Introduction

has curated and cataloged images of Black political and cultural expression in Bahia, a region of northeastern Brazil. Contributors to the archive have captured moments from mass demonstrations, theatrical and musical performances, festivals and street life in the region’s capital, Salvador, one of the largest Black cities outside Africa. At the center of the effort is Lázaro Roberto, also known as “Lente Negra” or Black Lens. Roberto and two other Black photographers founded Zumví in 1990, just five years after the end of the military dictatorship that had controlled the country since 1964. The archive’s name combines a reference to the zoom lens with the verb “ver” (to see) in Portuguese, signaling contributors’ belief in “the idea that photographic practice bears witness to collective historical events: I ‘saw’ and, therefore, we all sharpen our gaze to see,”

as its 2021 catalog explains. The name is also a play on Zumbi, the historic Afro-Brazilian figure and leader of Quilombo dos Palmares, a maroon community that fought Portuguese and Dutch colonial power in the 17th century.

Born in Salvador in 1958 to a laundress mother and a porter father,

Roberto first picked up a camera while in his teens to photograph performances of his leftist theater group.

The late 1970s kicked off a period of rapid and rich development in Afro-Brazilian culture and organizing, and Roberto used his self-taught skills to record mobilizations and consciousness-raising events held by organizations including the Unified Black Movement, a key formation during this period of “re-Africanization.”

He also photographed workers in historically Black and brown sites, such as the São Joaquim market and the Recôncavo region, offering portraits of the people whose labor made the city run. Roberto and the Zumví Afro Photographic Archive were featured at the 35th São Paulo Biennial,

and his work is included in the Art Institute of Chicago’s permanent collection, among other museums worldwide. Hammer & Hope sat down with him in October 2025 at Zumví’s headquarters in Salvador to discuss his legacy of documenting Black Brazilians' struggle for equality, self-determination, and cultural preservation.

You live in the neighborhood of Fazenda Grande do Retiro, which is also where you were born and raised alongside 10 siblings.

It was a neighborhood without basic sanitation. There was electricity but no running water, so we had to fetch water from a public fountain, springs, or streams nearby. My mother, along with many other women, washed clothes in a stream near a public school in the neighborhood.

When did your interest in photography begin?

In the 1960s, an Italian priest named Paulo Maria Tonucci started working in our neighborhood. He was very concerned about local problems and encouraged people to fight for improvements, not just wait for God to do things. He also started literacy classes for workers at night, a health clinic, and a theater group led by a Black professor named

. Around 1976, at an arts festival organized by the group, I saw some photographs by the photographer and filmmaker Antônio Olavo. I didn’t know him then, but his work caught my interest. It showed the environmental and social impacts of drought in the Northeast of Brazil. Those images stayed with me.

Soon after, I got access to a camera from Geremias Mendes, one of the theater group founders. I started taking pictures of the group. I was both an actor and a photographer. Geremias had a political background and was involved in leftist organizations in Salvador with Father Paulo.

A kids’ sack race in Fazenda Grande do Retiro, Salvador, 1981. Photograph by Zumví member Geremias Mendes.

Paulo was white and European. How did your Black community in Salvador react to him discussing politics and social issues? Was race a barrier?

At that time, we didn’t have much awareness about race, but maybe Father Paulo did. He also brought in Godi, who started to take us to meetings of the Unified Black Movement in 1978. Most meetings I attended were full of people from the arts. When 

 visited Salvador in 1978, she pointed out that the movement was strong in the arts, but less so politically. She said it was important to build political institutions focused on racial issues. Godi always included political and racial topics in our theater group.

Another important thing: In 1974, the all-Black cultural organization 

 was created. By 1976, I was already going to their headquarters, Senzala do Barro Preto, to see Afro-Brazilian musical and dance performances.

How did these experiences shape how you saw Salvador and your place in it in the late 1970s?

That period really changed my perspective. First, there was theater, then Ilê Aiyê. The lyrics of the songs were powerful — they celebrated Black pride and consciousness, encouraging us to embrace our hair. This opened our minds. When Ilê Aiyê started, I met a lot of people and felt more connected to the city and my own identity.

Black aesthetics from the U.S. were already an influence because of TV shows. I remember that around that time, mid-1970s to ’80s, images of Michael Jackson with the Jackson Five began to appear. That’s when I started to see that our hair had other possibilities, right? My father would cut our hair really short with clippers. I didn’t like it. Black women straightened their hair. That was the context in which I was raised. All that changed as I grew up. And when I went to Ilê Aiyê, I saw all this being rejected.

As a young person, did you dream of any particular profession?

In a Black family back then, we weren’t encouraged to aim high. The main goal was to finish high school or maybe take a vocational course in fields like administration, accounting, pathology — things that could get you a basic job. By 1980, I had finished high school and went on to study technical architecture, but I struggled with math and was also working in a school print shop. It was too much, so I dropped out.

I had already been photographing the theater group’s performances using Geremias’s camera. He also gave me magazines and technical information about photography. If I’m not mistaken, he had a Pentax camera. I would buy and load black-and-white film, and little by little I developed my craft even without any technical training.

I took a lot of photos of the theater events we organized at

Primeiro de Maio [a vocational school and community center in Fazenda Grande do Retiro run by Father Paulo]. I worked as a printer at

and Father Paulo brought a camera from Italy, a Minolta XG-1 model with a 50 millimeter lens. I paid Father Paulo for the camera over time and bought the 100 and 200 ASA film I needed. That’s how I started photographing social movements and popular festivals.

Was there a political-racial awareness in your photography from the start?

With a camera in hand, I saw that Salvador was in fact a Black city — something I hadn’t noticed. Photographing people, popular festivals, all kinds of demonstrations, I felt motivated to capture everything that caught my attention. When I saw the developed negatives, I realized I was telling a story, learning from myself. I photographed Afro-Brazilian cultural organizations, religious festivals like Iemanjá and Conceição da Praia. That also sparked my interest in social movements. The demonstrations always intrigued me, also thanks to discussions in the theater group and talks with Father Paulo. Photography naturally led me to documenting those moments, and so I built an archive over a decade, always learning, reading about photography. I didn’t have many mentors — just Geremias. It was a self-taught process.

What is the importance of the equipment in your photography?

When Father Paulo bought the Minolta for me, it came only with a 50 millimeter lens, no zoom. I wanted to try a zoom lens, but it was expensive and mostly used by professionals, since few beginners could afford one at that time. I managed to buy a used one and started experimenting with it.

I discovered I am a shy photographer and don’t like to be intrusive. With the 50 millimeter lens, it was hard, especially for portraits, since I had to get very close to people. The zoom lens allowed me to shoot without being noticed. I remember photographing São Joaquim’s market for a year around 1992. Around that time, an old friend, the historian Jorge Antônio do Espírito Santo Batista, was impressed by some of my photos of the market and suggested we work together on an exhibition. He would look into historical archives to trace the market’s history while I would focus on its workers. Jorge saw the market as a sort of 

 [maroon community]. I centered my lens on the

, a group of workers who made money carrying packages. Some of them asked if I was taking photos to sell them to whites in Pelourinho, a tourist neighborhood in Salvador’s city center. The lens helped me photograph without being intrusive, keeping my distance and capturing the market’s atmosphere.

And when people asked if you planned to sell your photos to whites, what did you answer?

At the time I didn’t say anything. When you go to photograph a Black man or woman, sometimes it happens — they turn their face away. They don’t let themselves be photographed by Black photographers like they do by whites like

Pierre Verger and Mário Cravo Neto, because white people can offer something. As a Black person, I have nothing to offer. My experience as a photographer was marked by that condition.

That’s why people in my neighborhood found it strange to see me in the ’80s with a camera documenting our reality. They called me a tourist — as if I couldn’t occupy that place as a photographer.

For young Lázaro Roberto, what was your intention when photographing? What motivated your choices, and what did you consider important to record?

I tried to do it my way as a Black person. Showing a side I didn’t see white people showing, you know? I wanted to question the kind of work relegated to Black people in this city. Why are there so many Black people working in street markets? That’s a legacy of slavery. Photographing at the market was a learning experience for me. There I found a strong thematic center that included women’s work, African-based religiosity, crafts, and the 

 [a type of sailboat traditionally used in Bahia for fishing and transporting goods].

Although I didn’t see myself as a journalist or professional photographer, I was drawn to the Black aesthetic at home, especially photographing my family, even without full racial awareness. Then the Unified Black Movement gave me that awareness about discrimination against Black aesthetics and why our parents cut our hair short and women hid or straightened their hair. All this pushed me to try not just to respond with photography, but really to document an antiracist perspective and to value Black aesthetics.

Lázaro Roberto at Casa Zumví in the Rio Vermelho neighborhood of Salvador, December 2025. Photograph by Luisa Dörr for Hammer & Hope.

Why did you choose to photograph in black and white?

The first photos I saw, by Antônio Olavo, were in black and white, and that stuck in my mind. Then my first experiences with photography, whether with Geremias’s camera or my Minolta, were in black and white. So I would buy the film and take it to be developed, but I didn’t print the photos on paper because it was too expensive. I would return home with only the negatives and store them in folders organized by date and subject. In a way, I didn’t see my own work [unless it was commissioned]. I worked all through the 1980s like this. This reality changed in 1990, when I took a photographer and lab technician training course and learned how to develop and print photos on paper. That same year, I invited Geremias to help me found the Zumví Photographic Archive in a space in Ribeira. Right after, I set up a darkroom with Geremias’s materials. Later, I managed to buy my own chemicals for developing. Only then did I start to see part of my work printed.

But I wasn’t invited to do any work. It’s as if people didn’t see me. Even after my work started being shown, people in the photography field didn’t call me.

We managed to create a group of Black photographers for mutual support and to share the costs of photographic materials like film and paper; we met on Saturdays to talk photography and have a beer. It was me, Raimundo Monteiro, and Aldemar Marques. We started the group to come up with our own assignments and sell our photos to newspapers. Our message was: If you do something in your community, your neighborhood, please contact the Zumví group and we’ll be happy to document it. And things started happening — people hired us, and even if they couldn’t pay us much, we’d use whatever contributions they could give to buy film.

Over the years, we started being invited by associations, schools, and Black institutions. The Steve Biko Cultural Institute began hiring us, especially in November, which is Black Consciousness Month in Brazil, but also for other events.

We realized we couldn’t create an agency, but it was possible to create a group to document the Black reality of Salvador. Having visited the 

, I started thinking that if one day everything I was doing didn’t work out, I could still build an archive for people to consult. The group’s work became part of our archive. The project lasted four or five years, while the members were still motivated. But with a lack of resources, we couldn’t maintain the work structure, and we stopped in 1994 or ’95. Raimundo and Aldemar left the project but donated their photographic material to our archive. From then on, even with all the difficulties I faced — I lost my job as a printer in 1995 and lost the space Father Paulo had given us — I have kept the project going.

Mandela’s visit to Salvador in August 1991?

I was already part of the Black movement and knew about the committee organizing Mandela’s visit. We knew Nelson Mandela’s story; we knew about apartheid in South Africa and his 27-year imprisonment. The Unified Black Movement published a famous letter against South Africa. I remember the Black cultural organizations also composed songs about Mandela. His visit to Salvador happened mainly because the Brazilian Black movement pressured the Brazilian government to lobby South Africa to release Mandela.

It was something I had never seen in my life. About 50,000 people filled Castro Alves Square to listen to Mandela’s speech. Even people from the interior of Bahia came. I covered it without getting paid. From Zumví, it was me and Jônatas Conceição [an important member of the Unified Black Movement and Ilê Ayiê], who managed to photograph Mandela’s arrival from inside the airport. I covered it from outside.

Today, Zumví’s collection includes all the photos taken that day by me, Jônatas, and another photographer named Rogério Espírito Santo.

Mandela and activist Winnie Madikizela-Mandela, his wife, greet a local child in Salvador, August 1991. Photograph by Lázaro Roberto.

Jônatas’s writings and teachings on the formation of the Unified Black Movement in the late ’70s contributed significantly to the preservation of the Black movement’s history in Bahia. Did he influence your writing of the manifesto “Let’s Save the Memory of the Bahian Black Movement”?

 The death of Jônatas in 2009 had a great impact on me. A few years before, he donated his photo collection to Zumví. By diving into the images he produced, I realized I had in my hands the history of the Black movement in Bahia. Jônatas was very aware of the importance of his photos and of Zumví. At the same time, I started to worry: 

If I die, who will take care of this memory?

 At that time, I kept all the material in my house in Fazenda Grande. That’s when I had the idea to write the manifesto and later to create the Catalog of Black Resistance, which we exhibited at the Afro-Brazilian Museum of the Federal University of Bahia in Salvador in 2018.

in 2013 when my nephew José Carlos Ferreira obtained funds to print and exhibit 30 photos from our collection. Two years later, through more fund-raising, we were able to purchase a computer and scanner and digitize part of our collection. The digitization equipment stayed at my house after the project ended, and we continued the work at home. Only then did I begin to see my own photographs enlarged on a computer screen.

After the digitization of the collection, curators from across Brazil and abroad began to seek you out. The Art Institute of Chicago included your photographs in an important exhibition on art and Pan-Africanism in 2024; the Museum of Modern Art curator Oluremi C. Onabanjo published an essay about your work for the São Paulo Biennial; and you gave lectures and participated in exhibitions at the 

Yes, and better late than never, right? But all this is the result of a lot of persistence and work. Since it’s an archive of Black people in one of the largest Black cities outside Africa, our photos have been used by many people, including licensing for books, exhibitions, etc. Our work has been very well received. The people who liked it most were from the Black community.

Our main goal is to foster Black memory, to make people create their own archives in their communities, neighborhood associations, Candomblé temples.

Lázaro Roberto at the Zumví Afro Photographic Archive’s headquarters in Salvador, Brazil, December 2025. Photograph by Luisa Dörr for Hammer & Hope.

This Afro-Brazilian Photographer Preserves the History of Black Resistance in Bahia

The Democratic Party establishment is living in a state of fear — not about the fascist administration running the country but about the Democrats’ base embracing left-wing politics. Party leaders are so terrified by the victory of democratic socialist and other left-wing candidates in this summer’s primary elections that their smears about “woke” leftists have at times veered into MAGA territory. But the Democrats’ “woke” panic has also intensified a debate on the left about the legacy of the 2020 uprising for racial justice and how to organize today. We asked Hammer & Hope co-founder Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor to untangle the questions.

The victory of socialists and other left-wing candidates during the Democratic primaries this year is terrifying the party establishment — to the extent that self-identified centrist Democrats are attacking some of the party’s nominees in ways that they would have denounced the left for. Why are left candidates winning, and why are party leaders so shocked by that?

 All this hand-wringing about left candidates by Democratic Party leaders is bizarre on one level. The expectation seems to be that left politics won’t appeal to anyone in the general elections in November. But if you look at the success of socialist and progressive candidates in combination with polling around support for universal health care, access to housing, increased public spending, and more, it’s clear that there’s a high level of left-wing sentiment in this country.

That was borne out in the Democratic primary elections. I think that’s what the Democratic Party establishment is freaking out about. They say they’re concerned that the politics of these candidates won’t play in the November general election, and the Republicans will be able to hang on to power in Congress. But I think what they’re really concerned about is that left politics 

 resonate — and you’ll have progressives and democratic socialists in office demanding that the Democratic Party leadership actually do something.

That gets at the structural problem for the Democrats. A lot of liberal pundits attribute the problems that the party faces to poor messaging — that Democrats just lack clarity on what they’re trying to say. But the answer isn’t just hiring the right consultants to get the message right. There’s a more fundamental problem: The party is pulling in different directions.

Mainstream Democratic leaders may believe in some level of government programs, but they reject proposals for universal health care and a bigger vision of the role that government should play in funding social programs.

And on the other hand, you have the left wing of the Democratic Party — either progressives or democratic socialists running on Democratic Party ballot lines — who have a totally different idea of what government should be doing. They want to revamp how government operates to return to something more like the New Deal era.

Whatever you think about these currents in the Democratic Party, the idea that they can peacefully coexist within a single party has been proved false by the past 10 years.

As a party, the Democrats govern with an eye toward protecting and promoting corporate America in the same basic way that Republicans do, but with a marginally greater level of state intervention and without the xenophobia, racism, and nastiness that defines Republican politics today. On the question of economics, they’re in lockstep. The leadership of the Democratic Party is completely beholden to the same interests as the Republicans. The Democratic Party has its own billionaires and its own corporations that it wants to serve. It has its own commitments to the state of Israel and to AIPAC. That creates a structural problem for the Democratic Party because so many people who have traditionally made up the party base are moving to the left.

The Republican Party’s agenda in the second term of Trump is a naked giveaway of wealth and power to the richest and most elite people in the country. The consequences of the rapid abandonment of any kind of regulatory state is right in front of our faces. This summer saw a fucking mass diarrhea outbreak, repeated recalls for salmonella, and other evidence that our food system is breaking down after the Trump administration took a sledgehammer to the federal workforce, including the Food and Drug Administration and the Centers for Disease Control.

Then there’s what Trump calls the Big Beautiful Bill, which is a massive redistribution of wealth from the bottom to the top, paid for by the evisceration of Medicaid and cuts in the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program that have kicked more than 4 million people off food stamps. The actions of the Department of Education have left 9 million people in default on their student loans.

The disaster for working people is obvious, and it’s also clear to see who’s benefiting from the economy and Trump being in power. The primary elections and opinion polling about what people want are a reflection of that. So is this fight within the Democratic Party resulting from the emergence of progressives and democratic socialists offering an actual political alternative.

The concern for the Democratic Party establishment is what to do in a moment like this. The party leadership is committed to a style and substance of politics that is outdated and irrelevant. This is a political crossroads for the Democratic Party.

 It was predictable that MAGA would try to smear all Democrats by denouncing so-called woke politics as out of touch with ordinary people, and mainstream Democratic leaders are using almost the same attack lines in criticizing progressive candidates.

But there’s a debate raging on the left after some left leaders, including Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, tried to walk back their previous support for slogans like “defund the police” in the context of electoral campaigns. Others on the left seem to see that as a betrayal of principle. What do you think? And how do you think the left should respond when faced with these accusations that it’s supporting unpopular positions like defunding the police?

 It’s complicated because we don’t have a common understanding of the issues that we’re trying to assess. This is the problem when you accept the framing of the right, which is what’s happened. Since the mass protests of 2020, the right has engaged in a campaign to redefine the notion of “woke” in order to vilify any government policies and social practices meant to challenge discrimination.

“Woke” has a longer tradition in the Black vernacular of meaning being politically aware. The phrase was reawakened, if you will, during the first phase of the Black Lives Matter movement in the 2010s. The right began to focus on “woke” when its political fortunes were turning sour in the late 2010s, because of the reaction to the first Trump administration.

 administration in presidential history; there were some 60,000 documented protest actions against Trump from 2017 to 2021. This led to a growing popularity of critiques of racism and of status quo politics. Maybe the clearest example of this was the 1619 Project, which was the creation of the New York Times writer Nikole Hannah-Jones. The project put forward the idea that racism, not freedom and democracy, is at the heart of the founding of the United States, so we should see 1619, when enslaved people first arrived to the English colonies, as the true beginning of the nation, not 1776.

This was the high point of a moment when progressive ideas weren’t sequestered to a certain part of the population but had a wide hearing. The response of the right was to reinvent “woke” as a smear, a mocking critique of what the right described as race ideology, by which they meant any sympathy with antiracism. The smear then migrated to gender ideology. “Woke” was used against the acceptance of transgender people, evidenced by the move toward gender-neutral bathrooms and gender-neutral books and the growing social acceptance that people could choose their own gender identities.

The right cobbled this together into a critique of political excess: The left is running amok, trying to force people to believe what they believe and think what they think. It all hinges on the idea that a “woke” critique of racism is about making ordinary white people feel like they’re personally responsible. That shifts the focus of antiracism from a systemic critique back to the idea that individuals are at fault, and the left is just attacking white people. So the current vilification of “woke” was an invention of the right to undermine the growing popularity of progressive ideas and politics and the openness to challenging the status quo, in however halting and uneven a way.

 on the left about the practice of politics — about whether the style of politics that the left has been engaging in has become more of a hindrance than a help to the movement in taking advantage of the new openness to progressive and left ideas.

In 2022, Maurice Mitchell, the national director of the Working Families Party, who played a leadership role in the Movement for Black Lives for many years, wrote a very long 

 called “Building Resilient Organizations.” Two years after the 2020 George Floyd uprising, the article was trying to come to grips with the question of why the uprising wasn’t able to fulfill any of the movement’s goals. A lot of what Mitchell raised had to do with the practice of politics. He wrote about neoliberal identity politics, which

 has also written about: this idea of elite capture, where elites take hold of political frameworks that may come out of popular movements and use them for their own ends.

The slogan that came to define the 2020 protests was “defund the police.” But without any kind of clear political strategy of how to achieve something as ambitious as that, people — out of frustration or just not knowing what to do next — could fall into the moral condemnation of others for not seeing things the way that they saw them. So if someone questioned defunding the police because they weren’t sure what the alternative to policing would do with violence and crime, activists didn’t always address these everyday fears. Instead, there was a tendency to condemn people out of hand for not caring if Black people die.

It’s been six years since the uprising in 2020, and things are in many ways demonstrably worse than they were. Last year was the first year since the uprising that police killings went down. Beyond the issue of policing,

we’ve lost the federal right to abortion; affirmative action has been abolished by the Supreme Court; and there’s a concerted effort to legally wipe out the existence of trans people.

I think the question that people are grappling with now, without necessarily recognizing it, is: How did that happen? How did we go from up to 26 million people in the streets — and not for a one-off No Kings march, but for weeks on end over the summer of 2020 — to this?

I think that’s really the question that isn’t being asked in what we might call the woke wars, which AOC uncorked with her comment about “Woke 1” being crazy. In one part of the left, there’s a defensive reaction; people are asking if AOC and others are dismissing wholesale movements against racism and attempts to deal with the issue of policing. And another part of the left seems to be saying that there were elements of those movement struggles that were useful, but there was also a way in which the practice of politics was alienating.

It’s important to untangle what we’re talking about: Are we talking about the political demands from that period? Or are we talking about a style of politics that did become alienating? Many of the things that Mitchell was pointing out in his 2022 article were genuine. The role of neoliberal identity politics in that period meant that it was common sense in movements to believe that people of color should have the last word in any debate, regardless of what they were saying.

Plus there was a tendency toward maximalist demands. Anyone who wasn’t for the abolition of police without qualification was for the forces of capitalism. Where’s the space for political debate and discussion? For allowing people to engage one another with the intention of persuading people? For making an argument and whatever the outcome of that argument still finding ways to work together? These are some of the questions that still need to be discussed. But the way that this discussion has emerged over the summer, it feels as if people on the left have retreated into camps instead of actually taking up the issues.

 The defund slogan — which the right and liberals want to ask about at every opportunity because it has become a smear — seems to have become the litmus test in this debate on the left.

 Right. I think defund the police is a good example of how what could be an important discussion for the left has descended into camps.

Was the demand to defund the police overreach by the left that exemplifies the political excesses of what people call “woke”? I think that’s a misreading of defund the police and how it emerged as a political demand. It came out of a recent history of the failures of measures to reform police. From 2010 through 2018, there were repeated efforts at reform that failed over and over again to have any significant impact on police violence. In 2020, the murder of George Floyd was just the most recent example of the failure to rein in policing.

The idea of defunding the police was always seen by activists as just one part of a two-part process.

The idea was originally expressed as “divest-invest” — that is, divest from police and invest in the community as a way to deal with the root causes of crime. That’s not particularly crazy or excessive.

But 2020 was a moment — and I think AOC made this observation in her comments — when anything seemed possible. You had upwards of 26 million people in the streets, and there’s a power that comes with that.

Corporate America was bending over backward to 

 as if it were in sync with the movement, and members of Congress were draping themselves in kente cloth and kneeling in the Capitol.

You can see why people would think anything was possible in that political moment, including defunding and even abolishing the police in the near term.

 of the Black Lives Matter movement’s organizing strategy became clear. Because of the dispersed and decentralized nature of Black Lives Matter, there could be demonstrations everywhere, and there was no one in charge who could just turn things off and tell people to go home.

That was important to the wildfire spread of the movement. But it also could be a detriment when it was time to organize an effort to convince people who were open to the idea of defunding the police but weren’t ready to embrace it as a slogan.

I also think the slippage back and forth between the ideas of defunding the police and abolishing the police confused matters. Defunding the police can be taken to mean that you minimize the presence of policing by redirecting funding from law enforcement. That’s different — or at least that sounds different — from abolishing the police. Opinion polling in the moment bore this out.

Support for defunding the police ranged up to the high 40s in the polls, whereas there was no similar level of support for abolition of police. I think conflating those two things could confuse the issue in the minds of activists and in the minds of the public.

Are these ideas that the left should abandon like some elected officials who seem to be running away from them? I think it’s important to have independent organizations that don’t just think of their political strategy based on what is electorally possible at a given moment. At the same time, there’s a real question of whether the slogan “defund the police” has become so distorted after five or six years of haranguing by both Democrats and Republicans that the phrase itself is no longer useful, even if the ideas underlying it are.

That’s important to remember: The underlying argument about defund is that we should be focused on the root causes of crime and violence, and that means we should devote funding and resources to social programs, public agencies, public institutions, and public services. That argument makes sense to me. Polling shows that people want redistributive politics today as much as in 2020, and greater funding for public and social programs was always a part of the divest-invest model.

If any society were serious about ending violence and crime, you could probably deal with 90 percent of the problem by making sure that people lead good lives. And you could devote resources to dealing with the social dysfunction that leads to other instances of violence. The first answer is to provide good housing, good jobs, access to health care, and access to the things that people need. Any society serious about ending poverty, violence, and crime would immediately do that.

But it’s important for the left to remember that defunding the police was never 

 about the invest part either. As a left, we still have to take up the issue of the role of policing in our society. Crime might be a pretext for the police to be present somewhere. But crime is certainly not the reason that the police exist. You can see that in the way that Trump has weaponized the issue of crime to justify deploying law enforcement to different cities. He did this in Washington, D.C., flooding the streets with federal agents and the National Guard. This had nothing to do with crime and everything to do with asserting control. Last September, a week after Memphis announced that its crime rate had hit a 25-year low, Trump ordered the formation of a Memphis task force — a surge of federal law enforcement officers and the National Guard to work alongside the 2,000-member police force in a city of 600,000 people.

This has been an unmitigated disaster. The Trump administration has used crime to justify a military-type occupation of a Black majority city. For those who think we can just move on from the issues of race by emphasizing the class dimensions of inequality in the service of building a mass movement, the United States will always remind you that it’s almost impossible to talk about class in this country without talking about race.

In Memphis, Trump wants people to buy into having their cities occupied under the auspices of safety from the “Black criminal,” but this occupying force is then available to interfere with social movements developing in response to the construction of data centers and in opposition to the abuses being committed against immigrants. Racist policing, justified as the means to protect people from crime, opens the door for a much wider pattern of discrimination and injustice.

The socialist and communist left in the United States has long understood that if you don’t take on the issue of racism, you can’t organize an effective mass movement on the basis of class — not in the United States. This is a multiracial, multiethnic society in which the ruling class has perfected the art of divide and conquer by preying on ethnic and racial divisions — divisions that aren’t natural but that exploit the differences that exist in this country.

In order to get to the heart of this discussion about “woke,” you have to look at how we got to this point six years after having 26 million people in the streets.

What do we learn from that? What do we need to preserve from that moment? What do we need to change? How do we answer the pressing question of how to build a multiracial movement that doesn’t just stop the madness of the Trump administration but also begins to change this violent, vicious status quo, where things are getting so much more difficult for ordinary people? That’s the real challenge that we’re facing right now.

 One critique of the left candidates, particularly those who are directly connected with the Democratic Socialists of America, is that their base is white and middle-class, and Black communities oppose them. How should we look at this critique?

 Let’s start with the question of why DSA is disproportionately white. I think this is a fair question, and there are multiple answers. For one thing, this is a majority-white country, so it’s easy for a lot of organizations and institutions that are not exclusively about race to be mostly white.

But I think the more important question is about the politics of the DSA and whether they make it an organization that should appeal to Black and brown people. DSA is involved in campaigns and projects around affordable housing, immigrant rights and resisting ICE, support for reparations, and more universal issues, such as a living wage and universal health care, all of which are crucially important to Black and brown constituencies. Also, the group does have Black and brown members who have an expressed desire to bring more Black and brown people into the organization.

This is a moment in which the left should be trying to grow. Relative to other left groups, the DSA is quite big, but relative to the political opening that exists in a country the size of the United States, it is actually small. So DSA and the left have to grow, no matter who is joining: white people, Black people, Asian people, Latinos and Latinas.

The idea that came up during the primaries that Black people aren’t actually interested in socialist politics is an old, stupid one that gets brought back every once in a while, usually when socialist organization becomes visible in a more public way.

The first answer is that most people in the world who have identified with the politics of socialism — which are really about redistribution and collective ownership — have been nonwhite.

Some form of socialist politics was evident in the anticolonial struggles of the 1950s and the ’60s and the national liberation struggles that swept across the “colored” world in the ’60s and ’70s. Nonwhite people saw collective ownership, opposition to private property, cooperation, and aspirations for freedom, justice, and democracy as their politics.

What about Black people in the United States? This is similar to the fake issue raised by Democratic leaders that all these socialists will ruin the party’s chances in the November general election. The actual worry of mainstream party leaders is that the socialists will get in positions of power, govern effectively where they can, and put more heat on the Democrats for their inability or unwillingness to be effective.

Similarly, I don’t believe the worry is that Black people aren’t interested in socialism. I think the worry is that the more Black people hear about socialist politics, the more Black people will become interested in socialist politics. That’s borne out in many polls. The people in the United States most sympathetic to socialism are Black people. Why wouldn’t Black people be interested in a politics of collective ownership, based on putting the public’s well-being first — a politics that removes the obstacle of profiteering and profit-making from our ability to lead a decent life?

I think we’re seeing a glimpse of what the future might look like with Angie Nixon’s campaign for U.S. senator from Florida.

Nixon joined the DSA a few months before the primary election she won, and she’s subsequently explained that she’s not a socialist by repeating a lay understanding of capitalism: 

I make money; I own a small business; therefore I’m a capitalist

. But her campaign is indistinguishable from what a DSA candidate would run on: universal health care, demilitarizing the police, decriminalizing drugs, housing for all.

And to the shock and horror of the punditry, her strongest vote totals in the primary came from low-income, working-class Black communities.

The mainstream media’s main observation about supporters of democratic socialists and progressives is that they are white, college-educated, and middle- and upper-income relative to the rest of the population. But I think that Nixon’s campaign shows concretely what Zohran Mamdani’s general election victory in New York City also showed: If you focus on campaigning in Black working-class communities, socialist politics appeal to Black people more than any other demographic in the United States.

Why would we judge something as it is emerging, rather than where it may end up? We can look at the trajectory of Mamdani’s campaign. He lost the Black vote in the Democratic primary. But that didn’t mean that his platform didn’t appeal to Black people. It meant that his campaign had to do politics! What is politics? It’s about engagement and persuasion. That was the 

 Mamdani made between the primary and the general election, to continue to go to Black neighborhoods and communities and make the case for socialist politics.

This is what the bankrupt Black political establishment is afraid of. Given their much-talked-about proximity to Black people, they know that if you come into working-class Black communities talking about the need for rich people to pay anything at all, let alone their fair share, those communities support it. They support using those resources to provide good housing for people, to provide child care and health care, to fully fund public schools, to create city-run grocery stores.

Black people, who are disproportionately working-class

 not only will vote for that agenda but may also take it up as a social movement. The class warfare politics of the Trump administration and the utter ineptitude of the Democratic Party establishment have opened up a huge political vacuum with working-class people, who are the vast majority of the U.S. population.

About half of the households in this country have an income of less than $80,000 a year, and they’re barely keeping their heads above water. Things are gruesome right now, and they’re getting worse every single day. There’s a huge opening, and the real fear of the political establishment is that the socialists will figure it out and walk into it. What it means on the right is a doubling down on absurd levels of racism and bigotry — and when that doesn’t suffice, pure physical repression, as in Memphis and D.C. What it means for the Democrats is seeing the political opening but being utterly clueless about how to step into the vacuum.

That leaves a huge space for the left. But to take advantage of it, we have to figure out what we can absorb from the Black Lives Matter period that is useful and what about the practice of politics has to be left behind in order to build a mass movement that is multiracial and reflective of the entirety of the working class.

The Democrats’ “Woke” Panic and the Left’s Response

n Minneapolis this winter, families went into hiding. Federal agents stalked the streets, the drugstores, the bus stops for their next catch. They brought hell.

But Minnesotans have shown us what you do in hell.

You carry a whistle. You patrol your block for ICE, or walk kids to school, or deliver groceries to those who are trapped. Every neighborhood is on a local Signal chat, and upwards of 20,000 people have been trained as legal observers. Volunteers brew tea for the observers, drive home families released from lockup in the middle of the night.

Civil society formed a front, a rapid-response army on the streets and a supportive underground. People who had never organized or demonstrated before took up constructive forms of resistance. Previous waves of protest over the years sometimes felt like marches to nowhere, with no clear entry point for activism. Minnesota has modeled a movement that anyone — everyone — can join.

No movement ever appears from nowhere. It has been seeded by earlier campaigns and by painstaking organizing work. In Minnesota, it was preceded by years of 

multiracial, interfaith coalition building

 and was supported by a robust institutional left that had already developed muscles coordinating among one another and with the grassroots. And it was inextricable from the movement for Black lives.

A decade ago, in 2015, activists held an occupation outside Minneapolis’ Fourth Precinct for more than two weeks after cops killed a 24-year-old Black man named Jamar Clark. The next year, school cafeteria worker Philando Castile was shot point-blank by police during a traffic stop with his girlfriend and her 4-year-old daughter in the car. When the officer was acquitted, thousands took to the streets, and protesters blocked the interstate. Then, in 2020, Minneapolis police officers murdered George Floyd. The Twin Cities came out first, in force, taking tear gas and rubber bullets; the rest of the country followed.

People faced these atrocities, according to Marcia Howard, president of the teacher chapter of Minneapolis Federation of Educators Local 59, “by actually sitting down and talking to each other — the connections forged from organizations, communities, church homes, neighbors, sitting together and having conversations about how we got to the place we were in.”

“And those conversations, though they were difficult, actually tilled the ground and gave us the opportunity to plant the seed of coalitions that we are now seeing, the tendrils, the growth that has led to the resistance movement,” she told the journalist Luis Feliz Leon in an interview for Hammer & Hope.

Darnella Frazier, who filmed Floyd’s murder, had been one of Howard’s students. The protests pulled Howard into organizing. She ended up spending years at George Floyd Square.

“People do not understand that the current regime has picked the wrong city and the wrong state to fuck with,” she said.

“Operation Metro Surge” was pitched as a horror story starring Somali immigrants, a pornographic right-wing welfare-fraud revenge fantasy against people Trump in December referred to as “garbage.”

But to the country looking on, Trump’s bullshit was completely eclipsed by what happened on the ground. Neighbors wanted to protect neighbors. The lawlessness and violence of the federal agents compelled the participation of tens of thousands of people, including many who do not consider themselves to be activists. Trump officials impugned as terrorists those killed defending their city. In defiance, opposition to ICE continued to grow. In this way, the response in Minneapolis broke through our shared pervasive fear and pierced the veil of invincibility that has emboldened the Trump regime over the catastrophic first year of its return.

The left surely needs to reckon for real with all the ways we’ve truly lost. All the rights and the programs repealed already, all the demands that haven’t amounted to much, the utter fecklessness of Democratic leadership.

But we look to the multiracial Minnesota movement demonstrating a better way to be in this country. People are brave; they will stand up; they want to be a part of it, given the chance. And courage is a magnet. When anyone joins, it draws in others who might have stayed on the sidelines.

“If there’s one big thing every big city could be doing, plant the seed of getting to know your neighbors,” Minneapolis organizer Doran Schrantz told this magazine. “The thing that stops an authoritarian creep is civil society.”

She estimates that a vast majority of the city has gotten involved in some way. “All these people in your mind who you thought were the ones, governor, mayor, philanthropists, elites,” she said. “They literally cannot do it. Only civil society can do it.”

Our thanks to the people and organizations who made it possible for us to publish Issue No. 10:

Ena Alvarado, Billy Brennan, Dana Castillo, Ana Valeria Castillos, Erin Crum, Vicky Fontenelle, Jaime Fuller, Chuck Gonzales, Sandy Byers Harvin, Lameesa Mallic, Shirley Ngozi Nwangwa, Akiba Solomon, Will Tavlin, Eamon Whalen, Allyson Winburn, Critical Minded, and the Economic Hardship Reporting Project.

Darnella Frazier, who filmed Floyd’s murder, had been one of Howard’s students. The protests pulled the English teacher into organizing. She ended up spending years at George Floyd Square.

“Operation Metro Surge” was pitched as a horror story for Somali immigrants, a pornographic right-wing welfare-fraud revenge fantasy against people Trump in December referred to as “garbage.”

But to the country looking on, Trump’s bullshit was completely eclipsed by what happened on the ground. Neighbors wanted to protect neighbors. The lawlessness and violence of the federal agents compelled the participation of tens of thousands of people, including many who do not consider themselves to be activists. Trump officials impugned those killed defending their city against the federal incursion as terrorists. In defiance, opposition to ICE continued to grow. In this way, the response in Minneapolis broke through our shared pervasive fear and pierced the veil of invincibility that has emboldened the Trump regime over the catastrophic first year of its return.

Our thanks to the people who made it possible for us to publish Issue No. 10:

Minnesota Is the Movement We’ve Been Waiting For

In 1964, Brazil’s military leaders carried out a coup — with the support of the country’s upper classes, the Catholic Church, and the U.S. government — against a moderate social democratic president, establishing a dictatorship that would rule Brazil for the next two decades. The new regime suppressed political rights and freedoms, using censorship, persecution, and torture against its opponents. But even as repression intensified in the late 1960s, left-wing resistance to the dictatorship grew.

Helena and Mauro (both are pseudonyms) were in their early 20s when they joined the resistance in Salvador, the capital city of Bahia state in northeastern Brazil. Both grew up in poor, majority-Black neighborhoods of Salvador, a city known for its rich and lived African cultural heritage but also for its stark racial and social inequality. Helena, a medical student, joined Popular Action, a clandestine Marxist organization with Catholic roots fighting for a socialist revolution via armed struggle and made up mainly of students. Mauro became a member of the banned Brazilian Communist Party (PCB), which opted for a peaceful strategy that included labor activism and grassroots mobilization. In this interview with Hammer & Hope, they recall how they became activists, their experiences of clandestine life, and their commitment to a socialist future.

 Brazil’s military dictatorship began in 1964. Your activism began a few years later as the regime’s repression intensified. What brought you to activism?

 In college, my brother got involved in a left-wing organization and introduced me to the other members. It was the Marxist-Leninist organization Popular Action, which was made up mostly of high school and university students, with very little connection to workers at that time. The organization had strong participation from left-wing Catholics. My brother recommended me for the organization’s medical and nursing students section, and they approached me. I started participating in discussions and then joined and became active.

I have to say that watching how my father exploited his employees at his supermarket and bakery also opened my eyes. He’d often force the workers to sign blank documents surrendering their rights. I saw it and thought it was horrible, but I realized that it wasn’t just him — it was capitalism.

My father, who was white, made racist comments about Black people, too. When he’d turn on the TV and see 

, a successful Black singer, he’d say, “What’s that Black guy doing there?” After seeing Simonal on the TV, he’d go into his room, slam the door hard, and go to sleep. Even today, that question of his haunts me. We kids worked in his market, and he’d tell us, “Whenever you see a Black person, follow them, because they’re going to steal.” He never stopped being racist his whole life. But since he didn’t recognize his kids as Black, he wasn’t racist with us. And this was in Salvador, the largest Black city outside of Africa, in a historically Black neighborhood called Liberdade.

 In 1966, in my neighborhood of Fazenda Grande do Retiro, I started participating in a youth group studying under the leadership of two communist Italian priests, Father Paulo Tonucci and Father Renzo Rossi. These two priests had a very particular method: They’d have us read material from weekly magazines about poverty, unemployment, and inequality in Brazil and then question why those realities existed. Over time, we started questioning our own reality in Fazenda Grande and in the city of Salvador, which by that time was already a metropolis with almost a million inhabitants.

My neighborhood was very poor and made up mostly of Black people. Most of the women were housewives, and the men worked at the cattle, sheep, and pig slaughterhouses in the neighborhood, at the maritime docks, or in commerce; very few worked in industry. The poverty was severe. Even though we were living in a big city, we didn’t have running water. My father bought a donkey to haul water from a stream and built a reservoir to keep rainwater, which partially met our needs. There was no electricity, either — houses were lit by candlelight. At one point, my father bought railroad tracks and made the poles himself to bring electricity to our house.

Everything was really precarious. The streets were dirty, and since there was no public transportation, we’d get really muddy going to school and work. There wasn’t a single person who’d gone to college — nobody! My sister Ana and I were the first in the neighborhood to get into university, back in the early ’70s.

I grew up under the influence of my father. He didn’t have great reading skills — he had only studied through elementary school — but he read the newspapers every day and was naturally a socialist, against the exploitation of poor people. He campaigned for candidates supported by the Communist Party and took us along with him. Because of him, I became a leftist, but I didn’t think about being an activist. My expectation was just to get a job and maybe start a family — the expectation of any young person living in the poor periphery. Right after I left the army at 19, I got my first job as a typist at a civil construction company. This was 1964, but I still didn’t think of myself as an activist.

We were raised as white, even though we were mixed race. Our skin is light, but we have curly and wavy hair. My father could be considered white, but my mother was what you’d call 

 [a Portuguese term for people of mixed white and African or Indigenous ancestry]. I never saw my mother discriminate against Black people. But I heard my father make racist jokes. Starting at 15 or 16, I began to push back against him. More than 80 percent of my friends were Black, and the comments he’d sometimes make about them made me feel bad. It wasn’t easy, because he wouldn’t accept my criticism — he’d raise his voice and sometimes get violent with me. But when I turned 18, I started standing up to him and openly following my antiracist values. And over time, my father got better, too.

 When did you decide that you had to be an activist against the dictatorship?

 1968 was a turning point. I was behind in my studies because I’d gone into the army and then had to work, so I went back to high school at 22 years old. I went to study at Colégio Central, which was the center of student mobilizations in the state of Bahia. I joined the student association and the Brazilian Communist Party cell at the school. I became friends with Carlinhos Marighella, the son of 

, a communist revolutionary of international renown who was considered enemy number one of the regime. He was assassinated by police in São Paulo in 1969.

During 1968, my activity was basically student mobilizations, marches, demonstrations. But in 1969, I stepped back from the student movement, because I went to work at Nitrofértil, a fertilizer business that was part of Petrobras, the giant state-owned oil corporation. I started participating in the movement to rebuild ASPETRO, the association of workers in the petrochemical industry. It was a very weak association at that time — only 13 members among more than 1,000 workers and practically inactive.

Within the Communist Party, I was placed in a clandestine cell made up of workers inside Petrobras. The cell included me, Carlinhos Marighella, Sebastião Couto, Ivan Pugliese, and others. Every two weeks, we’d meet with a party leader we called a “black cap” [an experienced militant acting as a contact with the national organization] to discuss the national situation and the daily reality for workers at Petrobras. Our “black cap” leader was Paulino Vieira, a communist from southern Brazil trained in the former Soviet Union who has since passed away. I got instructions from the party to intensify activism inside ASPETRO to transform it into a union with the legal capacity to represent workers in collective bargaining agreements with Petrobras.

There was a lot of persecution against the labor movement at that time. The unions that remained were mostly run by what we called “pelegos” — right-wing leaders linked to the dictatorship. The powerful bus drivers’ and fare collectors’ union, for example, was led by some guy who didn’t understand anything about unions; the bosses basically put him in charge as president because he’d keep his mouth shut. He did whatever the bosses wanted. The leader of ASPETRO was one of those, too.

But even in that situation, we were able to go on a massive recruitment campaign to transform ASPETRO into a union. When I was fired — about three years after I entered the factory — ASPETRO had 800 members. But the Ministry of Labor, which was under military control, refused to grant us union status.

Not being recognized as a union didn’t tie our hands, though. We ran a strong campaign over wages. To be hired as regular workers, newcomers first had to work as interns for a six-month period and then had to pass a test. Once they passed the test, the volume of work was much greater, and so were the responsibilities — like handling complex machinery — but without proportional salary increases from the minimum wage they received as interns. So we mobilized the interns, and they refused to take that internal exam. This was 1973, when I was already a leader of ASPETRO.

The management called a meeting and said they wanted to know why we were refusing to take this test. Whoever spoke up was fired on the spot. I wasn’t fired because one of the managers recognized me as part of a group that wasn’t being told to take the test and asked me to leave. I would have spoken up and been one of the 15 people who was fired that day, but I was saved temporarily. Later more people were fired for showing opposition to the firings.

 The repression became even more extreme in 1968 with the military’s Institutional Act No. 5 (AI-5), which authorized widespread censorship. Anyone who opposed the regime in any way faced the threat of arrest and torture. What was it like living under that constant threat?

 Even before the risk of arrest, there was censorship of books, films, plays, and music. After the 

 by the dictatorship in 1968, censorship became institutionalized. Even famous artists such as 

 were heavily censored. Radio and TV stations were shut down, and you couldn’t vote for mayor in capital cities, for governor, or for senator. Voting for president had ended after 1964. Basically, we could elect only city council members and representatives to the state and national congresses, and even then from just two parties authorized by the dictatorship, the National Renewal Alliance (ARENA) and the Brazilian Democratic Movement (MDB). In practice, everything we’d learned from Marxist theory was being confirmed. The escalation of the regime was a response to growing opposition. AI-5 was a response to the intensification of student and artistic resistance to the regime, especially after the assassination of the student 

 during a protest in Rio de Janeiro in March 1968.

We opposed everything that symbolized the regime. I remember that we rooted for Brazil to lose in the 1970 World Cup, even with 

 on the field. I remember we’d get so angry and upset hearing chants of “Brazil, Brazil!” coming from fans in the street.

In 1969, the regime made two disciplines of ideological indoctrination mandatory: moral and civic education and the social and political organization of Brazil. Even at universities, we were forced to study these, but there was no discussion, no debate, nothing. We on the left wouldn’t go; we’d sign the attendance sheet and leave. To ridicule the disciplines, we called them “Forward Brazil.” That was meant to be ironic — that was the slogan of the Brazilian right at the time, appropriated from the 

 of the victorious Brazilian team from the 1970 World Cup.

Hammer & Hope

Contributions

Forum

Introduction

Forum

Introduction

Forum

Introduction

Forum

Introduction

Issue

11

This Afro-Brazilian Photographer Preserves the History of Black Resistance in Bahia

Issue

12

The Democrats’ “Woke” Panic and the Left’s Response

Issue

10

Minnesota Is the Movement We’ve Been Waiting For

Issue

10

Two Afro-Brazilians Remember the Brave Resistance to a Dictatorship

Issue

10

The Future of Museums in West Africa

Issue

12

Fascists on the Streets of Memphis

Issue

11

250 Years of White Supremacy

Issue

8

This Labor Leader Is Still Organizing After ICE Detention, But From Mexico

Issue

7

It Feels Like Hell on Earth, but Another World Is Possible

Issue

6

Why Is Beyoncé a Political Symbol in Brazil?

Issue

8

Military Coups and the Struggle for Power in Africa’s Sahel Region

Issue

6

Thank You

Issue

9

War at Home

Issue

6

White Supremacy Is Apocalyptic for Everyone

Issue

7

Thank You

Issue

6

South Africa’s Black Working Class Opposes the Land Reform Law That Led Donald Trump to Give White People Refugee Status

Issue

8

Our National Nightmare

Issue

3

A Palestine Resource Guide

Issue

5

Thank You

Issue

4

Atlantic Crossings

Issue

3

This Is America’s War on Palestinians as Much as Israel’s

Issue

4

Thank You

Issue

3

“You Cannot Profit Off Our People’s Blood and Think Students Will Not Come for Your Money”

Issue

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