Feature Interview: Jackie Byers of the Black Organizing Project
Blue Heart: Let’s start with the story of how you launched the Black Organizing Project.
Jackie Byers: Well, I’ve been an organizer for over 20 years. After direct organizing, I started to get into developing organizers. Part of what I loved about organizing was the development of people and part of what has been missing is real investment in organizers, especially from the base.
I was recruited to Oakland to work for the Center of Third World Organizing, a national organization that also developed organizers of color across the country. We decided to really look at what was happening with Black organizers specifically and how we could develop more Black organizers and Black organizations. We realized after doing lots of listening to our allies and other organizations and other leaders that what was needed was actually more infrastructure for Black organizing training.
We didn’t have any preconceived issues or campaigns. We spent all our time listening to people, connecting to people, and building community space. It took a lot of faith. We didn’t have resources. There was a lot of folks who questioned why we were doing Black organizing and not just multiracial organizing. So it was risky and provocative. We decided to do it anyway, especially here in Oakland with the history of activism. I became the lead organizer, then as the organization built momentum, I was asked to become the founding director, then to build infrastructure. And so here we are!
BH: It’s clear you’ve consistently pushed boundaries and edges, and that leads to a lot of struggle. It’s hard to continue to hold your line. What thresholds have you crossed internally and what changes have you seen outside as a result of you holding that line?
JB: Our campaign “Bettering Our School System” has been provocative. We have pushed for removal of law enforcement out of schools. When we started our campaign, a lot of the folks that were dealing with the prison industrial complex and law enforcement weren’t necessarily looking at the schools. So we didn’t neatly fit in a space. You would find people who are pro law enforcement who want to sit down and talk about suspensions and expulsions, but they don’t want to deal with the role of police. So we’ve always had to push those edges. But over the years, those conversations have been happening and it’s more normalized in those spaces and more people are making attempts at reforms.
It sounds unrealistic to people for us to say we want police out by 2020, it sounds unrealistic for us to say we believe you can have a school without police, because it’s become part of people’s normalized ideas of schools. But we’re going to continue to say it, because no real historic change has ever sounded realistic in the current condition.
BH: What are some of the struggles you’ve faced as you’ve scaled and needed to play to funder interests?
JB: We don’t take money from anything that would ask us to compromise what we’re doing. We tell the truth and look for funders to be allies to that vision. We don’t contort something to get money. As we grow it becomes harder because there are fewer foundations that are supportive of Black organizing and organizing the way we do. Up to this point, we’ve had good allies and for larger foundations, we’ve had good program officers that have really helped us.
I would say the real challenges are more subtle for me at this point. The kind of time and energy that it takes to raise that kind of funds, it is hard for me. You have to write a 20-page proposal and then maybe they only fund you for a year and you have to go back and do it again. For a small organization that’s intense. I’m glad I’m in this role, but gosh, what could we do with that time, if we didn’t have to put all these reports together? What could we do with that energy?
BH: Could you describe what your model looks like?
JB: Our model is centered around grassroots organizing and leadership development. It’s going out into the actual community. We target places or people that are most impacted: working class areas, areas where folks are struggling. You might knock on doors, you might do street outreach, and then a lot one-on-ones with people and building relationships. It’s people centered. This organizing is also extremely humbling. When you do outreach for hours, call 25 people and only two people call you back, it’s not very ego-fulfilling. But if we expect to really transform things we can’t do it without actual people. We can do things that get attention, and that’s important sometimes, but you can’t actually have the full transformation without the grassroots organizing.
We really emphasize leadership development. If someone is interested in organizing we have internships, where someone can learn organizing skills and get paid a stipend. And if they really, really love organizing they could be in a training which is a year. But if you don’t want to do it professionally, you still learn skills that you can take into your life and become more involved.
As far as identifying what to do, we have committees. We have an organizing committee made up of community members. They look through data, they do research, they go to meetings, they come back together, they develop strategy along with the organizing staff.
BH: Talk a little bit about how the “Bettering Our School System” campaign was born and what that looks like.
JB: There was a lot of concern from the community around education and criminalization. Then somebody contacted us about this young man, Raheim Brown, who was murdered by school police. We got members to go to the school board and see what was going on. It was horrible, not only the individual situation, but also the way the school district was handling it. They shut down this family and this mother. They closed ranks and changed the narrative from a young man being murdered by their police department to “Oakland is so violent.”
We decided to look at this institution. It was shocking. There were things we assumed that would be normal: “Of course they would have this policy in place, of course they are collecting data, of course they notify parents when they question kids.” There was literally no transparency, no accountability, no infrastructure put in place to deal with law enforcement. Folks are walking around with guns on campuses from kindergarten to 12th grade. The organizing committee did initial research and brought it back to the membership and membership voted on it being the campaign. There was a lot of research on the ground and behind the scenes before we actually launched it publicly in 2011.
BH: What does it look like now?
JB: We have won four important things. We got a complaint policy in place. There was no way for anyone to complain about issues about security or law enforcement. We had to fight for an MOU between the school district and the Oakland Police Department to regulate the contact between OPD and the kids. The school district has their own police agency but they got a federal grant to bring in OPD and they did that without any school board approval. One of the biggest fights we had was parental consent — that you can’t question a kid without a parent or guardian’s consent. At that point, you could just interrogate a kindergartner. Even adults will incriminate themselves because they’re afraid, so imagine how many kids have been… yeah. We won those things. We also got over $2M to be put into restorative justice. And we got the school district to eliminate the use of “willful defiance” suspensions for the whole district, K-12, because that was one of the biggest categories that Black children were being suspended on.
BH: You’ve achieved so much. What has changed in you and how you approach the work?
JB: While we are proud of what we’ve won, the biggest win in winning is the people. You can take a group of folks walking into the OPD with the hair raised on their necks. You feel afraid sitting down across the table from these law enforcement agents that you may have had interactions with. You fight for something you believe in and you’ve researched, not just for you and not just for your family, but for all kids in Oakland… and then to win. And you won, not a lawyer. It changes and transforms the possibility of every person in that room. They see that they won because they had each other. It breaks the sense of isolation. When people have an opportunity to see what’s possible, they’re ready for the next fight. That is what’s beautiful to me and worth every hour and minute and struggle because no one can take it from them.
I’ve been humbled many times in this work. I’ve had to step into roles that I didn’t necessarily feel comfortable with. But I was told, when I first started organizing, “don’t ask anybody to do anything you aren’t willing to do,” so I’ve had to stretch myself, too. One of my commitments has been to develop the team of people that work with me. At some point, they may have to serve a role that’s similar to my role. So doing whatever I can to prepare people for that is really important to me.
One thing that I have been surprised about is, even though I didn’t come from the operations end of things, I’ve found myself ridiculously excited about it. Part of it is that I understand that, there are certain things that take a lot of organizations down and it’s usually on the infrastructure side. People can’t necessarily go directly after your politics so they’ll look for weaknesses in your finances or anything they can find. So I have this really strong commitment to make sure our stuff is tight.
BH: Where do you see BOP going in the next 5 years? How would you envision the world being different because you exist? In your wildest dreams, what could you become?
JB: Obviously I’d love for us to get police out of Oakland schools!
We’re rooted in Oakland, but we have a lot of people that are displaced to placed like Pittsburgh and Antioch. We’re seeing really egregious data in those districts where there’s a large Black migration. We want to go where our folks are, and do it with integrity. Who else is already in that community? How can we pool our resources together? And if they don’t have organizing infrastructure, how can we support that? That’s a growth area that I’d love to envision us fully realizing. I see us doing statewide work, working again in coalition, building with other people across the state, building something that’s bigger than us.
My dreamy dreamy thing would be to have some sort of national role.
BH: What kinds of mistakes do you see other organizations or allies making most often?
JB: A lot of times, people will take the work of grassroots organizations and gain a lot from it and will not give a lot of credit to it.
Sometimes the challenge is that people want to feel something, so they want to be part of it. As a place that’s really about Black space, that can be a challenge if someone wants to come to something. We do have things that are open. We just had a townhall that was multiracial and open, but there are also a lot of spaces that are not open spaces and so it is inappropriate for somebody to sit in that space or observe.
People might want to volunteer, where they have a thing that they want to do, but it’s not necessarily what we most need. And because we try to develop the community members, there’s very few things we would outsource. If it’s phone banking, we ask people in the community to do the phone banking.
BH: What’s your advice and guidance for folks that are trying to show up in solidarity with the movements that you’re part of?
JB: If people want to figure out how to show up in solidarity, I think they should just ask, but be patient around it. Maybe for a campaign, we could use broad support, but it might not be immediately.
Individual donors are so critical. We get so excited. Getting a $50 donation or something like that is so meaningful, it’s beautiful to us because it means somebody just believed in what we did and is not asking for anything in return.
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