When They Call You a Terrorist

Have you ever been labeled something so powerful it made you question who you are? In When They Call You a Terrorist, Patrisse Khan-Cullors, co-founder of Black Lives Matter, asks that very question—because for her, being called a terrorist wasn’t just a label, it was an accusation meant to delegitimize resistance, erase history, and destroy hope. Yet instead of despairing, she rebuilt her understanding of identity and activism around love, vulnerability, and truth. She argues that to fight systems of oppression, we must first remember our humanity—and protect it fiercely, even when the world insists we don’t belong.

Khan-Cullors contends that the story of her life—the intersection of poverty, racism, queerness, faith, and community—reveals exactly why movements like Black Lives Matter exist. They’re not born from anger alone; they rise from grief turned into vision. Her book becomes a meditation on how personal trauma and collective struggle can birth a radically empathetic form of resistance.

From Survival to Stardust

The memoir begins with a poetic reflection: she and her people are made of stardust—survivors of centuries of violence who still radiate light. This cosmic imagery connects generations enslaved, imprisoned, or impoverished to something infinite and sacred. It's Khan-Cullors’ way of saying, “we were never meant to die; survival is our rebellion.” Her mother’s endless work hours, her father Gabriel’s addiction and charisma, her brother Monte’s suffering inside the carceral system—all become symbols of endurance. Through them, she learns that defiance can wear the face of love itself.

Her detailed recounting of Monte’s torture in Los Angeles County Jail becomes one of the book’s emotional cores. It reveals how routine violence against Black and mentally ill people is normalized in America. Yet it’s through witnessing Monte’s pain that she discovers her true calling: organizing against systemic cruelty. The shock, she writes, turns into movement.

Love as Resistance

Throughout the memoir, Khan-Cullors insists that love must accompany defiance. Love, she quotes James Baldwin, “takes off the masks we fear we cannot live without.” Whether loving her queer community, her husband Mark Anthony, or the comrades who risked their lives protesting police violence, she shows that love is not sentimental—it’s revolutionary. (Compare this to bell hooks’ All About Love, which reframed love as an ethic of justice rather than mere emotion.) Khan-Cullors uses care as a counterattack to a world that equates hatred with power.

The memoir transforms the idea of leadership: not heroic martyrdom but collective compassion. The founders of Black Lives Matter—Khan-Cullors, Alicia Garza, and Opal Tometi—move beyond slogans. They cultivate healing circles, art, and joy amid mourning. This redefines activism as a sustainable spiritual practice.

The Moral of Being Called a Terrorist

Why is the story called When They Call You a Terrorist? Because the label itself exposes a disturbing truth: America’s institutions often brand Black liberation as threat, while real terrorism—white supremacist violence, mass incarceration, poverty—is ignored. Even Nelson Mandela was listed as a terrorist by the FBI until 2008. For Khan-Cullors, being called a terrorist becomes proof of power: “If they fear our liberation, we must be doing something right.” She reframes what others use as condemnation into a declaration of survival.

Why This Story Matters

This book is more than a memoir—it’s a lens into the architecture of inequality and the possibility of repair. It’s about America’s criminalization of Black existence, but also about making joy and kinship in spite of it. Through vivid experiences—from the raids that shattered her peace at St. Elmo’s Village to the birth of the hashtag #BlackLivesMatter—she invites you to ask: How might you protect someone else’s dignity today? How might you redefine justice not just as punishment, but as healing?

Core Message

You are not the labels used to limit you. You are the stardust that persists, the community that refuses to vanish. And when they call you a terrorist for daring to love your people—you answer with truth, compassion, and action.

Over the course of this summary, you’ll walk through twelve interconnected ideas—from the broken beginnings of her childhood to the birth of a global movement. Each idea builds on the last, showing how one person’s courage can ignite collective transformation, how grief becomes a rallying cry, and how our shared humanity can still, somehow, win.

When Khan-Cullors describes her Los Angeles childhood, she portrays poverty not as an accident but as a carefully constructed condition. Her family lives in Van Nuys, surrounded by working-class Mexicans but patrolled like criminals. Reagan’s War on Drugs defines her environment: helicopters circle, cops harass Black boys, Section 8 housing becomes ground zero for surveillance. Through the eyes of a young girl watching her brothers shoved against walls, she teaches you what institutional trauma looks like when it’s the air you breathe.

Community Interrupted

Her mother Cherice’s labor—working 16-hour shifts at multiple underpaid jobs—represents survival as a full-time occupation. Yet even in exhaustion, Cherice nurtures a moral core: faith, responsibility, and hope. The disparity between Van Nuys and wealthy Sherman Oaks illustrates America’s moral geography: a few blocks away lies abundance most Black families can’t access. Children of poverty walk past homes with pools and manicured lawns they’ll clean but never own. That’s the system she later names as racialized capitalism, akin to Michelle Alexander’s argument in The New Jim Crow.

Personal Terror and Early Rebellion

By age nine, Khan-Cullors sees police raid her home repeatedly, assaulting innocence itself. These moments plant the seed of her future defiance. She learns to remain silent in terror—her initiation into America’s racial caste system. Later, when she is arrested at age twelve for minor weed possession, she understands how the system trains Black children for incarceration rather than opportunity. What might have been teenage rebellion elsewhere becomes criminal in her neighborhood. She writes, “I learned my body was surveillance; I learned my fear was data.”

Lessons of Survival

The message from these experiences is explicit: not all childhoods are allowed innocence. You start to understand that for Khan-Cullors, resilience begins not with empowerment rhetoric, but with endurance. Her family learned to “move on,” she says—because stopping to grieve might mean starvation. From her mother’s refusal to complain and her brothers’ silent suffering, Patrisse inherits a paradox: to survive, you must both feel deeply and hide those feelings to stay alive. Later, she turns this contradiction into fuel for organizing—teaching others that empathy should come before judgment.

“I have lived my life between the twin terrors of poverty and the police.”

This grounding chapter serves as a microcosm of the book’s thesis: communities deemed disposable are exactly the ones capable of the greatest moral clarity. When society interrupts you, as it did Khan-Cullors, reclaiming connection becomes a revolutionary act.

Khan-Cullors’ transformation from frightened child to visionary organizer begins in her teenage years, when formal schooling collides with truth-telling. Sent to Millikan Middle School in affluent Sherman Oaks, she experiences the sharp divide between Black working-class poverty and white privilege. Teachers once praised her brilliance; now they mistake her questions for defiance. It’s here that she learns education can replicate oppression instead of freeing the mind—a discovery echoing James Baldwin’s assertion that becoming conscious means scrutinizing the society that educates you.

Witnessing and Questioning Authority

At Cleveland High, a magnet program centered on social justice, she finally finds mentors who tell her: keep asking questions. She reads Audre Lorde, bell hooks, and Toni Morrison. She studies apartheid, sexism, and spirituality. She even begins interrogating her faith as a Jehovah’s Witness, rejecting a theology that shames women and queer love. Her act of walking out on her mother’s reinstatement ceremony is her first protest—a symbolic refusal to let patriarchy define holiness. (“I want a place of worship that feels honest,” she writes.)

Finding Purpose Through Pain

These questions guide her toward organizing. The Strategy Center, founded by activist Eric Mann, becomes her training ground. She studies Mao and Marx alongside Lorde and hooks, learning that resistance requires moral imagination and structural critique. She is galvanized by the Bus Riders Union campaign, which challenges economic discrimination and environmental injustice. In this crucible she sees how community work can bridge the personal and political—that fighting for bus riders is also fighting for her mother, who still spends hours in transit.

Witness as Action

When her father dies and she organizes his funeral with dignity denied him in life, Khan-Cullors realizes organizing is sacred work. She vows that every forgotten person deserves ceremony, remembrance, and accountability. Her education is no longer academic—it’s experiential, rooted in bearing witness. From her brother’s torture, she learns that seeing injustice is not enough; you must turn sight into amplification.

By redefining knowledge as empathy in action, Khan-Cullors demonstrates that true education—like true faith—must awaken the responsibility to fight for others. That is the education every revolutionary must endure.

The chapters “Zero Dark Thirty: The Remix” and “Dignity and Power. Now.” chronicle how personal agony translates into activism. Khan-Cullors’ brother Monte’s imprisonment and torture by sheriffs becomes her turning point. She recalls reading an ACLU report describing prisoners beaten within an inch of their lives and realizing that the system perfected cruelty on home soil long before Abu Ghraib. Instead of collapsing, she creates art and action.

Art as Political Weapon

Her performance piece Stained uses giant printed testimonies, caution tape, and live movement to embody state-sanctioned violence. Audiences witness simulated solitary confinement, exhaustion, and despair. This becomes the seed for her organization Dignity and Power Now, a campaign to establish civilian oversight of the Los Angeles Sheriff’s Department. (In 2016, her team succeeded.) It proves that creative protest—art that demands empathy—can challenge bureaucracy.

From Individual Grief to Collective Legacy

Monte’s story teaches Khan-Cullors that single tragedies connect to systemic design. American prisons, she argues, are modern plantations—we’ve replaced slave labor with prison work, police raids with slave patrols. Her movement reframes incarceration not as justice but as society’s addiction to punishment. (This aligns with Angela Davis’s call for abolition of prisons and the carceral mindset.) When the system names her family “criminals,” she responds by naming them “survivors.”

The Courage to Organize

Launching Dignity and Power Now marks her evolution into leadership. She learns campaigns succeed not from charisma but from process: listening circles, coalition building, and long-term pressure. When civil oversight is finally won, she frames it not as victory but as beginning. Behind every policy change lies a question she asks repeatedly: “Do you believe you have the power to forge positive change?” For Khan-Cullors, belief itself is the first revolution.

Her activism insists that even the most broken story—Monte’s, Gabriel’s, her own—can become the architecture for transformation.

This section brings you face to face with the heartbeat of her organizing ethos: justice is not revenge; it’s restoration. Power, she declares, must start with dignity.

July 13, 2013 changes everything. In a motel room after visiting a young man imprisoned for robbery, Khan-Cullors watches the news: Trayvon Martin’s killer is acquitted. She weeps, then reads a Facebook post from her friend Alicia Garza: “I continue to be surprised at how little Black lives matter.” Khan-Cullors replies with three words that will become a global emblem: #BlackLivesMatter.

Naming the Truth

The hashtag isn’t branding; it’s a prayer. By saying the unsaid—that Black lives matter—she challenges a moral void. (Like Martin Luther King Jr.’s call for beloved community, it centers love as justice.) What begins as grief online turns into a movement offline, coordinated with Alicia and Opal Tometi, who builds its digital infrastructure.

A Call and Response

Public protests erupt after the deaths of Michael Brown, Eric Garner, Sandra Bland, and too many others. Khan-Cullors organizes the first major Los Angeles march on Rodeo Drive—symbolic confrontation between Black pain and white wealth. She uses a bullhorn to ask brunchgoers to bow their heads for Trayvon’s family. And they do. For one suspended moment, Beverly Hills acknowledges the humanity it’s built atop.

Movement DNA

She and her cofounders build guiding principles emphasizing empathy, affirming difference, queer leadership, and community healing. It’s feminism in motion—non-patriarchal, decentralized, intersectional. Their gatherings integrate poetry, dance, and rest alongside protest. This hybrid form, she explains, is how they prevent burnout and make activism a sustainable way of life.

The creation of Black Lives Matter closes the loop on her memoir’s opening theme: being called a terrorist for loving your people simply proves the power of that love. Each chant, each march, each life celebrated becomes proof that hope, like stardust, cannot be erased.

Later chapters—“Black Futures” and “When They Call You a Terrorist”—extend the story into motherhood, marriage, and global consciousness. Khan-Cullors moves from personal revolution to generational healing. She marries Janaya (Future) Khan, a Canadian Genderqueer activist, and gives birth to her son Shine. Through them, she redefines family as sanctuary—a radical notion for someone raised through eviction, incarceration, and raids.

The Rebirth of Hope

Motherhood transforms her activism. Holding her baby, she writes, “I want to run away to a place where only love lives.” But she doesn’t run. She fights to make love visible in a violent world. Shine becomes her metaphor for the next generation, “our own Black Future.” When Donald Trump is elected, Khan-Cullors admits fear—not for herself but for the safety of communities she’s spent years protecting. Yet even amid despair, she recommits to organizing and self-care.

Sustaining Resistance

Her closing lessons resist nihilism. To survive prolonged struggle, activists must cultivate joy, health, and restoration. She introduces wellness practices into the movement: nutritious meals at meetings, time for exercise, spiritual grounding, and emotional honesty. “We can’t tell people to heal and then send them back into toxicity,” she warns. Activism, for her, must model the world it claims to build.

Redefining Terror and Freedom

In the end, she reframes terrorism itself: it’s not protest that terrifies—it’s starvation, incarceration, and silence. Freedom looks like mothers who work less and love more, brothers who can rest without fear, children who know kindness, and communities that feed rather than police one another. Her last words echo Assata Shakur’s famous chant: “We have nothing to lose but our chains.”

When you are called a terrorist for seeking dignity, remember Khan-Cullors’ answer: choose love as your weapon, truth as your armor, community as your revolution.

This finale completes the memoir’s arc—from fear to power, from isolation to belonging, from imprisonment to healing. Through her story, you see that justice begins, always, with the courage to imagine freedom anyway.