering, causing the poverty, causing the reason why people ain't got X, Y, Z, that's also the missing element link too, is that – and I’m not saying that every organization has to be running all the multitude of strategies, but again, being able to do it in coalition work, alliances, teams of willing, but like, It's gonna take more organizations, you know, doing shit together and being powerful together.

Begging this question, I am for big talks about what we can do together that we can't do alone. That's actually going to help us to do all that's required and necessary in order to win some shit for our people. And none of it is a waste. But it needs to be deeper, more coordination, and held together with a lot more vision, values and something else…

KS: Stamina!

MH: and stamina.

AWG: Just thinking about any of the organizers you're in community with 2022, is there one other insight or offering. Or us on the left who are trying to build power, that you wanna make, that you haven't gotten a chance to say. Or even if it's like, everybody should read this. Everyone should listen to this song. Everyone should blank. That could be the offering. It doesn't just have to be like the, the five most important points.

MH: So there's a few. Everybody is needing curriculum stuff. So check out, “We Don’t Want To Be Stars” Auburn Seminary Health Project. But that Shapiro and a bunch of SONG fam and movement fam, contributed and Kate was the one that actually pulled it together. Emily Simons did the design on it. It's beautiful, but it really is about building power through a feminist lens  and community and campaign! Talking about healing! It's so good! It can be found online for free!  

I'm a part of Black Organizers for Leadership and Dignity, and had been in a few weeks talking about how to develop good strategy, and I think one of the ones that really stands out was  really thinking about how do we over – Overwhelming Obstacles, selections from the introduction to Good Strategy, Bad Strategy by Richard Rumelt. Not necessarily somebody that I have lined up on my bookcase, but I think there was some interesting points that he was making. And what does it mean to be the underdog in the fight, and how do you really identify where you have decisive advantage over this bigger enemy? And I think movement has to grapple with that. And I feel like you know, we can I feel like we've been able to tap in a little bit. We were able to tap in around, how do we bring a decisive advantage inside of an electoral fight? That's cool. And we need to also find that and develop that in other ways that we bring in and giving the smoke to our enemies and also in a way in which we are embodying and building the other world building that we know that is required. And so I think that that's also something too.  

This is also a time where people are like, “Narr-a-tive”. People wanna say, say, say. If we just say it better, if we just sharpen how we say it and all this sort of thing, but I'm like, “Our people want us to talk with our feet and people wanna feel it and be moved by it.” And beyond what we say. Beyond what we say. And I know it's critical, but I don't want folks to forsake organizing and what it means to just talk to everyday people about the shits. And of course we should be using that to help inform how we talk about our issues more broadly together and our visions more broadly together. But we not gonna get it if we don't talk to our people, everyday people, cuz that's who gives us the language, that's who gives us the ways in which we culturally talk to our different communities about the things that we trying to win.

AWG: Mary hooks, Kate Shapiro. Thank you so much for your time today. 

MH: Thanks so much!