BU Today: From racist rhetoric to hate crimes, what do you think is driving racism in this country and how do we successfully address it?

Brooks: Given the state of division in the country and this moment of the observation of the 400th anniversary of slavery, now is the perfect time to ask ourselves, “How did we get here, and how can we go beyond where we are to where we aspire to be as a country?”

We have to acknowledge that slavery didn’t end in 1863 with the Emancipation Proclamation, or in 1865 with the 13th Amendment—neo-slavery and the era of mass incarceration extended slavery beyond the 1800s and into some form that exists today. We also need to acknowledge that the tools that we used to vanquish slavery in the past are some of the tools that we need to use today, including law, policy, research, protest, art, advocacy, and morality.

As a professor and civil rights leader, one thing I always teach my students is that hope can’t be empirically demonstrated—it has to be morally chosen. There is much that one could be despairing and despondent about, but people are choosing to be hopeful.

After [the mass shootings at] the Tree of Life and Mother Emanuel, religious attendance didn’t decline. People become more engaged, more involved, and more committed. So this is a measure of the danger of our times, but also a measure of the courage of the people. Look at the number of young people leaving school to protect the health and well-being of the planet—they haven’t given up.

Throughout your career fighting for equality and justice, you’ve been arrested numerous times and received frequent threats of physical harm. What has that experience been like for you? 

The work of democracy is life-changing work, but it is also life-risking work. In Ferguson, Mo., when we marched from the home of Michael Brown to the home of the governor, we had to alter our march route when the route was published in the newspaper, and according to law enforcement, we were going to be ambushed by the Klan. We were ambushed, with people confronting us on the streets in Rosebud, Mo., and displaying racial animus with malt liquor bottles, watermelon, boxes of fried chicken, and shouts of the N-word.

At the NAACP, we had to abandon our building because of a bomb threat. At one of our local branches in Houston, people showed up with AR-15s on the Christian Sabbath day. We received death threats online, in the mail, and in person on a regular basis. In the march from Selma to DC, we marched 1,000 miles in 43 days. When we arrived in South Carolina, then-Governor Nikki Haley said we couldn’t come through Greenville-Spartanburg because they couldn’t ensure our security. That meant the activists had to march an additional 200 miles.

Since I’ve left the NAACP, I still occasionally get threats. That’s a part of the work that one would like to avoid, but you can’t avoid it if you’re serious about doing the work. And that’s for anyone, not just people who are doing civil rights work. If you don’t see leaders pushing the envelope or incurring any risk, that may be the time to ask whether they’re demonstrating real leadership.

Recent hate crimes and online threats today are risks not only imposed upon professional activists, but on ordinary Americans. Trans Americans are being assaulted and killed, synagogues and churches are being shot up, and mosques are being threatened. This is a real and serious moment in the country, where physical dangers to American citizens are emblematic of the dangers to our democracy.

Do you think the social justice activism among millennials today is the key to achieving equality in the future? 

In the darkest of times, the fact that you have people organizing, convening, demonstrating, protesting, and bearing witness to the light among them says everything about their capacity to bring about change. These demonstrations, protests, and acts of civil disobedience are not only expressions of outrage, they’re expressions of aspiration. They’re contemporary, up-to-date, Twitter-moment-ready vehicles for bringing about the realization of democracy.

You have a generation of Twitter citizens who are more knowledgeable and thoughtful about Reconstruction than students were a generation ago. You have young people talking about the Abolitionist movement, both in terms of the abolishment of slavery and the deconstruction of a carceral state and the ending of mass incarceration. We not only have a country that is becoming increasingly historically literate with respect to slavery, but also using the lessons of slavery to inform and inspire the direction of the country. That’s incredibly powerful. I never heard slavery discussed with the depth, and intellectual and moral richness, that I hear young people talking about it today.

The work of this new generation of activists, public servants, and leaders deserves to be honored in the same way that we honored Dr. King by the memorial on Marsh Plaza. The history that we read about in high school is happening right now; it’s just not in your textbook, it’s on your Twitter feed. We forget that the elder statesman Rep. John Lewis (D-Ga.) (Hon.’18) was also the junior and senior in high school who wrote letter after letter to Dr. King before he got a meeting, and he was also the young upstart whose words everyone was afraid of at the March on Washington. There’s a new generation of John Lewises and Martin Luther Kings and Rosa Parkses and Claudette Colvins today.