I learned about Charleena’s case from Jesse Hagopian, a teacher at Seattle’s Garfield High School and a friend of mine. Jesse met Charleena’s family at a vigil right after she was killed. He called me and told me about the case. It felt like being punched in the stomach. I asked Jesse if we could set up a meeting with Charleena’s brother and sister. I also said that her kids should come. I showed up at Garfield with Pele and Pele’s brother Allo, who is a preacher, and we went to Jesse’s classroom, arriving a little bit early.
Then the whole Lyles family rolled in. I’m talking cousins and probably like six kids: Charleena’s children and a couple of the cousins’. They were still in a daze from what had happened, but anger was beginning to break through the shock. They had just come from the coroner’s office, where they learned that Charleena had been killed with seven bullets, four in her back. They couldn’t make sense of why this woman, who was so physically tiny, needed to be put down with seven shots in front of her children.
Pele spoke, and at first she broke down crying. Then she pulled it together with the strength I’ve seen grow inside of her since she was fifteen. She said, “As a mother and as a woman, this really hurts, and I want to make sure that the women of Seattle stand with Charleena.”
I was overwhelmed in the moment, thinking, There is nothing I can do to make this right, so maybe at least I can make the load of grief on their shoulders just a little less heavy. We did a prayer circle at the end, standing, with everybody holding hands, all the kids and the family. Pele’s brother said a prayer for Charleena. Everybody was in tears.
That’s when I said that we needed to do more than pray. We needed to raise money for Charleena’s family and have a rally in her name—and that’s exactly what we did. In the heat of the summer and without any kind of organizational backing, we put together an event worthy of the woman taken from our city. Three hundred people showed up. Entire families were there. We made sure there was a face-painting tent for the kids and nutritious barbecue for whoever was hungry. We also sold T-shirts I had printed up that said, “I am Charleena Lyles,” and then on the back, “#SayHer-Name.” Every dime from every shirt—which we are still selling—goes to her kids.
Charleena Lyles has a huge extended family, so dozens of her people were there. But there were others at the event who had also lost loved ones to police violence. One of the most moving moments, to me, was hearing from a longtime Garfield High School teacher named Janet Dubois, who went public for the first time that day with details about her son being killed by police. It had happened years and years earlier, and she just suffered quietly, never speaking about what took place. I learned later that she had started to tell her story at a Black Lives Matter event at the school, but it was at this rally where she really described what happened. That day helped the people who had endured so much pain feel less alone. Since that time, we hosted the Lyles family at Seahawks training camp, and the team, especially Russ and Cliff, reached out to show them love. That’s the brotherhood, right there. Charleena’s kids, who had been carrying all this grief, actually looked happy. It was glory.
This is why I support the Black Lives Matter movement, because it helps people realize their worth. People in the movement understand that Black Lives Matter is not just a slogan or a hashtag. It’s about resisting the “New Jim Crow,” a social system that has created a parallel, separate, and unequal America, defined by mass incarceration, unemployment, and substandard food and education. Here are some not-so-fun-facts, compiled by the Washington Post: Black Americans are two-and-a-half times as likely as white Americans to be shot and killed by police officers. We are twice as likely to be unarmed when shot, and three times more likely to be abused while in police custody. Juries give Black defendants sentences that are 20 percent longer than those given to white defendants convicted of the same crimes. We are imprisoned three times as long for the same drug crimes, even though we use drugs, weed included, less than white folks do. And when we get out of jail, a chance for decent employment—or, in some states, even the right to vote—doesn’t exist. We are being warehoused in prisons at such a rate that an entire generation has been scarred. In some neighborhoods, it’s just women and the elderly and children, with working-age Black men erased from the equation.
This is the “New Jim Crow,” and it starts so young, it will put tears in your eyes. It begins with the school-to-prison pipeline. Here are some more less-than-fun facts, according to the US Department of Education Office for Civil Rights: 40 percent of all suspended students are Black; 70 percent of in-school arrests happen to Black students; and before you say, “They must have done something to deserve it,” consider that Black preschoolers—we are talking about four-year-olds—make up 18 percent of preschoolers yet are almost half
