t’s morning again in America. Federal agents snatch students off the streets. The White House boasts of banishing hundreds of people to a Salvadoran prison, ignoring the judges who demand due process. Head Start, federal science research, and domestic violence shelters await the chopping block. Hospitals turn away trans teens. Retirement accounts go up in smoke. The regulatory state unravels while corporate polluters are empowered to spew toxins far and wide. Powerful corporations and institutions abandon their meager commitments to diversity. Milquetoast Democrats barely object, fantasizing that they can win by 

. The Trump administration is repurposing antiracism into a grenade and lobbing it at the remnants of the welfare state. Across the world, the right wing is blowing up everything and incinerating the planet. White supremacy is apocalyptic for everyone.

Regular people are stepping into the fray, providing the varied, creative, noncooperative opposition to the neo-fascist administrative takeover that we need. A thousand people gathered outside the upstate New York home of President Donald Trump's border czar to protest Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s abduction of a local family, leading to their release. Street protests and demonstrations at Tesla showrooms, part of a worldwide economic boycott of Elon Musk’s company, have resulted in a whopping 71 percent drop in its profits in the first quarter of the year. 

 took place from late January to late March 2025, compared with the same period during the first Trump administration. The demonstrations are smaller than earlier iterations, having to rebuild after the demobilizations of the Biden presidency. While this era of resistance may lack the iconic novelty of the 2017 Women’s March, a more capacious and potentially unruly coalition is being forged — one more attuned to the problem of oligarchy, less inclined to exceptionalize Trump, and potentially more capable of nimble responses to cascading crises.

It’s no surprise that people are fighting back. An April poll of 2,300 registered voters found that 

 of the Democrats surveyed support politicians “who are calling on Democrats to adopt a more aggressive stance towards Trump and his administration and ‘fight harder.’” Instead, Democratic lawmakers are “

” about such pressure from the people they represent. Constituents in deep red areas have so opposed proposed cuts to social services like Medicaid and SNAP that the National Republican Congressional Committee chair 

 to stop hosting town halls to avoid incensed audiences.

For 18 months, the mainstream media and leading Democrats refused to distinguish anti-genocide protests from antisemitism. Now international students who dared to criticize Israel’s death-dealing in Gaza face detention and deportation. We interview the Cornell graduate student Momodou Taal about his decision to leave the country under the threat of political abduction. These shocking acts of state repression are alerting more people to the ways Palestine has been used as a wedge issue by people for whom Jewish safety has been a useful pretext for a power grab.

Power grabs have come fast and furious in recent months and in multiple forms, from Musk’s chainsaw to the public sector known as DOGE to the rolling back of already inadequate renewable energy commitments and the cross-sector witch hunt against antiracism efforts. This issue details some of the ways people are resisting. We profile newly organized federal workers and learn from filmmakers, artists, and Afro-Brazilian Beyoncé fans who understand that culture, to quote contributor Maddy Clifford, is “essential to building the power to defeat fascism.” And let’s not forget that Los Angeles, a global center of cultural power, was literally ablaze earlier this year. Robin D. G. Kelley writes about recovery efforts in Altadena and the community’s vision for regeneration and new beginnings.

To effectively combat fascism, we need to understand it as an international phenomenon. The British writer Gary Younge considers how Trump and his brethren in England and across Europe fuel movements where “a belligerent sense of whiteness and national identity, beset by economic insecurity, is winning elections.” In South Africa, one such movement has gained steam after Trump condemned a new land reform law as racist against Afrikaners. We talk to Zandile Nsibande, a leader of a shack-dweller movement there, who explains why working-class Black people also oppose the law.

Here in the United States, we can understand the latest government and corporate attempts to roll back civil rights, antiracism, renewed labor militancy, and climate progress as part of a counterrevolution without a revolution, a reactionary response to the promise of the 2020 uprisings. Five years after the George Floyd rebellion, our abolitionist dreams threatened the status quo. Now the right — assisted, as ever, by some liberals — is on a deadly rampage to quash those dreams at any cost. Conservative extremists intend to burn down Washington, abolishing the Department of Education, dissolving the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, and waging a scorched-earth war on antiracism efforts. Poor Black and brown people are already suffering the most, but the consequences will be devastating for almost everyone except the supremely wealthy.

How can we make sense of this onslaught? We asked Black organizers, writers, and academics to consider the state of Black politics and what has changed since the breakthrough in 2020, when millions of people hoped for reparations and racial justice. What happened to the largest and most significant Black movement in two generations? What went wrong in the Black Lives Matter era? Only by answering those questions can we move forward. And we must.

Illustration by Stephanie Santana. Photograph by Warren K. Leffler, via Library of Congress.

White Supremacy Is Apocalyptic for Everyone

o amount of words or pictures can adequately capture the magnitude of the devastation caused by the Eaton fire, and nothing could have prepared me for seeing my old neighborhood of West Altadena reduced to rubble. The burned-out cars, twisted and discolored metal, thick toxic ash, lone chimneys and concrete porches, trees charred beyond the point of regeneration, appeared to extend as far as the eye could see. Accompanied by the brilliant photographer Gabriella Angotti-Jones, I drove up and down familiar streets taking in wreckage while sharing tales of legendary house parties, loving neighbors, prom, jam sessions, my mom and little sister wearing flowers plucked from our yard in their hair, our garage turned artist’s studio. When we turned the corner on Santa Anita Avenue and Poppyfields Drive and saw the remains of what was once my home, only shock kept me from weeping. Gone was the beautiful two-story stucco Janes Cottage house with the cathedral windows, the dark hardwood floors, the wild backyard garden. All that remained was the elevated redbrick porch and the long driveway leading nowhere. The street was eerily quiet as dozens of people in hazmat gear gingerly cleared endless piles of refuse. Even on North Lake Avenue, the main thoroughfare dividing West and East Altadena, where drivers lined up to receive protective masks, gear, buckets, water, and other supplies, there was a solemn quiet, broken by muffled expressions of encouragement and determination.

An undated photograph of the author’s childhood home before the Eaton fire. Photograph by the author.

I left Altadena nearly 40 years ago, but my ties to the place are as strong as ever. As fires raged all around us, light gray ash dusting our streets and filling our lungs, I remained singularly focused on Altadena. On the morning of Jan. 8, I captured the sheer immensity of the Eaton fire, the eastern horizon glowing bright red and orange against a backdrop of dark clouds. It struck me as a terrifying metaphor for the political conflagration that awaited us.

ven before the inauguration, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, and the MAGA crew blamed DEIA (diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility) for the California fires. They circulated screenshots of the Los Angeles Fire Department’s racial equity action plan, accusing it of prioritizing “DEI over saving lives and homes.” They derided Chief Kristin Crowley, the first woman and first openly queer person to lead the LAFD, as a DEI hire, and spewed racist and sexist vitriol at Karen Bass, Los Angeles’s first female and second Black mayor, falsely claiming she shuttled funds from the fire budget to DEIA initiatives — ridiculous claims, but dangerous nonetheless. Anti-DEIA laws are a smokescreen to criminalize antiracism and any effort to protect the rights of women, gender-nonconforming and trans people, and people with disabilities, and to 

 racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, and ableism. One of Trump’s executive orders claims DEIA violates federal civil rights law by replacing “merit” with unearned race-based entitlements. Nonwhite, female, queer, and disabled people occupy positions for which they are not qualified. The real victims of discrimination are white heterosexual cisgender men.

An intact house sits behind a row of homes burned by the Eaton fire off Lake Avenue at the base of the Angeles National Forest on Altadena’s west side, Feb. 5, 2025. Photograph by Gabriella Angotti-Jones for Hammer & Hope.

The response to the Southern California fires demonstrates the absurdity of MAGA’s postracial fantasies. Despite the eruption of 14 different conflagrations across two counties, the story of the 2025 Southern California wildfires is really a tale of two cities: to the west, the Pacific Palisades — a world of celebrities and a few billionaires with means to hire private firefighters to protect their own homes as surrounding properties burned — and to the east, Altadena, a largely working- and middle-class multiracial community with a historic legacy of Black homeownership. Thanks to recent reporting by The Washington Post, we now know that the Eaton fire was first reported around 6 p.m. on Jan. 7. Warnings and evacuation orders were issued an hour later, but only to residents east of Lake Avenue, living in a predominantly white and affluent section of Altadena. By 11 p.m., fires were reported in the largely middle-class multiracial neighborhoods west of Lake. Authorities knew but did not issue warnings or evacuation orders to West Altadena residents until 3:25 a.m. and again at 5:42 a.m.

EPA workers clean up a home on Altadena’s west side, Jan. 31, 2025. Photograph by Gabriella Angotti-Jones for Hammer & Hope.

he Eaton fire killed 17 people, 10 of them Black; all lived west of Lake. More than 9,400 structures were destroyed. Although African Americans account for just 18 percent of the city’s population, 48 percent of Black-owned homes were destroyed or damaged, compared to 37 percent of homes owned by non-Black people. As I write these words, thousands of families are still seeking permanent shelter, applying for aid from the Federal Emergency Management Agency and the state of California, and filing insurance claims. Thanks to deregulation, many Altadenans had their homeowner’s insurance canceled before the fire on account of their proximity to wildfire zones, triggering a scramble for new policies. Now they are facing skyrocketing premiums and woefully stingy claims settlements.

Behind Trump’s anti-DEI spectacle lurk even greater threats to families trying to recover from the fires. Following the Project 2025 playbook, the administration had planned to gut the Environmental Protection Agency and FEMA. It has already begun blocking reimbursements for disaster recovery costs in some states and withdrawn funds for projects aimed at reducing damage caused by climate change. To be clear, the point of abolishing FEMA is less about the devolution of the administrative state than enriching private insurance companies by eliminating government-funded disaster relief. The administration has also cut funding to organizations fighting housing discrimination and rescinded job offers to thousands of federal firefighters on the eve of the summer wildfire season.

Much of the Trump/Project 2025 agenda is really an intensification of five decades of neoliberal policies that have made us more vulnerable to extreme weather catastrophes by reducing federal funding for states, shrinking government capacity by cutting taxes for the rich, and privatizing public assets, such as the electrical grid. In 1978, the passage of Proposition 13 slashed California property taxes, forcing municipalities to cut funding for schools, libraries, infrastructure, and fire departments. Deteriorating infrastructure and a water shortage explain why Altadena’s hydrants ran dry. Of course, policies that have accelerated the climate catastrophe contributed to the surge of wildfires and our increased vulnerability to their impact. And the Trump administration’s agenda of expanding fossil-fuel extraction, repealing regulations on pollution, and withdrawing from the Paris climate agreement and the World Health Organization guarantees bigger and more frequent fires, storms, and pandemics, and an inevitable path toward planetary extinction.

The LAFD, similar to other big-city fire departments, is saddled by outdated and inoperative rigs and a shortage of mechanics to maintain the equipment. The price of fire trucks has risen exponentially, in part spurred by private equity firms buying up manufacturers, cutting labor, and streamlining production, resulting in a backlog of orders and increased demand. The shortage is often chalked up to the Covid-era collapse of the supply chain, but Edward Kelly, general president of the International Association of Fire Fighters, observed that the Covid crisis “was masking what ends up being a main driver of higher cost and lag time in production: the monopolizing of fire truck and ambulance manufacturing in the United States.” Ladder trucks that sold for $1.3 million only a few years ago currently cost about $2.3 million. Chief Crowley admitted in January that some 100 fire vehicles, including 40 engines and 10 ladder trucks, were out of service.

igns declaring “Altadena’s Not for Sale” are everywhere, aimed primarily at unscrupulous developers and private equity firms like BlackRock looking to turn Altadena into the Beverly Hills of East Los Angeles. With land parcels selling above the asking price — investors are paying $69 a square foot or more for lots that averaged $22 a square foot a year earlier — the incentive to sell is high. But the signs remain, along with a determination to rebuild. Altadena Strong, a loose coalition of residents, activists, and architects, and established organizations like Dignity and Power Now are pushing for an equitable and sustainable rebuilding of the community. They want land trusts to keep developers at bay, strong zoning regulations to maintain Altadena’s original character, and protections against displacing longtime Black homeowners. Black activists have helped families raise money and launched a Displaced Black Families GoFundMe directory to help residents recover and ideally hold on to their property.

An “Altadena Not for Sale!” sign in front of a home hosting a donation drive organized by the Bakersfield church The Garden, near the intersection of Glenrose Avenue and West Woodbury Road on Altadena’s west side, Jan. 25, 2025. Photograph by Gabriella Angotti-Jones for Hammer & Hope.

Behind the urgency to save Black-owned homes are two narratives: West Altadena is a thriving Black community, and the greatest crisis it faces is the loss of generational wealth. Both claims are partly true, but if we are to be honest, the Black Altadena I first encountered nearly half a century ago has largely disappeared. In 1980, when I graduated from high school, 43 percent of Altadena was Black, compared to 18 percent today. Altadena is legendary for its high rates of homeownership; three-quarters of Black residents own their homes, a rate equal to whites, who make up 49 percent of the population. Likewise, Latinx and Asian/Pacific Islander residents — 20 percent and 7 percent of Altadena’s total population, respectively — have homeownership rates of 61 percent and 77 percent. But unlike other residents, Black homeowners dedicate a much higher percentage of their income to cover housing costs. Nearly half of Black households nationwide paid over 30 percent of their income on housing, compared to 32 percent for non-Black households; 28 percent of Black households spent more than half of their income on housing, compared to 13 percent for all others.

Our obsession with the loss of Black generational wealth exposes an unspoken paradox: The source of that wealth — rising property values and gentrification — is responsible for the Black community’s evisceration. My colleagues at UCLA produced a devastating study showing that from 2019 to 2023 Altadena’s median home value reached $1,000,000, over a third higher than that of Los Angeles County, and single-family homes purchased in 2023 sold at a median price of $1.2 million. With African American families being priced out, it’s little wonder that only 7 percent of Black homeowners are under 45 years old and 57 percent are over 65.

Generational wealth is individual wealth, not community wealth. And if the point is to 

 generational wealth, then selling property, turning it into multifamily dwellings or whatever it might take to make a profit is to be expected. But if we see the struggle of Black Altadenans to hold on to their land and rebuild motivated only by a desire to build monetary wealth, then we misunderstand what’s going on and what made this community special. For most Black residents, Altadena was never just real estate; it was a promise.

nother narrative circulating on the internet and in the media is that Altadena was unique for its absence of housing discrimination and racism, that it was always a welcoming place where Black strivers could thrive. This is simply not true. Pasadena and Altadena have a long history of racism. In 1914, the year the Ku Klux Klan entered a float in the Rose Parade, Pasadena opened a new public swimming pool in Brookside Park for whites only. The pool was desegregated in 1942 only after the NAACP waged a long fight. The Pasadena Improvement Association was formed in 1939 to “limit use and occupancy of property to members of the white or Caucasian race only.” Its efforts, backed by the local government and Chamber of Commerce, succeeded in segregating the Black community on the west side of town. Freeway construction forced African Americans farther north, where they remained on the west side and with a few exceptions locked out of Altadena until the 1960s.

During the 1930s and ’40s, the Great Northwest Improvement Association, another housing association, informed real estate agents and potential home buyers, “We want our section of Pasadena and Altadena to be a place for white people only.” For the small sum of $5, homeowners could attach a racially restrictive covenant to their deeds and become members of the Altadena Property Owners’ League. By the start of World War II, 80 percent of homes in Altadena had restrictive covenants, and most of these remained even after the U.S. Supreme Court ruled such covenants unconstitutional. Some white residents turned to terror in order to keep Altadena white. In 1956, when word got out that the Reverend James Foshry Scheree, a white minister, planned to sell his home to a Black couple, neighbors set his gas meter on fire. By 1960, Altadena was 95 percent white. Black people accounted for 4 percent of the population, and most of them resided in a canyon situated on the far west side of Altadena known as the Meadows. Among those residents were the renowned radical artist Charles White, whose wife Frances Barrett was white; Wilfred Duncan, Pasadena’s first Black fireman; and a few Communists, including Pettis Perry, the Black leader of the Communist Party of the United States of America. The late Don Wheeldin, a longtime Black Pasadenan and former Communist Party member, told me that there were so many leftists in the Meadows, it was nicknamed Red Gulch.

White resistance to Black neighbors was not unique to Altadena. Throughout Los Angeles County, Black efforts to move into white neighborhoods were met with vandalism, cross burnings, bombings, arson, and death threats. During the late 1950s and early ’60s, cities and towns we now think of as Black or multiracial — including Inglewood, Hawthorne, Gardena, Compton, Lynwood, South Gate, and Leimert Park — came to resemble Birmingham, Ala. In fact, on Sept. 20, 1963, just five days after white terrorists bombed Birmingham’s Sixteenth Street Baptist Church, killing four Black girls, the California State Legislature passed the Rumford Fair Housing Act, prohibiting racial discrimination in the rental and real estate market. Fourteen months later, voters overwhelmingly backed a ballot proposal rescinding the law. It took the California Supreme Court to restore fair housing laws after ruling the repeal unconstitutional.

Seeing the writing on the wall, in 1964 a group of white homeowners calling themselves Altadena Neighbors decided that the best way to protect their property was to accept Black home buyers and, in the words of co-founder Robert Girvetz, “educate the white residents that if they don’t panic and move out there will be no devaluation of their property.” It’s unclear how much influence they had. Not long after Altadena Neighbors formed, Joseph Henry Davis, a Black man who had just purchased a house at 2367 North Holliston Avenue, found a cross with the words “Not Wanted Here” on his lawn.

Pure determination and the 1968 Fair Housing Act created an opening. By 1970, Black residents made up 27 percent of the town. Arguably, the main factor leading to Altadena’s demographic shift was a 1970 federal court order to desegregate Pasadena’s public schools. A court-mandated busing program was enough to send a lot of white families to surrounding cities, such as Eagle Rock and Glendale, or enroll their children in private schools. White flight meant more affordable homes for Black working-class families, artists and musicians, young couples, and even single mothers on public assistance. A decade later, Altadena’s Black population would peak at 43 percent.

Top row, left to right: the author’s aunt Pearl, grandmother Carmen, brother Chris, sister Makani, stepfather Paul, mother Ananda, and the author. Bottom row, left to right: the author’s sister Meilan, Paul’s ex-wife Marie (kneeling) with Idris (her son with Paul) and Michio (her youngest son) on her lap, and Marie’s daughter Nefertiti, Christmas 1982. Photograph courtesy of the author.

hen I left my father in Seattle to live with my mother and my three siblings in Pasadena in March 1977, they were living in a rough neighborhood in a tiny house that she had purchased for about $16,000. Not long after I arrived, she married a white jazz musician, sold the house for $32,000, and purchased the home on Poppyfields Drive for a little over $50,000. We never had much money. My stepfather was going to school for music education, and when he wasn’t playing an occasional gig, he drove a tour bus. My mother was a skilled baker who made organic wedding cakes and opened a short-lived bakery in Altadena called Ananda Bakes, but it did not make enough to cover the rent. And yet we had a great life, surrounded by art and music, neighbors, friends, trees, and mountains. There were no sidewalks, and occasionally we encountered people on horses trotting down the street. The only threat to our safety I can recall was the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department. Living in an unincorporated area, we fell under the county’s jurisdiction, and every Black and brown teenager knew the sheriff don’t play. Teenagers were subject to a curfew, and we were frequently stopped and detained by the sheriffs, who forced us to sit on the ground or stand for what felt like an eternity while we underwent interrogations and background checks.

Music was everywhere. Our community included the pianist Joe Zawinul; the saxophonist Bennie Maupin; the drummer Albert “Tootie” Heath, whose commitment to the community inspired the pianist Richard Sears to compose a five-part suite in tribute to Heath titled “Altadena”; and the trumpeter, composer, and legendary educator Bobby Bradford, whose talented daughter Carmen was my classmate at Pasadena High School. (Carmen went on to enjoy a successful career as a jazz vocalist and was the lead singer of the Count Basie Band.) Our next-door neighbor Arvid Garrett sang with Three Sharps and a Flat and the Ink Spots, and his son Arvid Jr. — we called him Gary — was a brilliant drummer and composer. House parties were funky and frequent. In those days, all you had to do was drive or walk around the neighborhood until you came upon a long line of parked cars. You would just follow the music, walk in, and get on the dance floor — no invitations required, though the person throwing the party reserved the right to kick you out. I’m still proud of the fact that my classmates chose my house party, a GQ Affair on Poppyfields, as Party of the Year!

Tom Metzger, the leader of the California Ku Klux Klan, in his Fallbrook home office after winning a narrow victory in the Democratic primary in the 43rd Congressional District, the nation’s most populous district, Oct. 21, 1980. Photograph via Bettmann Archive/Getty Images.

When I graduated from high school in 1980, Ronald Reagan was on the campaign trail headed to the White House. His election portended dark times — cuts in social spending, rollbacks in civil rights law, an exponential rise in racist violence. That year Tom Metzger, the Grand Dragon of the Ku Klux Klan and founder of White Aryan Resistance, garnered enough votes to win the Democratic primary in Southern California’s 43rd Congressional District. But against this moment the poet and singer Gil Scott-Heron called “Winter in America” stood Altadena. Altadena was the promise of what America 

be, the opposite of oligarchy and fascism, a bulwark against white nationalism and racist terror.

The promise of Altadena was a Black community living inside a multiracial community in which interracial couples were unremarkable, Black kids were kids, not predators, community gardens were for the community, and my hippie mother could walk the block barefoot.

The promise of Altadena was the Omowale Ujamaa School, a fixture from 1971 to 2006, founded by Naima Olugbala, Mshairi Kisenga, and several Black parents seeking to raise intelligent, independent, and proud African children who were taught to “believe in constant struggle for freedom to end oppression and build a better world.”

The promise of Altadena was the resident artists: John Outterbridge; Charles Carter, my sister’s father; the poet Blossom Powe, who came out of the Watts Writers Workshop; my brother’s friend Romye Robinson, who made hip-hop history as a co-creator of the Pharcyde; the choreographer Marjani Forté-Saunders and her husband, the composer and sound designer Everett Saunders; and the musicians John Clayton, Bobby Bradford, Bennie Maupin, Roy McCurdy, Dale Fielder, and Steve Lehman (all of whom lost their homes to the Eaton fire), as well as Patrice Rushen and so many others. They all represent a different source of generational wealth: the cultural and artistic riches that keep us alive and teach new generations to carry on the legacy.

The promise still remains. It can be found in the 

, edited by the former Altadena poet laureate Dr. Thelma Reyna, who was my high school English teacher and responsible for creating three generations of writers. She believes poetry has the potential to make community and free us all.

Nikki High, the owner of Octavia’s Bookshelf in Pasadena, March 20, 2025. The bookstore has become a hub of support in the wake of the Eaton fire. Photograph by Gabriella Angotti-Jones for Hammer & Hope.

And the promise lives in Nikki High, my younger sister’s childhood friend and the visionary behind Octavia’s Bookshelf, the city’s favorite bookstore and a community hub. Even in the face of financial challenges and with her own home threatened by the fire, Nikki managed to turn her modest space into a source for supplies, meetings, and mutual aid. She didn’t open Octavia’s Bookshelf to get rich; it was an act of love for Altadena and its beautiful Black queer artistic heritage.

The promise of Altadena, then and now, explains why so many families held on to their property or passed it on to their children and grandchildren. They never intended to renovate and flip their houses for a profit in order to move to a better neighborhood. They stayed because of something much bigger than generational wealth: community, memory, joy. Why they stayed and choose to remain made me think more deeply about what it means to hold on to a place in the face of colossal destruction, to return home to rubble. Beneath the rubble is land. The land is sacred; it is where ancestors dwell. It holds all our memories close. It is the source of life and renewal.

The dirt pit that what was once the author’s childhood home at 403 East Poppyfields Drive on Altadena’s west side, Jan. 31, 2025. Photograph by Gabriella Angotti-Jones for Hammer & Hope.

Between Fires in Los Angeles and Fascism in America

The U.S. student movement in solidarity with Palestine is facing ferocious repression as the Trump administration revokes student visas en masse. Masked federal agents roam around looking to snatch students and faculty off the streets and send them to jail for their activism, including their mere beliefs. One of the students targeted is Momodou Taal, a graduate student at Cornell University who led pro-Palestine activism there and was suspended twice by the university. A dual citizen of the United Kingdom and the Gambia, he joined another graduate student and a faculty member in 

 the Trump administration for allegedly violating their First and Fifth Amendment rights by punishing speech and quashing political dissent. On March 21, Taal’s lawyers were notified that the State Department had revoked Taal’s student visa after Immigration and Customs Enforcement condemned his “disruptive action” and ICE requested that he turn himself in. Instead, Taal left the country on his own terms, “free” and with his “head held high,” and continues his struggle on behalf of a free Palestine, upholding the Pan-Africanist tradition.

Taal and Hammer & Hope editor Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò

 Thanks for making time to talk. Where were you when you were first politicized about Gaza in particular, and what politicized you?

 In terms of my involvement or awareness of Palestinian advocacy, the earliest recollection I have, just because I searched my name and Palestine on my Facebook and I was posting about Palestine in 2008, so I would have been 15 at the time. It’s something I’ve always kind of been aware of by way of my religion, my faith — I’m a Muslim — but also to do with a hero I looked up to, Malcolm X. My radicalization and politicization always involved Palestine because I had noticed there was a common thread, common theme between so many of the people I looked up to who spoke about Palestine. I remember in 2012, my final history paper before going to university was about Palestine as well. Ever since that moment at 15, I have constantly and continuously been deepening my knowledge about Palestine.

I’ve always had Gaza and Palestine in my mind, and it’s always been a struggle I see as the last kind of stronghold of 500 years of European colonialism. As someone who’s from the African continent and knows what colonialism has done to the continent, I see this as a crystal-clear example. Knowing that colonialism is a global system, I know that Israel is the manifestation of certain colonialism.

 How would you characterize the response from Cornell versus that of the federal administration? What explains the similarities and differences?

 Cornell is emblematic of so many other institutions right now in that they are not realizing that the capitulation to the government — they’ve been capitulating and cooperating, and saying they’re cooperating with the law — often is in contradiction with protecting their students. And it seems so far that they would rather capitulate over protecting their students. But I would say a lot of these universities are actually in lockstep with the government. If Cornell and other universities were taking a stance not to capitulate, not to give up their students, essentially, and take clear, firm stances publicly, I don’t think the federal government would have been able to get away with what they’ve gotten away with.

Cornell is letting me finish my degree remotely so far. So far, so good. That’s a good move, and these universities are trying to navigate this tense climate. The federal government is presenting a mirror to the university in this moment, to institutions, and asking them what kind of place they want to be. Universities, especially in the United States, especially in the Ivy League, have become, for all intents and purposes, businesses. The federal government has targeted that as a weakness or pressure point: They can withhold or threaten to withhold funding if universities don’t do what they want. Given that universities have such large endowments, it would be better in this moment if the universities would, rather than think about profit, think about people and think about their students in this moment, especially those who are in precarious positions.

 Earlier you mentioned both your religion and Malcolm X as a figure you learned from and look up to. Is there a connection you see between the Black struggle generally and the struggle against the genocide in Gaza? Or do you view your involvement in the struggle differently?

 It’s interesting to draw the connections. We have to constantly go back to one of Malcolm X’s last letters, from the day he died, actually: He mentioned Zionism. The official declaration that the UN adopted in 1975 that Zionism is racism was pushed by and backed by several Pan-Africanist leaders. So the struggle for Black liberation for me is inextricably linked to the struggle for Palestinian liberation, and so many of my heroes and leaders said quite emphatically that they recognize Zionism as a form of colonialism. Given that we’re still dealing with the vestiges of colonialism as a system, we recognize it for what it is and see it time and time again. For example, the police that often come back and kill Black people in the streets of the United States are trained in Israel. We find that Israel has been on the wrong side of almost every single African liberation struggle, from South Africa, from Tunisia, from Algeria. So for me, Israel has continuously been an enemy of Black people, and I’ve often held that to be pro-Black is to be anti-Zionist.

 What do you think is the potential of the student movement in the U.S. or elsewhere?

 The student movement is a sign of struggle. If we look at history, student movements have been important to the ideological struggle and keep the struggle alive in many ways. Obviously, it’s not the most important; the most important is the struggle on the ground in Gaza right now and in Greater Palestine, in historical Palestine. But student movements, mass movements have not been on the wrong side of history. This is where we are now.

 What would you say to student organizers now who are facing repression or concerned that they will be targeted, whether in the U.S., in the U.K., or on the African continent?

 I’m not the one to tell people what to do, nor to tell people how to struggle and what sacrifice they’re willing to make. But we have to sincerely have some introspection about the type of world we want to live in. Can we really live in a world in which we witness a livestream of genocide with such a level of impunity? Where every single multilateral institution is rubbished and ignored? If that’s the world we have, fundamentally, that’s the world we have to reject. And what I’ve been saying is that it’s clear that Zionism will do everything to kill. So we must do everything in our means by any means necessary to stop this.

The targeting is expected. But it depends on, for me, whether people have conviction that there will be a free Palestine in our lifetime. And if you have that conviction then you will move accordingly, and that’s how I operate, and I would hope people will have the same level of conviction as well.

 What do you say to critics who question your focus on Palestine, who argue you should be more focused on politics where you live, whether they have in mind the U.S., the U.K., or the Gambia?

 My Ph.D. is on Africa. I work on Africa. I’m a Pan-Africanist, but my Pan-Africanist struggle is a part of a global broader struggle. When we center U.S. imperialism as the primary contradiction, the destruction or the removal or the lessening of the U.S.’s ability to act imperialistically is a net positive for the colonized world. In terms of my struggle, I was in the U.S., so I focus on the U.S. I believe you should struggle wherever you are.

Momodou Taal speaks to a crowd gathered at the Bernie Milton Pavilion at Cornell University, Oct. 5, 2024. Photograph by Karlie McGann/The Cornell Daily Sun.

Momodou Taal, a Persecuted Pro-Palestine Activist at Cornell, on Black and Palestinian Solidarity

 is worth every bit of hype it received after it hit theaters in January. Produced by Issa Rae, written by Syreeta Singleton, and starring the Black Hollywood princess Keke Palmer and the R&B superstar SZA, the film is a hilarious, feminine take on the 1995 cult classic 

. The outlandish events take place over a single day and follow the main characters Dreux (Palmer) and her best friend and roommate Alyssa (SZA) as they attempt to secure their rent money by 6 p.m. In the process they encounter all kinds of shenanigans, including a messy accident at a blood bank, electrocution, getting laughed out of a payday loan spot, and Alyssa’s hoopty being towed, to name a few. Beautiful cinematography, sharp editing, and an all-star cast that includes Katt Williams, Janelle James, and Lil Rel Howery balance out the absurdity of the plot, perfecting the recipe for an all-around feel-good flick.

 explores the kaleidoscope of personalities, practices, and institutions that make the hood a home for the people who live there. Dreux is practical and ambitious but a few credits short of a bachelor’s degree, and making do as the star waitress at a diner chain. Alyssa, whimsical and eccentric, is a talented artist, too distracted by her deadbeat boyfriend and waiting for spiritual signs to formulate a plan to sell any of her pieces. Their nurturing neighbor Mama Ruth (Vanessa Bell Calloway) runs a candy store out of her apartment while Jameel (Dewayne Perkins) braids hair and cracks phones in the courtyard outside of his. Their shrewd landlord, Uche (Rizi Timane), won’t make repairs in their rundown apartment or offer them the grace and courtesy he’s extended to Bethany (Maude Apatow), the clueless white tenant who just moved in. Everyone knows not to fuck with Big Booty Berniece (Aziza Scott), a hot-tempered siren; to fear the local ganglord King Lolo (Amin Joseph); and that the local payday loan spot is predatory. Viewers watch 

 for the laughs it delivers in abundance, but they will find it rich with layers about the class struggles of poor and working-class people of color. If you loved it as much as I did, enjoy those vibes while you can, because I’m not sure when we’ll have another Black, female-led commercial feature like it.

has become a rarity in today’s Hollywood landscape. I’m a cultural critic who’s been covering the entertainment industry for almost a decade from an 

, and what I’ve noticed in the past five years is that the potency of bespoke Black stories is wearing off. Titles made by Black people to intentionally showcase the intricacies of the Black American experience — from frivolous joy to our deepest cultural fears — have been replaced by diverse casting. Black actors and directors are on the top of call sheets for plenty of major projects. But fewer of those projects reflect the complexities and nuances of Blackness itself. There’s a palatableness to recent stories that feels regressive. Perhaps this shift foreshadowed what was to come in our government and corporate policies?

Let’s take a trip down memory lane to the 2010s, when 

the last Black-female-led comedy that saw similar box-office and critical success before 

 — was released. It was one title among a wave of films in the era that zoomed in on an aspect, current or historical, of Black life and received widespread acclaim and viewership. 

 (2016) followed in the footsteps of Dee Rees’s 

 (2011) to illuminate a Black, queer coming-of-age story. It won an Oscar for Best Picture for its efforts. After leaving Sundance with a grand jury prize and the largest distribution deal the festival had seen to date, 

 (2016) grossed $16 million at the box office. It told the story of Nat Turner’s rebellion and intentionally called back to the racist 1915 film of the same title. 

, starring Janelle Monáe, Taraji P. Henson, and Octavia Spencer, ignited a public conversation about introducing Black girls to STEM fields and was one of the most profitable releases of 2017, according to Deadline. Shortly after came Jordan Peele’s 

socio-psychological horror film that managed to transform the genre with its biting critique of white liberalism and won Peele an Oscar for best original screenplay. Barry Jenkins followed up 

 with a tender adaptation of James Baldwin’s novel 

 in 2018, the same year that Spike Lee told the biographical story of the Black cop who infiltrated a KKK chapter in Colorado with 

and Boots Riley tackled the battle between labor rights and capitalist greed in 

On the silver screen, major cable networks found crown jewels in textured Black stories. 

 premiered on HBO in 2016, starring and created by Issa Rae, lauded for its honest depictions of Black women’s unique friendship, dating, and career journeys. Every episode of FX’s 

, created by multi-hyphenate Donald Glover and debuting the same year, was an unpredictable surprise, laced with dry but politically charged humor about Black America. Showtime introduced 

created by the Emmy winner Lena Waithe, in 2018. It humanized the inhabitants of a violent neighborhood on Chicago’s South Side. Experimental content like 

 (2019) showed the infinite capacity of Black creativity. There was a revival of Black family sitcoms like Jerrod Carmichael’s 

 (2017), created by one of the legendary Wayans brothers; and 

 (2018), starring Tichina Arnold and Cedric the Entertainer.

I like to think of this period as a golden age for Black storytelling, offering a welcome reprieve from the onslaught of reality TV and social media content that often lacked artistic depth. All of these shows and films were heralded for going beyond representation and offering layered stories, characters, and perspectives that reflected the fullness of Black culture. Black women were often at the helm, and were allowed to publicly claim their seat at the epicenter of American culture. Issa Rae, Kerry Washington, Viola Davis, Shonda Rhimes, and Lena Waithe became household names for their many groundbreaking projects. The virality of #SayHerName following the 2015 death of Sandra Bland, widely reported stats about the 94 percent of Black women voters who supported Hillary Clinton in the 2016 election, and the female rap renaissance that mushroomed after Cardi B dropped “Bodak Yellow” in 2017 only helped to confirm their status. The white imagination was no longer the sole guiding force in Hollywood.

In some ways, these were the immediate cultural fruits of Barack Obama’s America. Not only was he the first Black president — an emblem of racial representation at the highest order — Obama understood the importance of Black creativity and put his own passion for Black art on display, booking Beyoncé to sing at his first inaugural ball in 2009. It’s no surprise that in his post-presidency he and former first lady Michelle Obama launched their own production company, Higher Ground. The racial justice movement that gained momentum after the killing of Trayvon Martin in 2012 also primed audiences for content that uplifted Black experiences in America.

This momentum carried into the new decade with titles like 

 (2020), starring Issa Rae and LaKeith Stanfield, and Beyoncé’s masterful musical film 

from the year before. Also in 2020, Netflix offered audiences Radha Blank’s 

, with Viola Davis in the titular role. All of these had been in the works in prior years. But then came the racial justice protests sparked by the murder of George Floyd in 2020, which carried on through a global pandemic that brought the entire world, including the film and television industries, to a stop. Companies, including those in Hollywood, made grand commitments to support Black communities and voices. But as time passed, it became clear that these promises were performative.

The racial justice protests fizzled out in the fall of 2020 and Covid-19 delayed production plans for months, even years. Then the Writers Guild of America and Screen Actors Guild labor strikes lasted for several months in 2023, demanding Hollywood executives implement fairer wages, benefits, pensions, and protections for workers. Years of unrest put financial strain on the industry, and among the first shows and incentives to be cut were those that supported the diversity initiatives companies had so passionately endorsed in 2020. Those promises now seemed like mere cover for the true intentions of studios: to capitalize on Black consumers who were ready to keep investing in stories that reflected their lives.

 concluded as planned, but Rae’s follow-ups, 

, were canceled by the HBO offshoot Max, marking the end of her vibrant reign at the network. At Hulu, both Natasha Rothwell’s 

 were canceled, after one and two seasons, respectively, despite being released under the Onyx Collective, an initiative launched by Disney, Hulu’s parent company, to support creators of color. Amazon Prime released the third and final season of 

 in January 2025. None of these studios offered meaningful rationales for the cancellations.

On the big screen, inventive stories, characters, and histories have been set aside in favor of more palatable, sure things. Franchise hits with universal appeal, like 

 (2023) — which faced racist backlash for casting Halle Bailey as the titular character — and music-driven films like the Oprah-backed 

 (2023) reboot and the historical biopics 

 (2021) got big press runs, marketing pushes, and awards nods. The few notable exceptions include 

 Zooming out, we can draw certain inferences and conclusions.

In 2023, there was an exodus of entertainment executives, many of them women of color. Disney’s chief diversity officer, Latondra Newton, and Vernā Myers, Netflix’s head of inclusion strategy, both stepped down from their roles after six and five years, respectively. Karen Horne, senior vice president of Warner Bros. Discovery’s diversity, equity, and inclusion for North America, left the company during its restructuring. Jeanell English left the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences after nearly three years, less than a year after being named the inaugural executive vice president of impact and inclusion.

But even before that, a wave of right-wing sentiment (steeped in barely obscured white supremacy) had swept the cultural and political landscape, culminating in the recent re-election of Donald Trump. The attacks on diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives that the government has launched since Trump’s second inauguration in January have explicitly sanctioned the continuing erasure of diverse perspectives, whether onscreen, in the government, in academia, or in corporate America. Many companies and organizations that once sought to fill the gaps in representation and opportunities by uplifting these perspectives are now being labeled as discriminatory and contrary to merit-based ideals.

We find ourselves now in a political climate that actively denies the realities of systemic racism. Opposition to any rigorous discussion of race or honest grappling with Black history has helped lead to the weakening of anti-discrimination policies that once helped Black creatives gain visibility in Hollywood. The institutional biases responsible for Black lives left dead in the streets and their beds are the same ones that create barriers to access in the entertainment industry and other sectors. A refusal to acknowledge the damaging effects of this racism now fuels the narrative that Black people benefit unfairly from diversity initiatives. New executive orders opposing DEI have emboldened companies to abandon these efforts without consequence. The underlying message is clear: Why should we specify that Black lives, Black education, and Black stories matter? Culture plays a huge role in influencing ideas, opinions, and — if the message is powerful enough — policies and protections. When Black families on TV, Black women in theaters, and Black friendships onscreen become scarce, it helps to foster a culture where Blackness can be easily undermined in real life.

While Black-led stories are far from extinct, it seems like they have certainly been put on a shelf. If history has taught us anything, it’s that the erasure of Black narratives is cyclical and linked to our sociopolitical realities. We’ve had our golden ages before, and we will have them again. It’s up to us to make sure that the lulls don’t claim the progress we’ve made for justice and equality. It’s also on us to remain vigilant and intentional about supporting Black art — because if we don’t, no one else will. But for now, I guess we’re just having another one of them days.

Why “One of Them Days” with SZA and Keke Palmer Is Such an Anomaly

n the evening of July 14, 1967, Geraldine Pointer met Martin Sostre at his Afro-Asian Bookshop on Jefferson Avenue in Buffalo, N.Y., one of two bookstores he ran. Pointer, who usually managed Sostre’s store on High Street, was helping him close up when a dozen plainclothes police officers and FBI agents descended. She thought the men were robbers and tried to pull them off Sostre. Both Pointer and Sostre were arrested.

A mother of five, Pointer was 23 years old and had been dating Sostre for almost a year. She had started working with him because she believed in his vision of empowering the Black community through literature. Sostre was well known in Buffalo: His bookstores had become key to facilitating Black power and community building in the city. In addition to being Black-owned, his bookstores were significant because they symbolized the Black radical tradition in Buffalo. Although Buffalo had active chapters of the NAACP, the Congress of Racial Equality, the Urban League, and other civil rights groups, intergenerational differences and class conflicts divided Black politics along middle-class and working-class lines. Buffalo’s CORE branch publicly rejected the philosophy of Black Power. Aside from BUILD (Build Unity, Independence, Liberty, and Dignity), there were few Black radical organizations in the city. The SNCC newspaper 

 called Sostre’s bookstores “the only disseminator of revolutionary Marxist-oriented Black Nationalist literature, art, and music in the Western New York area.” The educator and storyteller Karima Amin remembered the bookstore as a library where Sostre would allow her to sit for hours reading books without pressure to purchase when she was a student at the University of Buffalo. Sostre’s bookstores anchored Buffalo’s East Side in political education, Black history, and revolutionary ideas, all of which the state viewed as a threat.

Despite dubious evidence framing Sostre and Pointer, including testimony from an 

, the two were found guilty. After a six-week trial beginning in May 1969, Pointer was given a seven-to-15-year suspended sentence for selling drugs and a one-to-three-year sentence for “interfering with an arrest.” The judge denied her attorney’s motion to appeal the $10,000 bail and instructed five guards to remove her from the courtroom. As she looked around and saw the faces of her supporters, friends, and family, including two of her children, Pointer held her head high, raised a clenched fist, and said, “Don’t waste any tears, and please take care of my children. Continue the struggle!”

 Sostre the year before of selling narcotics, inciting a riot, arson, and assault, and sentenced him to 31 to 41 years. Amnesty International deemed him a “prisoner of conscience,” and people across the globe protested his incarceration, leading Gov. Hugh Carey to commute his sentence on Christmas Day in 1975. Sostre was released in February 1976, after serving nine years. He died in 2015, at the age of 92. Now an 

 that I am part of seeks justice for him and for Pointer, pushing the city and the state to acknowledge their violent actions that robbed Black Buffalo of its revolutionary intellectuals, organizers, and community-focused institutions. The 

, has sparked a renewed interest in this history among scholars, activists, and community members. This surge of attention has led Geraldine Pointer to make just one request: assistance with “clearing her record.”

 had been searching for Pointer since I came across her name while compiling the 

, a list of almost 200 sources that contextualizes Black people’s experiences in the city before the 

 at a Tops supermarket on May 14, 2022. I could find little information about her and worried that her story had been forgotten, overshadowed by Sostre’s towering legacy. As a historian of Black women’s radicalism, I am trained to read between the silences of the archive to interrogate what is and is not documented and why. Why had the Martin Sostre Defense Committee, formed after their arrests, not organized under Pointer’s name as well? Why was she considered apolitical when she had left the courtroom with her fist raised? And then I wondered how she had felt being taken away from her five children, and what impact her incarceration had on her personal and political development.

Two years later, my collaborator on the Buffalo Syllabus sent me a flyer announcing the 

 of the Justice for Geraldine Pointer and Martin Sostre exoneration campaign at the radical bookstore Burning Books. Pointer was in attendance. Her radiant energy matched her gold-patterned dress and wooden giraffe cane as she stood with her children and grandchildren. When I said I wanted to write an article about her and join the campaign, she embraced me warmly and thanked me.

This was the first time in my academic career that I would study someone whose personal background overlapped so intimately with mine. After Pointer’s release, she raised her children in the Kenfield-Langfield projects, the same public housing development I grew up in. When I invited my grandmother to a panel discussion I held with Pointer in August 2024, imagine the shock on my face when the two women recognized each other. My grandmother had been friends with Pointer’s two younger children, Exzertios and Christa, as a child, and remembered Pointer as an amazing cook and hairstylist. When I talked to Pointer a few months later, she explained how she had made friends while incarcerated through her work in the prison’s beauty parlor.

Unlike Sostre, Pointer was not well versed in radical literature, nor did she pen political essays or start newspapers. Her relationship with Sostre developed her radical consciousness, however, and led her to work at one of the most revolutionary establishments in Western New York. Pointer’s direct confrontation with the 

 was a proving ground for her politics and dedication to the freedom struggle independent of Sostre. When I think of Pointer’s case, I am reminded of Claudette Colvin, who inspired Rosa Parks and the Montgomery bus boycott — yet her 

age, darker skin, and pregnancy out of wedlock

 meant civil rights leaders and organizations did not view her as the ideal figure to challenge racial segregation. The bravery of Colvin, Pointer, and women like them in the face of racist judicial systems should be honored. We must not forget the sacrifices of the everyday people behind momentous demonstrations and movements.

eing affiliated with Sostre cost Pointer two and a half years away from her children and estrangement from her family and friends. From his prison cell, Sostre wrote that “never in her life” had Pointer “been involved in any criminal activity or arrested for a crime or violation of law.” He protested what had happened to him and his bookstore, which had been “sacked and totally destroyed by the white police agents of the racist power structure.”

The “riot” that Sostre was charged with inciting was the Buffalo Rebellion, which began on 

, when 200 Black locals, primarily residents of the Lakeview projects on the Lower East Side, protested the police’s use of excessive force on two Black male teenagers. It is estimated that the group increased to 350 people by the evening and swelled to 1,500 the next day. Most of the rebels carrying out strategic attacks on police stations, public housing administration offices, and white-owned stores in the area were young people, including high school students. The uprising lasted five nights and resulted in 60 injuries, over 180 arrests, and approximately $250,000 worth of property damage.

Residents’ frustrations extended beyond police brutality to the lack of public facilities, recreational centers for youth, and drug and rehabilitation programs. Unemployment was a particularly difficult struggle in their Rust Belt community. The Black unemployment rate was double that of white people, reaching 16.3 percent in 1960. The Black population in Buffalo had climbed from 

, yet racism, residential segregation, and deindustrialization limited their social mobility. The closing of Buffalo’s major flour mills and manufacturing cutbacks at Bethlehem Steel and Republic Steel disproportionately affected the Black migrants who had relocated to Buffalo for these factory jobs. Sostre’s own employment at Bethlehem Steel had allowed him to make enough money to open his bookstores. Disinvestment, blockbusting, and white flight confined Black residents to Buffalo’s East Side, leading them to be physically separated from white people and trapped in economically disadvantaged neighborhoods. Today, Buffalo remains one of the 

The student newspaper of the State University of New York at Oswego reported that during the rebellion, Sostre kept the Afro-Asian Bookshop on Jefferson Avenue “open all night and spoke to crowds, using pictures from magazines and the white cops, running hog-wild in the streets outside, to illustrate his points about white colonialism and the need for black self-determination and socialism.” It was one of many Black-owned businesses left untouched by the rebels, but the student newspaper found that “the cops smashed the front windows of the store and firemen hosed down the inside of the store, destroying most of the offending literature.”

The FBI had been coordinating with local and state police to monitor the store before Sostre’s arrest. Sostre remembered officers harassing him about the literature he sold, suggesting that he “was looking for trouble” and telling him to sell something other than “communist stuff.” He replied, “I have a constitutional right to sell this, and no one determines what types of books I sell.” Then the police coerced Arto Williams, who was in the Erie County Jail for allegedly stealing an air-conditioner and had visited Sostre’s bookstores, into setting Sostre up as a drug dealer in exchange for release. The day of the raid, Sergeant Alvin Gristmacher released Williams and provided him with a handful of cash, including marked bills. Williams then went to the bookshop under police surveillance and gave Sostre the money, asking him to hold the cash for him; he had his hand in his pocket as he left the store. He later recanted his testimony that Sostre had sold him drugs.

Within a few weeks of Pointer’s and Sostre’s arrests, UB students and organizers with Youth Against War and Fascism, an affiliate group of the Workers World Party, formed MSDC to demand their release. MSDC raised $5,000 for Pointer’s bail, enabling her, a single mother, to return home to her children while awaiting trial and sentencing. While out on bail, Pointer joined other defense committee members in marching in front of the Erie County Courthouse to demand Sostre’s release and helped run the Afro-Asian Bookshop in Exile on the university campus.

When Pointer first appeared before a judge on Dec. 18, 1967, she announced her decision to defend herself. The judge questioned whether she was intellectually prepared to do so. Pointer insisted that she read books and would consult with her lawyer friends on trial procedures, saying, “I don’t think I’ll get a fair trial with a public defender — that’s why I don’t want one,” in a deliberate challenge to the carceral state and a reclamation of her autonomy.

While she was in and out of the courts leading up to her trial, Pointer faced harassment from Child Protective Services, which accused her of “fail[ing] to properly care for her home and its conditions.” The case supervisor even ridiculed her for feeding her children white beans for dinner. Pointer explained that she was making ends meet while waiting for her next welfare check. Social Services mentioned the Sostre case in court proceedings, misrepresenting the bookstore as a place where “narcotics are sold.” Pointer successfully defended herself in family court and maintained custody of her children.

After Sostre was convicted, Pointer worked with the defense committee to request assistance from the NAACP, and Charles T. McKinney of the NAACP’s New York City branch became her defense attorney. (McKinney would go on to establish his reputation among activists when he successfully led the 

 two years later.) The defense committee’s letter to the NAACP explained that Pointer was “only a victim in the police effort to frame Sostre. Her case cannot be understood apart from his,” even though they were tried separately. Even though Pointer took brave stances and was radicalized by her arrest, the defense committee wrongly continued to paint her as a helpless victim in the state’s attack on Sostre, not as another political prisoner. One committee coordinator told

The Buffalo News, “Hers is the classic case of being in the wrong place at the wrong time.” While casting her as an innocent victim was a legal and publicity tactic to garner supporters and pressure the district attorney’s office to drop charges, it overlooked her sacrifices for the movement and the ways she challenged state repression. Other committee members explained that she was “not ‘political’ like Mr. Sostre”; instead, she was “just a woman who is proud of being black.”

McKinney’s cross-examination of Williams and other police officers raised doubts that Pointer had even been present at the time of the alleged drug sale. In his closing statement, he pointed out, “You cannot resist an arrest unless you’re under arrest or told that you’re placed under arrest.” His robust defense sowed hope for Pointer, her family, and her supporters, who were devastated when the jury handed down a guilty verdict.

hen Pointer and I spoke, she said that being forcibly separated from her children was the most challenging part of this ordeal. Her two daughters lived with Pointer’s mother and her three sons were put into the foster system during the two years she was imprisoned. She was granted custody of all her children upon her release but made sure they all went by her children’s father’s last name, Robinson, lest they face bullying because their mother had been locked up.

When she began serving her sentence, Pointer was so depressed that she could not eat anything. “I was so distraught,” she said. “I didn’t want to be bothered with nobody.” But an older inmate named Beatrice Simmons helped her, telling Pointer, “You got to start eating,” because she could be sent away to a mental hospital if she didn’t. She held Simmons’s advice — “Do this time. Don’t let this time do you” — close to her heart as she navigated prison.

While she was incarcerated, both the state and her own family pressured her to accept a plea deal that would free her if she incriminated Sostre by falsely claiming that he sold drugs at the bookstore. Every time she appeared before the parole board, the commissioners repeatedly asked if she was ready to tell the truth — or, as Pointer described it, “tell a lie on this man so he can stay in jail for the rest of his life” — and she steadfastly refused to do so. Her resistance was rooted in her belief that the state had targeted Sostre for his community work. “I knew it wasn’t right for me to tell a lie on somebody,” she told me. Sostre was “doing things in the community, like making sure our community got Black history.” She said the state had “invaded our privacy, arrested us, and charged us with something that we didn’t do.” Pointer’s mother once brought her children to a visitation to try to sway her to accept the deal. She told me, “I ended the visit before it was over because I was so pissed and hurt that she would do that when I told her I don’t want my kids up there. I don’t want them to see me like this. I don’t want to hurt my children.” Back at her prison cell, she remembered “banging and kicking the door,” yelling at the guards to “open this motherfucker.”

Pointer managed to avoid any further encounters with the police or prisons, which was difficult in a city known for its 

 and abusive cops. Although the Buffalo Police Department has attempted to rebrand itself in recent years by sponsoring summer youth programs and recruiting Black residents and other people of color, Pointer’s and Sostre’s cases remind us of the police’s true intentions: surveilling and suppressing the kind of revolutionary ideas for Black liberation outside the construction of the state. It is no coincidence that Pointer and Sostre’s 1967 arrests occurred 0.3 miles away from the 2022 mass shooting at Tops. They were organizing in the heart of Black Buffalo.

It is unfortunate that it took a mass shooting for a racial reckoning, but New York State government pledged $50 million in investments and federal funding to support East Buffalo a month after the mass shooting. Although some residents called for more police officers in the neighborhood and greater security measures, demands for more mutual aid, food co-ops, and community-led initiatives won out. Yet almost three years later, we do not know how that money was spent or 

The exoneration campaign aims to pressure Buffalo to acknowledge the direct role it played in oppressing the city’s Black intellectual and political life. It extends the legacy of the Afro-Asian Bookshops by highlighting the importance of community-centered physical and intellectual spaces as necessary meeting grounds for people to strategize, exchange ideas, and fellowship with one another. A central campaign demand is for the city to return the vacant plot of land where the Jefferson Avenue bookstore was situated to local residents for community purposes. In collaboration with the Buffalo Syllabus, the campaign will run a freedom school focused on systemic issues plaguing Black Buffalo and solutions for imagining an abolitionist approach to community harm and repair. Black Buffalo’s survival depends on recovering what the police tried to steal from us: the revolutionary possibility of community building and political study.

What happened to Geraldine Pointer and Martin Sostre reminds us never to underestimate the lengths to which the state will go to violently attack dreams of Black liberation and the power of everyday people to courageously resist such oppression.

Geraldine Pointer in Buffalo, NY., March 14, 2025. Photograph by DJ Carr for Hammer & Hope.

Who Is Geraldine Pointer?

 guess it’s gotten to me after all,” Russ Schafer conceded, gesturing toward his involuntarily shaking hand. Schafer, who requested a pseudonym in order to avoid workplace retaliation, has worked at the Environmental Protection Agency for more than 20 years. He’s trying to hold on to his job and refused “the fork” — the voluntary resignations pushed by the Trump administration in February, so-called because the subject line of the email to federal employees, “Fork in the Road,” was nearly the same as one sent to Twitter employees in 2022 by the company’s then-new owner, Elon Musk.

“I’m just unwilling to walk away from my work. It’ll take a much bigger bribe to get me to give up on that,” Schafer told me. He lamented that due to decreased funding and staffing at the EPA over the years, he is no longer able to initiate large-scale regulatory efforts or sustain long-term work on “big cases that didn’t generate beans,” as he had in the early days of his career. Nevertheless, Schafer said, “If I’m around and we decide to do something on some of the things I’m tracking that represent a huge environmental risk, I want to be there to do something.”

But tens of thousands of workers have found that neither refusing the fork nor having union and legal protections has shielded them from the mass layoffs. A slew of arcane and clinically termed “reductions in force” is tearing through government agencies. After about 76,000 fork resignations came the illegal terminations of thousands of probationary employees, followed by mass reductions in force wielded against entire offices and departments. The most brazen attack yet came via executive order in late March, putting an end to collective bargaining rights for at least a million federal employees.

The bloodbath at the Department of Health and Human Services, where some 10,000 employees were summarily let go without notice on April 1, bears the sudden and chaotic markings of what have by now become familiar refrains. Dozens of National Institutes of Health employees posted on Reddit: “17 years of service. Entire office let go”; “This was my dream job”; “devastated”; “Ten years of service, I worked my butt off”; “I have a headache that is throbbing. My coworkers and I broke down crying”; and on and on. Now much of the infrastructure, research, and services of the U.S. health system, already frail, are in danger of collapse.

The government is currently at war with what it has vilified as its own “bureaucracy,” in lockstep with Project 2025’s stated aims to outlaw public sector unions and rewrite decades of labor law. In a 2024 

, Russell Vought, a Project 2025 architect and now the director of the Office of Management and Budget, declared: “We want the bureaucrats to be traumatically affected. When they wake up in the morning, we want them to not want to go to work because they are increasingly viewed as the villains. We want their funding to be shut down so that the EPA can’t do all of the rules against our energy industry because they have no bandwidth financially to do so. We want to put them in trauma.”

With Donald Trump in the White House and his billionaire hatchet man, Musk, deployed, the implementation of Project 2025’s vision seems imminent. Trump is attempting the largest order of mass layoffs in U.S. history, eclipsing the worst instances of corporate job cuts. As the country’s largest employer, the government has over three million employees. Decimating this work force will have enormous knock-on effects, and hit those groups disproportionately represented — veterans and African Americans — hardest.

Despite Trump’s now-rote rhetoric about a ballooning and omnipotent deep state, he is waging war on an already diminished bureaucracy. For decades, the federal work force and the programs it delivers have been steadily eroded through incremental bipartisan clawbacks. Government spending as a percentage of gross domestic product was relatively stable in the postwar years, but it began to dive in 1975, dropping from 23 percent to 17 percent today. Meanwhile, public sector workers as a percentage of the labor force have followed a similar decline. 

 among public workers continues to be much denser than among their private counterparts, but it also slipped to 25 percent as of last year, down from 30 percent in 1989.

At the same time, the labor movement has pivoted away from confrontational tactics, like strikes, workplace actions, and mass picketing, effectively tying its own hands in the face of attacks. Mark Smith, a 39-year-old occupational therapist with Veterans Affairs and president of National Federation of Federal Employees Local 1, told me that the federal sector has been like the proverbial frog sitting in a slowly warming pot of water, unaware that it’s being boiled to death. Federal unions and the public at large have allowed decades of underfunding, creeping privatization, and vilification of government employees to go largely unheeded.

But alongside likely historic defeats, stirrings from within the ranks of government employees are providing a spark of hope. As federal unions are engaged in necessary legal battles that may take months or years to wind through the courts, a scrappy but growing Federal Unionists Network has provided a fulcrum for rank-and-file members who don’t want to wait to resist.

What began in 2022 as an ad hoc group of fewer than two dozen union members has grown into an organization of hundreds of active members, a network of more than 15,000 workers, and a developing infrastructure to organize and train leaders within every federal union in the country, just at the moment when the warming pot is no longer tepid. As Smith noted, the executive branch has thrown a bomb into the pot, giving everyone an incentive to do something. The introduction of new forces onto the battleground might succeed in notching a few defensive wins in the present. Perhaps most important, it has the potential to lay the groundwork for a more potent labor movement in the years to come.

As Paul Osadebe, a union steward at American Federation of Government Employees Local 476 and a FUN leader, put it to a couple of thousand federal workers on an emergency organizing call: “There’s no one who’s going to come in and save us at the end of all of this. But you do have the power to save yourself.” Organizing, he explained, is “not some specialized thing. It’s not something that other people do. It’s something that you can do.”

’ve been eating a lot of egg tacos,” Jasmine McAllister laughed, as she explained the daily realities of organizing while unemployed. “I'm spending my energy doing this.” She pointed to the picket of federal workers behind us at New York City’s Federal Plaza. “And trying to remember to pet my cat and see my husband and stuff.” It was just a month before that McAllister had received a termination notice to her personal email, addressed to “[EmployeeFirstName][EmployeeLastName],” the product of a failed mail merge. She was among dozens of Consumer Financial Protection Bureau probationary employees who received identical emails on Feb. 11, part of the first wave of terminations aimed at probationary employees. Two months later, nearly the entire agency was laid off in a legally contested reduction in force.

But within an hour of receiving the email, fired workers got on a video call. “We got fired at 9 p.m.,” she told me. “Ten p.m. we’re like, OK, let’s get out there tomorrow.” By noon they had almost 100 people assembled in downtown Manhattan. McAllister and her co-workers had seen the writing on the wall and had been talking for weeks. That first picket included just CFPB employees. But after a FUN-initiated national day of action on Feb. 19, McAllister and others connected with the network, and through it met workers at other agencies. Their pickets became multi-agency, drawing on the alphabet soup of federal agencies from the SEC to the EPA to the FTC and others.

The organizers who founded FUN first got to know each other in 2022 through a campaign initiated by Chris Dols, president of Local 98 of the International Federation of Professional and Technical Engineers. Dols and a handful of others sought to pressure Congress to confirm President Joe Biden’s Federal Labor Relations Authority nominees. The FLRA governs federal labor relations (as the National Labor Relations Board does for the private sector) but was still controlled by Trump nominees during Biden’s tenure, despite a Democratic majority in Congress. Had Congress pushed to confirm Biden’s nominees, it would have ensured a more union-friendly board. And more important, the campaign’s organizers asserted in a Labor Notes op-ed, the process of campaigning for Biden’s nominees, regardless of whether it was successful, could be a stepping stone to “cohere a national cohort of the next generation of government union leaders — and the years ahead could be full of experiments in creative, local- and member-led federal unionism.”

That’s how Mark Smith first got pulled into the future FUN’s orbit. Dols was making cold calls, reaching out to contacts at union locals around the country about the FLRA campaign. “He just called and said, ‘Hey, how’s it going in your local?’” Smith recalled. And then, Smith explained, Dols just listened. “Classic good organizer, right? And I told him all the problems and all my frustrations and how you feel sort of isolated and under-resourced.” Smith added, “He listened and I talked a lot, and then he talked about this campaign and how I could get involved in it.”

In the end, their campaign did not succeed. Neither did a 2024 run for the national IFPTE executive board by Dols and fellow FUN leader Colin Smalley. But both campaigns highlighted the need to prepare for a future Republican offensive and likely Democratic inaction, and both built networks and organizing infrastructure. “We said it again and again in the campaign,” Dols told me. “We don’t know if it’ll be in one year or in five years or in nine years, but there will be another Republican administration, and they are going to declare war on the federal sector.”

y the time Trump was re-elected in November 2024, FUN had almost 200 members and was growing rapidly. The network’s numbers might have accounted for a tiny fraction of the more than a million federal union members, but as government workers, they had a lot of experience getting things done with few resources. FUN managed to draw thousands of feds, as they call themselves, to more than 20 towns and cities around the country during its Feb. 19 national day of action. The event got a lot of media coverage and made a big splash within the labor movement and among progressive groups. It positioned FUN’s membership as people ready to fight just as “everybody was finally realizing we need to actually fight,” as Dols put it. It would not be enough, he continued, to “keep our head down and hope they just don’t come for us.”

In the weeks that followed, as word spread about the day of action, FUN continued its outreach work, and national unions and progressive organizations like MoveOn and Indivisible promoted the network. FUN has now reached a spread that roughly corresponds with the geographic diversity of the federal sector itself, its numbers have surpassed 15,000, and mass calls — some of which have featured leaders from the national federal unions, alongside AFL-CIO President Liz Shuler and other private sector leaders — have drawn thousands more.

At the heart of FUN’s organizing strategy is what the labor activist and academic Eric Blanc calls “worker-to-worker organizing.” Blanc has argued that if unions hope to turn around labor’s decline, they will need to shift away from top-down, staff-driven approaches. Instead, worker-leaders can be recruited and developed, and can themselves strategize on the ground, gain information and experience, and bring in others to do the same. FUN is raising money and bringing on staff members with experience in this sort of organizing. At town hall meetings of federal workers and on organizing calls, FUN activists break down how to talk to co-workers about organizing. Rank-and-file members share stories about how they organized rallies and actions at their locals, many for the first time in their lives. One union member in Utah — highlighting how little he knew about where to begin — recalled using ChatGPT to come up with a rally agenda. Another union member in Seattle had helped organize science fiction conventions in the past but had never been involved in labor organizing. But in 2025 she and a group of other workers connected through the FUN planned happy hours that became organizing centers for large protests. With this type of organizing, the labor movement can extend its outreach beyond what small numbers of union staffers can reasonably be expected to do around the country.

The ideas that drove the formation of FUN — creative initiatives, a rank-and-file organizing model, and the need for networks and solidarity across the many unions and agencies that make up the federal work force — are critical not only to combat Trump’s charge but also to challenge decades of actions against federal employees and services. Federal workers have never had the same rights as workers in the private sector, and have been villainized by both mainstream parties and numerous administrations. This history created the conditions that allowed the current attacks to happen.

he country’s defining labor law, the National Labor Relations Act, signed by President Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1935, left federal employees out of the guarantees that were recognized for other workers: the ability to negotiate and strike over wages, hours, and conditions of employment. It wasn’t until 1962 that federal unions were even recognized, via an executive order signed by President John F. Kennedy. This recognition was only enshrined into law in 1978 via the Civil Service Reform Act.

But the CSRA guarantees a scope of bargaining only over conditions of employment, while denying federal workers the right to negotiate over pay and benefits. Public sector unions are also required to operate in an “open shop” environment, meaning that although the union must fairly represent all employees, those employees are not automatically dues-paying union members. Government employees had already been denied the right to strike in previous legislation, and are even prohibited from “asserting” the right to strike.

In what became a defining moment for federal workers and the labor movement at large, President Ronald Reagan fired more than 11,000 striking air traffic controllers in 1981. As members of the Professional Air Traffic Controllers Organization, the air traffic controllers made aggressive demands regarding pay and workplace conditions, and they explicitly challenged the illegality of strike actions.

But when Reagan fired the workers and decertified the union, PATCO found itself isolated from the rest of the labor movement and unable to win mass public support. PATCO became synonymous with labor’s historic defeat in the neoliberal era. In signaling to American businesses that it was time to pursue a no-holds-barred strikebreaking offensive against unions, Reagan forced a final nail into the coffin of labor’s retreat — in both the public and private sectors. Greyhound, Bridgestone/Firestone, and other large private companies took their cue from the White House and permanently replaced their unionized striking workers.

The labor movement had been on the ascendancy in the 1960s and ’70s. But after breaking PATCO and with the help of the Federal Reserve, which unleashed high unemployment and an engineered recession, the government was able to effectively suppress union militancy by the 1980s. Union membership steeply declined, and confrontational tactics like strikes were all but retired in the decades that followed. By the turn of the 21st century labor had pivoted to lobbying, legal actions, and an overall defensive, risk-averse posture. In exchange for relative labor peace, bosses were willing to provide modest wage and benefit increases. Unions chugged along, amassing dues and maintaining their own financial health.

Nowhere has this social contract been clearer than in the public sector, where the government offered long-term stability for workers who managed to get into that work force. In exchange, they whittled back funding and increased subcontracting with little resistance, while union leaders largely treated politicians as allies to lobby rather than bosses.

Federal sector locals, Smith told me, “are notoriously sleepy and moribund. There are hundreds of dead locals that were chartered at some point but have no officers or meetings. They just don’t exist. They’re there technically, but there’s no activity.” When Smith first became a shop steward at his local, he found that nobody was talking about the union, and many didn’t know they had a contract or what a union is. “It just sort of felt to me like we could be doing so much more. We have all of these incredibly talented and smart and hardworking clinical staff and health care workers who are just untapped.”

The problem is largely structural. In addition to the legal constraints enforced upon federal unions, the government work force is also fragmented across agencies and unions. The “traditional model of well-defined jurisdictions and unions that avoid stepping on each other’s toes,” Smalley argued in a recent 

, “that can be really counterproductive to building sectoral power in the federal government.”

In response, and in the context of a broadly more passive and disorganized labor movement, federal unions have fallen mostly into a service model of unionism. In negotiations they have emphasized a model of bargaining for the “impact and implementation” of items that have been deemed outside of their purview. They can negotiate over the procedures and processes by which changes are implemented, but not the changes themselves. Absent a vision for how to push against those boundaries — whether that’s through political fights to change the terms of what is negotiable or through creative actions that find adaptable ways to organize within the realm of permissibility — unions are consigned to accepting the rollback of working conditions.

Smith recounted examples of multibillion-dollar contracts to outsource nursing and other jobs in Veterans Affairs. Bargaining over impact and implementation seems woefully insufficient in response. “And then we’ll just quietly go on our way?” Smith asked. “And I’m sort of thinking to myself: That’s it? We’re not gonna take some kind of action or at least talk to the people affected by these decisions, use our union platform as a bully pulpit to raise these issues to the public?”

Trump is attempting to deliver a greater public flogging to the U.S. labor movement than even Reagan’s historic firing of air traffic controllers managed to achieve. He is also operating with few of the niceties that Reagan skillfully weaved into his assault to build public support. Reagan framed the PATCO strike as an act of greedy insubordination and successfully isolated the union. The air traffic controllers, for their part, were militant and confident, but in overestimating their own strength they did little to build public support or practical solidarity from other wings of the labor movement. According to a 1981 Gallup poll, 59 percent of Americans approved of Reagan’s firings, while 30 percent disapproved. More than two-thirds thought air traffic controllers shouldn’t be allowed to strike.

Trump’s March 27 order to end collective bargaining rights for most federal employees, on the other hand, emphasized the president’s individual political agenda. He openly targets unions for “fighting back” against him, filing numerous grievances and obstructing his efforts rather than working with him. He indicated that he will pursue “constructive partnerships with unions who work with” him — that is, those who acquiesce to his agenda. Where Reagan sought legal directives and the support of public sentiment to fuel his right-wing backlash, Trump is using executive orders to confuse and demoralize his opposition.

But federal workers today are much more popular than either Trump or Musk. According to a 

, half of the registered voters surveyed view federal workers positively, while 21 percent view them negatively. The reverse is true of Musk, with 51 percent holding negative views of him and 39 percent positive. Unions, meanwhile, remain the most trusted institutions left in this country. According to an August 2024 Gallup poll, 70 percent of Americans approve of labor unions, far higher than approval ratings for the president, Congress, big business, and the media.

Many people believe the public sector should be doing more, not less. This sentiment is likely to grow as more people feel the direct impact of the attacks. Twenty-seven percent of NBC’s March poll respondents said that they or someone they know had “been negatively impacted by reductions or cuts to federal benefits, programs, or services as a result of changes enacted by DOGE,” and another 14 percent said they or someone they know is a federal employee who had been laid off as a result of DOGE’s attacks.

By taking aim at the whole of public services and government jobs, the Trump-Musk-Vought troika is targeting public services that millions of people depend on: Social Security, veterans’ medical facilities, public lands, and post offices. But the jobs themselves are just as popular. For millions of people, getting a government job has meant that you “made it” — a chance for lifelong work, security, good benefits, and dignity — contributing toward the public good. “Elon Musk and all these billionaires,” McAllister put it, “are like cartoon evil characters of what an evil boss is like. They want people to work at factories and tech workers working 80 hours a week to optimize different things stealing our attention.” They’re trying to create an environment, she explained, to undermine workers’ high expectations of what a job should provide. “The idea that you can have a job where you’re helping people and you have a stable life with normal, humane hours — just the idea that’s the type of job that can exist is very threatening to them.”

Because the government faces public scrutiny and accountability in ways that the private sector rarely has, it has been pushed to use its own hiring practices to chip away at the country’s cavernous racial wealth gap. Today, nearly one in five federal workers are Black, and while it is far from true to claim that government work has equalized the racial wealth gap, it has provided an island of economic security to hundreds of thousands of Black families. A 2020 paper by the Center for American Progress found that the median Black households headed by private sector workers held less than 10 percent of the wealth of their median white counterparts. In the public sector, Black median household wealth climbed to 37 percent of that held by white families. Public sector jobs have provided Black workers — along with women and other constituencies facing persistent labor market discrimination — a ladder into the middle class.

Hammer&Hope

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No. 6

Spring 2025

sounded through

A poem.

Taylor Johnson

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