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Interview of Michaela Brown
No full textLocal organizer and executive director of Organizing Black, Michaela Brown, discusses her emergence as a leader while growing up in the city through involvement in such programs as the Baltimore Algebra Project, Peer to Peer: Youth Enterprises, and the Baltimore Urban League. Afterwards, she talks about how her youth experiences influence her organizing career, first starting out in working to improve education for disenfranchised youth and then moving onto police brutality organizing following the deaths of Trayvon Martin, Mike Brown, Freddie Gray, and Korryn Gaines by police. She then goes on to talk about her experience in Baltimore following the death of Freddie Gray and what she did as well as what she saw others do during the Baltimore Uprising. Finally she talks about the goals and solutions she hopes to achieve through her work as well as discuss the importance of marginalized voices such as women and LGBT members of the community being brought to the forefront of movements such as Black Lives Matter just as much as black male voices.This interview was conducted during the 2021 Interdisciplinary CoLab as part of the project, From the Civil Rights Movement to Black Lives Matter: Oral Histories of the Lived Experience in Baltimore. Transcript is edited.From the Civil Rights Movement to Black Lives Matter: Oral Histories of the Lived Experience in Baltimore
Date: 16 June 2021
Location: Online via Webex programming
Interviewer: Lorra Toler
Transcription: Deysi Chitic-Amaya
Interviewee: Michaela Brown
Length: 00:59:52
00:00:02
Lorra Toler (LT): Hello, this is Lorra Toler from the University of Maryland, Baltimore County’s Summer CoLab Project, “From the Civil Rights movement to Black Lives Matter: Oral Histories of the Lived Experience in Baltimore”. The day is June sixteenth, 2021 and today I will be interviewing Michaela Brown.
Michaela is an executive—executive director and organizer based in the Baltimore area. She has thirteen years of experience in direct-action grassroots organizing. She has served as a vol—as a volunteer with the Baltimore Algebra Project from 2007 to 2012 where she was then hired as the co-director in 2012 and lead organizer in 2013. She later served on the Baltimore Algebra Project board of directors from 2014 to 2016. Michaela also worked as the first coordinator and organizer at the Baltimore Black Workers Center, and led work with Baltimore Bloc from 2014 to 2016, during the time they impacted the Baltimore Uprising, Afromation, and the City Hall sit-in. She currently serves as the executive director and cofounder of Organizing Black where she believes it is imperative to create safe spaces for black organizers to learn and grow.
Her leadership is influenced by the concurrent experiences of being black and a woman, as she believes it is important for people of these identities to occupy leadership positions and organizations spaces. Thank you for joining us today. Uh, my first question for you is what initially brought you to this line of work.
00:01:47
Michaela Brown (MB): Um, that's a good question. So, I think it all stems from me, being a policy debater, starting in middle school and from there that put me in relationship with organizations, like the Baltimore Algebra Project through a coalition called Peer to Peer: Youth Enterprises.
And so, in 2007, they had a, an extravaganza which is when they put on a showcase of all the youth led or run organizations that train the young people in skill sets so like it may have been in a videography, it may have been in tutoring, it may have been in organizing, but the point of the extravaganza was to show young people there are opportunities out here that isn't working at Target or working in McDonalds so forth and so on.
And so from that first extravaganza I became a part of the Peer to Peer Coalition, um, while still working at the Baltimore Urban League, and volunteering at the Baltimore Algebra Project.
00:03:00
LT: Very nice. Um, so in previous interviews, we asked this question, and we got like, mixed answers, so I want to ask what does activism mean to you and, like, how do you define it?
00:03:17
MB: I think I think, so, I was thinking that every organizer is an activist, but every activist is not an organizer. And so what that means is that activism, literally is like the act of raising awareness about specific causes. Where, um, if you think of something like an advocate, an advocate is a person who advocates on behalf of people who may not be able to speak for themselves. So that could be a lawyer, you can even think of lobbyists as advocates, because they go to the hill and they advocate on the behalf of the people for certain bills, right?
And then you have organizers who are trained in a skill set that, and it can vary across the board because you can be a digital organizer, you can be a direct action practitioner, you can be a labor organizer and they have a very specific skill and niche in things that they organize around to raise awareness to train the community in and to advocate on the behalf of folks who may not be able to speak for themselves.
But organizers, typically, or the goal should be for them to create a space for the community to speak for themselves and train them in the areas that they feel may be useful and beneficial for the community to be able to achieve the goal that they want to achieve so it goes beyond just posting on social media or making, you know videos or things of that nature. It's literally being in the community training people, maybe or maybe not creating an organization that there is around the organizer and so that would be a dif—[audio cuts out]
00:05:15
LT: So, what specific issues are you working to change in the community as an organizer and then how have you gone about doing this?
00:05:25
MB: So, over my career—if that's what we want to call it— as an organizer that has been different. So when I started out I was in education and youth job— that sounds weird— but essentially, I organized for young people, whether that was around education or employment. Um, and so education is about being able to get what was considered a quality education, so to go beyond what is provided to young people now, particularly in public schools, and make sure that, you know, schools had adequate funding, they had properly prepared teachers, schools had air condition, adequate food that, like, there was a whole list of things that we talked about as education organizers to show people that it goes beyond just what happens in the classroom. There are a lot of things that impact young people that, that has an effect on their education and their ability to get it.
Along with youth jobs, which was around the conversation about providing skill based employment to young people beyond just youth works. Instead of telling young people to go work at Mcdonald's, the idea is that young people will get employed to work at the Baltimore Algebra Project, or Youth as Resources or Wide Angle Media and a whole list of other nonprofits that would give them an actual skill that they would be able to build upon through the program and at a high school.
Um, especially since a lot of our high schools now do not provide trade education anymore and so then from there I went into police organizing or like police brutality organizing. So, after leaving the Baltimore Algebra Project, I ended up at Baltimore—what is it—Bloc, Baltimore Bloc, where they focus specifically on police brutality and supporting the families, who were impacted by the crimes of police officers and that was a natural transition based off, like, where we were in the world with things happening around us, like Trayvon Martin, Mike Brown Freddie Gray, Korryn Gains.
00:07:45
Um, and so I was doing that while also being the first coordinator and organizer at Baltimore Black Workers Center and their focus was around, similar to like the algebra project, so figuring out what the community needs work and how we could uplift those needs and organize and provide the skills around that and now at Organizing Black, our focus is in three main areas. So participatory governance, which is the idea that the citizens of Baltimore have the skills and the know how to be able to decide a policy agenda, the budget so forth and so on for our city. We don't need this very heavy top down approach that doesn't actually engage the community around what we should be budgeting for, how our city should run, things of that nature and that ties right into our defund the police campaign, which is around the idea that we Baltimore City.
Surprisingly enough, we don't have control over the police, but we provide the largest portion of their budget and so, if policing was looked at as any other job, they would be seen as inadequate, right? They do not perform at the level in which they should perform. However, the budget increases every year. So, our goal is to decrease that budget and put it back into the community and areas in which would actually solve the things that police are claiming they're supposed to solve, right? So we all know that police are not a deterrent to crime and more importantly more policing doesn't solve homelessness, it doesn't solve the poor quality education, it doesn't solve food deserts or any, any things of that nature, right? So if we decrease that part of the budget, right? The part of the city budget that gets the most funding and then we put it in areas like education, mental health, housing we would then be able to see and show that policing isn't the answer to the issues that we see in our communities?
I mean, so we've broken that down into two parts, we're asking for a thirty million dollar, like, community trust from where the community literally decides what happens with that thirty million dollars and the other seventy goes into in a sense funding the apparatus that will respond to quality of life issues that police are currently responding to, like, you know, mental health, vagrants, see things of that nature and make it so that they're like, quality, trench social workers. So, like, and that's that's a complicated piece there, but, like, there are people who are actually trained and informed on and the responses we need to deal with, you know mental health crisis versus police who are not trained and if they were to respond, and then there's more community violence because the police officer has now harmed someone who was literally in the middle of an episode.
And then our third piece is around education and so we are currently a part of a coalition that is fighting for an elected school board. So we are, we either are the only one or one of the few areas in Maryland where the school board is not elected, our school board is appointed and so that then impact—those people have an impact on the decisions that are made about our students. However, a lot of those people don't live in our cities or their children don't go to our schools. So, the idea is that we should have people who are elected by the community that sit on the board instead of these appointed individuals who have no relationship if you will to the community to then be able to make better decisions for Baltimore City education.
00:11:50
LT: Thank you. So you discuss policing and your campaign to defund the police, so how do incidents racial injustices, directly impact community life and what long term influences do these have?
00:12:10
MB: I think that if we look at history, maybe as someone with a degree in history— that is what I went to school for— we know that we know a couple of things. So one, that black, brown and poor communities have always had a relationship of tension between them and police. Two, we also know that policing as we see it today is a direct, is direct correlation or in direct relationship to slave catchers and so that means regardless of the amount of training that police officers go through, regardless of the amount of community events, that police try to put on or participate in, the very foundation that policing was built on is a racist institution.
Right? And so what that means is in its current iteration police can never not be non-racial, right it, it literally is built on the concept of race and so it has literally had an impact on our community since then. From slave patrol days to now there is a long deep history of the way that police do black children like, for example, we know we've literally been in conversations with former police officers who have said it, and it's also in data that police officers view black children as older, at least by two years than what they are compared to their white counterparts, that alone is not something that can be untrained. It's little I don't know how it's been ingrained in the way that policing occurs, but that is a a clear example of how it has an impact on our communities where we are told, or viewed as black men or black women when we're really thirteen year old boys and girls right?
I mean that can have an impact on how the media, and even how people in the community view the crime and who is involved in it and so there are a lot of areas in which this, you know, the view of race and racism and policing impacts how we have conversations about crime, how we view crime. Why is it whenever we talk about crime, especially when we talk about black on black crime, which isn't a thing because race on race crime exists because our communities are still hyper segregated, whether we want to call it that or not. If you look at cities across the country, the overwhelming majority of cities are still segregated by race, intentional or not, because it can still be connected to things like red lining and making sure that black people stayed in certain communities, they couldn't get access to other communities, do public transportation and things of that nature.
You know, that you have interactions good or bad with the people in close proximity. So, for most black communities, that would be black people, because that's how the communities are designed, but we don't have those same conversations about other racial groups right? The overwhelming majority of white people live amongst white people, the overwhelming majority of Asian folk live amongst Asian folks so forth and so on. But the only demographic that has the title, or a name for the crime that is committed in their communities are black folk, black on black crime and so all of that impacts how police view us, how the media view us and the conversations that even we have amongst ourselves about the, the violence in our communities and so. There's no amount of training that can— you can't unlearn that unfortunately at least not through one training, not, you know, “Oh, I've been through one year of racial justice training as a police officer. Now I'm fixed”.
No, the institution is much much older therefore it's going to take something much, much larger than, you know, some pockets of racial equity training here and there to be able to change the way that our community, our community see police, and how police see us.
00:16:25
LT: And then earlier you had brought up Freddie Gray, um, if you felt comfortable, could you talk about, like, what it was like, in Baltimore City at that time and how that experience was?
00:16:39
MB: I think, so for me in particular, um, in a sense, I would say that I was better prepared than most and the reason why is because I happen to be an organizer who was already dealing with these conversations with folks around the country and also with other families who have experienced similar things in Baltimore that didn't get the same like national profile as Freddie Gray’s murder.
I think that at that time in Baltimore, just like in many of the other places that we saw before and after Freddie Gray, but that was the tipping point. Our communities, especially like, so I'm someone who grew up in Western district, I literally could walk from the house that I grew up in to Freddie Gray’s home.
Um, and so growing up in Western district, knowing the type of police they are, that literally was the tipping point for that community. Freddie Gray wasn't the first and unfortunately, it wasn't the last they had to deal with the, the brutality that police, that particular police department inflicted on that community and so people were tired and got up, and there's something about it and I know that people have their opinions about whether or not what happened during the uprising is what should or should not have happened.
00:18:11
But people did what they felt like they needed to do to be able to make sure that there was a conversation that happened in Baltimore, even nationally about policing and the brutality that black, brown and poor communities face at the hands of the people who are supposed to protect and serve us. So, during that time, tensions were high.
There was a lot of, there also was a lot of very positive community things that happened in the midst of the uprising, conversations happen. You know, there was dancing in the streets during the curfews. All types of things that that often times get missed when having the conversation about the uprising, people often only want to discuss, like, the CVS that caught fire, or the fire that was in Patterson Park, or any of the, any of the other things that are, quote/unquote seen as violence, instead of discussing, like, the community conversations that came out of out of it, or the, the way that the community figured out how to get medication and food to the elderly folk that didn't have access to any of those things because the curfews that were placed on our communities, there was some really great and dope programs, organizations and formations that came out of the uprising that has been able to lead to like, community gardening right? And having the conversation about who does this in our communities, and how we can do what we need to do, like urban farming to make sure that our communities have fresh fruits and vegetables.
Um, and that wasn't something that was necessarily taking place prior to the uprising or not at larger scale. Um, and I think what was in terms of for me, I think the hardest things to grapple with during that time, was one of the fact that I was in the middle of taking finals in college, and I had to explain to my teachers, like, “I'm not going to be here because I need to be out there.
00:20:26
Some teachers understood because they already knew what I was about and other teachers didn't care, but that's another conversation in terms of, like, you know, how schools or not just schools, but institutions to do a better job of supporting students, workers, whatever it is when it comes to you know, trying situations in the communities that we live in, or are part of. I think the other hard thing was. I mean, literally having to deal with the police. So I think about the march that happened that led all the way to Oriole Stadium, where it ended up being like, this large barricade of police who decided it to be violent towards the protesters, but did nothing about the white uh, baseball goers, I guess is what we can call them behind them that were literally saying racial slurs and spitting at people and throwing alcohol on, on the protestors who were literally just trying to get people to hear their plea around the issue of police brutality.
And I think in the remnants of the uprising, there's still a lot of things that haven't improved, despite all the things that happened on the uprising, our government still hasn't really been moved to do anything about the issues that were brought up during the uprising and, like, a good example would be the fact that the city council just unanimously passed the budget for fiscal year 2022, but did nothing to cut policing right, and so that is a very clear sign about where our government officials stand and where the community stands in terms of what we think should be done about police and police brutality in our city.
00:22:31
LT: So, what does civil rights mean to you?
00:22:41
MB: I mean, I think it means, I think that civil rights is the stepping stone or cornerstone to the movement that we see right now, in terms of Black Lives Matter, the movement, not the organization.
Um, I think that if it wasn’t for the people, the organizations, whether we're talking about the people, you know, who didn't get highlighted for the Civil Rights era or those who did. If it was not for the blueprint and their footwork around issues of like voting rights and the other things that they were fighting for at that time, I'm not sure that the Black Lives Matter movement today would be where it is. I think that civil rights has definitely progress beyond, you know, or maybe, so, I think overall it is about black people or poor people or brown people, so marginalized as people being seen as people, being seen as individuals who have an impact on influence, you know, in the world as it is today, in society.
I think on smaller terms, if we think about, like, you know, what we're often taught about on civil rights. I definitely think it has progressed beyond voting rights. Right? It's it's about things, it's about that and more, because unfortunately, even in 2021, there are people who still have to fight for the right to vote or the right to accessible voting. So, even though they can vote, there are all these things in place that still doesn't give them adequate and equal access to it. Um, and so it goes beyond that in this day and age, because we're talking about things like police brutality.
We're talking about things about, like, housing and red lining again and gentrification and we're talking about health with an inclusion
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