Revolution interview with Collette Flanagan 

Building for the Month of Resistance to Mass Incarceration in Dallas: Not very "Southern and Polite"

August 4, 2014 | Revolution Newspaper | revcom.us

Revolution Interview
A special feature of Revolution to acquaint our readers with the views of significant figures in art, theater, music and literature, science, sports and politics. The views expressed by those we interview are, of course, their own; and they are not responsible for the views published elsewhere in our paper.

Li Onesto recently talked with Collette Flanagan, from Mothers Against Police Brutality in Dallas, Texas, and also a signatory of the call for the October Month of Resistance to Mass Incarceration, Police Terror, Repression and the Criminalization of a Generation. Earlier this year, when Revolution interviewed Collette Flanagan, she told the story of how her only son, 25-year-old Clinton Allen, was murdered by a Dallas cop on March 10, 2013. It was after this horrible police murder that she founded Mothers Against Police Brutality, which has been working to get justice in the many, many cases where the police just execute people in cold blood and are never even indicted, let alone put on trial and punished.

Revolution: Today I’m talking with Collette about the work she is doing in Dallas to build for the Month of Resistance. And in particular I’m talking with her about a very, very successful event that she organized on June 20 where Cornel West spoke.

Collette, I first met you in New York City at the end of April, at the national strategy meeting for the Month of Resistance and it looks like you got busy right away, didn’t wait a second, putting out the call, making plans, and getting others on board to be a part of organizing to carry out and make real the whole vision of the Month of Resistance. So maybe you could start off by talking about what the idea was behind the June 20 event, why you thought it was important, and then how you went about organizing for it.

Collette Flanagan: I think it’s very important for people to understand their own demographics, their geography, their local politics, who are the leaders, who have the titles who are leaders who are not leading. For me, I understood very early on in this process that no one was coming. No one was getting on the white horse, the leaders did not want to touch anything relating to police brutality. Everyone was washing everyone else’s hands, they would not get involved. Even the churches did not want to get involved because of a lot of the subsidies that a lot of the churches get from the city. And a lot of our Black and brown leaders that we have faith in and have put in offices to represent our communities have gotten entangled financially with the city. In other words, their own political gains and political alliances would not allow them at their own discretion to get involved. So they would turn a blind eye to police murders.

So I knew very early that I needed to organize and that there were other mothers out there like me and other families—that it’s so important to build coalitions. I understood very early on, although Clinton was my only child, my only son, I have a daughter—I loved him and I still love him very, very much. But as much as I loved him and wanted to get justice for his murder, no one really cared about him being murdered because a Black man’s life in this society is not worth anything to most people. And even in our own communities we have become desensitized to Black men being murdered, it’s almost like, “Oh, that’s what happens to Black men, they get murdered.”

So I thought that it was very important to start organizing, making phone calls, and doing it grassroots. I really admired what Obama did, and that was getting the students involved. I think the students are a very important key to organizing because they don’t have the attachments that we do—they don’t care about jobs and titles and political alliances. They just understand that something is wrong and they want it to be right. So we reached out to a lot of students which was very successful for us, that was one of the first things that we did and we organized and we energized that base.

Revolution: I’d like to hear more about that, but maybe first you could go back and talk about what was the idea for the event itself. When you thought, OK, if we’re going to make the Month of Resistance happen in Dallas we gotta get some people together here. What was your whole concept of the event?

Collette Flanagan: The event, we named it Community Matters. Dr. West and I had talked about the history of Dallas and how there had really never been a civil rights movement in Dallas. A lot of the pastors got together back in the ’60s and met Dr. Martin Luther King on the tarmac and turned him away—they said we don’t want you here. They said, the Blacks here like the space that they’re in and all get along, we don’t want what’s going on in Mississippi or Birmingham. So Dallas never fully had a civil rights movement. So the Blacks here have become very complacent basically with, hey, we live in the South—this is just kind of the way it is, institutionalized.

So what I envisioned was having a—we had done some very bold moves here that weren’t very Southern or polite in our movement and we’re known for being right there on the edge, but still peaceful.

Revolution: Like what? Give me one example.

Collette Flanagan: Like the District Attorney, he’s never talked to the families when murders happen, he thinks he’s above the fray. He’s a Black DA and he’s not talking to you because “if I talk to you I’ve got other families might want to do the same.” So we just protested at his house and people were like, “Whoa, you protested at the DA’s house?” And we were like, hell yeah, he’s an elected official, he didn’t have that position for life. If he won’t come to talk to me about my son being murdered I will come to you. He had a tailgate party and we went to the tailgate party and we protested. Outside of the box things that we’ve done to let people know that, listen, we’re not going away, you’re going to have to deal with this. And with that, when I met Dr. West, our synergy was so high—Dr. West had been kind of salivating for years to get his hands on Dallas, he knows what’s been going on. And so we were just talking about how... you’ve got to remember Dallas is a city that has many mega churches, Bishop Jakes is here, TD Jakes is here, the entertainer Steve Harvey is here. We have Black Dallas Cowboy players that get stopped by policemen and harassed all the time. Nobody ever says a word, they’re just glad to get away with their lives. We have a lot of Black influential men who live here but who never, ever, ever will say a word about anything.

So I envisioned that we would bring Dr. Cornel West in, and he was exactly up for the job and to talk about how much our community matters and how the church is obligated to be involved. Churches say they don’t want to be political and yet they let candidates come and talk about, please vote for me. You are political already. And so Dr. West was the perfect fit for that, nobody else would do that because they don’t want to step on anybody’s toes.

So basically the message was crafted and we talked about it—how dare you live in this community and have these families into your churches and organizations that have sons that you know are being targeted by policemen because they are Black and brown—how dare you take their tithes into your church and then say that you cannot be involved. He challenged them and it needed to be done. He challenged white people, Black people, brown people, and I knew that he would be doing it and so the challenge for us was to make sure that we got people there to hear. And so we stepped out on the limb and we went on this media firestorm in getting the students involved, we recruited social media people, we were tweeting all the time, we got some of the mega churches to push out that this was happening. I mean, how can you say, no I can’t send this with Dr. West coming, I can’t promote this. So we kind of backed them into the corner. We really spent a lot of time promoting the event, a lot of calling, we did phone banking. We had a group of about 12 that was the push-out group, we all had a responsibility and then from that 12 we had four people that were responsible for colleges, ok. And then from those four people then there were like 13 more people who came off that. So it grew but we kept a board of advisers and that was what was so important. Because I knew that when you allow everybody to come in and then ask them what should we do, you never really get anything done. You should have a plan already, invite everybody in and say this is how we’re gonna do it, let’s get it executed, now what are some of your ideas on execution, but this is what we’re doing.

We pretty much had it planned out and so we were just pushing it out and getting people. We told people, look, there are different ways you can donate. We send letters out, if you can’t come or can’t donate to the cause, you have a say: print shop, can you print up 500 invitations, can you print up 500 envelopes and go back and ask the next print shop to print 500 more. We basically had everything paid for through donations just simply by asking and that was really cool. A lot of people think you have to have a lot of money. We did too, we were kind of scared—oh my god, we have Dr. Cornel West and we have no money! So we just got really creative and we started leveraging and asking and sending emails and we put our time into crafting really good-looking emails to ask people to donate and we gave them things that they could donate to us, like if you can’t send $250 or $100... and we strategically targeted them, if we knew that they had a print shop or that they did graphics so we would ask for some of their time. And then we had another committee that would follow up with these people after they would agree to help us. So we had like a little machine going, it was fantastic.

Revolution: Can you talk more about the students? Because like you said, they are key, they have the time, the energy. I know this is a big question all around the country; if the Month of Resistance is going to be what it needs to be, in the next couple of months, as school starts, we gotta really get these students in the house in a big, big way.

Collette Flanagan: Sure, I think the way to engage the students—right now everybody is off, they’re getting ready for school. But the thing that we did was we found three or four presidents of different organizations at a college and they gave us a list of all of the other organizations. And so even, like right now, we are fashioning a letter to these organizations because students are young and they want to be important—and they are important. And they’re right in between that young adult thing and they want to be treated like adults and we send them a really nice letter, making them know how important they are and we go out and meet them. We go out sometimes and meet two or three organizations in one week. We’ve been doing conference calls this month, and all of August is going to be dedicated to doing conference calls with the presidents and vice presidents of these organizations and pushing out emails and setting up when we can come and talk with the organizations when they’re having their first meeting—we’re trying to get in on their first meeting.

Revolution: How many student organizations were represented at the event?

Collette Flanagan: About 13.

Revolution: So it’s off this, getting those 13 and others, basically making plans to have meetings at the different schools to launch different efforts around the Month of Resistance.

Collette Flanagan: Absolutely. What we’ve done is taken the 13 and we’ve put them on a council, and you know some of them fall off. But we’ve taken the 13, we’ve made them very, very important and we’ve already had one, we’re going to have a conference call with them—tell them how important they are, the magnificent work that they did with getting the word out with Dr. West coming and this is what we need to keep our momentum going. So we’re using the 13 group to push out not only to their organizations, but to push out to the other organizations. And then we’re going to have within that group... one of the things on the agenda is that we want them to identify professors that will sponsor us—because if you get a professor to sponsor what you’re doing they’re going to let you come into their classes and speak. And if you can come into their classes and speak you get to leave all this literature and they have classes for like five days or whatever. So that’s how we’re using the 13 organizations that we have now, to use them to reach out to the other organizations and it’s working pretty good so far. We’re hoping to get more, but even if the 13 just reach out to two or four, that’s tripling the size of the organization.

Revolution: This is mainly colleges you’re talking about here?

Collette Flanagan: Yes

Revolution: What about high schools?

Collette Flanagan: We have some high schools. High schools are really a little different. The thing with the high schools is you get the parents. So we’re identifying now, we got only three high school students, two are from the same high school and we’re trying to figure out how to work with them with getting more students involved and we’re waiting for school to start so they can give us a syllabus, things that they’re having, registration. So we’re kind of waiting for that but high schools are a little different, it’s a little bit more work but we’re going to do it. And the commitment level is a little lower in high school because they’re not as mature and they’re not thinking about anyone’s going to bother them. But the ones that usually come out of high school are usually really committed, they’re usually the mature ones.

Revolution: And these are a lot of the ones who are the target of the police and facing a possible future of being incarcerated.

Collette Flanagan: Yes! Absolutely, but they’re the hardest group to get but we’re going to set up so that some college students can go talk to high school students. And they can use their organization to get into the schools, so we got to get them to leverage that in that way.

Revolution: I want to go back to the June 20 event with Cornel West for a bit—I don’t think you’ve mentioned yet in this interview how many people attended.

Collette Flanagan: It was 1,187. I had said, I thought if we get 500 that would be great, that would be huge for Dallas. Of course, secretly in the back of my mind I would want like 100,000. But our goal was 500 solid, and people just kept coming and coming and coming. We just couldn’t believe this—where are all these people coming from? They just kept coming. And we had it at a huge church and we were really debating on having it at this church because we didn’t want it to look so empty if it didn’t get filled. And we had thought about having it at another place that held 600-700 people and there we wouldn’t have had enough room.

Revolution: Can you talk about who was in the house?

Collette Flanagan: Sure. We had the county commissioner, we had a police sergeant on the police chief board, we had pastors, city councilmen, state representatives, attorneys. We had students, white liberals, white progressives. The mixture was wonderful. We had people drive up from Houston, from San Antonio, from Austin. It was great.

Revolution: It sounds to me like this became “the event that no one could miss” and it’s kind of interesting because from what you are saying it seems like even the establishment felt they had to be there.

Collette Flanagan: Yeah, absolutely. And we were bold enough to invite them. We even invited the mayor. We knew he would not come because we have an absent mayor. We knew he wouldn’t come but we wanted it on record to invite him because it’s part of a strategic move for later. Of course they sent a little letter that he wanted to come. But just the fact that they acknowledged that, oh we’re sorry, he can’t come, the mayor has a prior commitment. Normally if you send something to the mayor, they don’t even respond.

But they knew that this event was very important. The whole city of Dallas pretty much knew. And pretty much at the last minute we were able to get some free PSA time, some radio time. But we learned, because we were rookies at this—we knew that Dr. West was coming but we couldn’t pinpoint a date down until two weeks before he got here. So we did this in two weeks. Before this we knew he was coming, we did kind of start talking to groups so we did that base kind of stuff. But in terms of really organizing, getting a place, he couldn’t give us a date until—actually it was a little more than two weeks, it was like 17 days. So in fact if we had had more time I think we could have tripled the number of people who came and it would have been even greater.

Of course we had the families—we had reserved seating for the families. In fact, we did not have reserved seating for the politicians. But we had reserved seating for the family members that have lost their children or experienced police brutality, because this was a once in a lifetime and because if anything had died in them I knew that Dr. West could renew it and I wanted them to be front and center. And that is exactly what happened.

Volunteers Needed... for revcom.us and Revolution

Send us your comments.

If you like this article, subscribe, donate to and sustain Revolution newspaper.