EXCLUSIVE: Black Lives Matter Organizing A 'Youth Activist Camp' For 10 -Year-Olds
As the school year comes to an end in Los Angeles, many students look forward to hanging out at the beach, going on family trips, or attending vacation Bible school. But since teens, and preteens, who want to abolish police need summer activities too, the Los Angeles chapter of Black Lives Matter is organizing a Youth Activist Camp.
The week-long cultivation, which runs June 12 through June 16, will be “free for all Black youth, ages 10-18.”
According to the registration form:
In addition to learning strategies for organizing social justice campaigns and direct action tactics, the camp will focus on community building, skill-sharing, critical literacy, public speaking, as well as techniques for developing healthy collective and self-care practices. All youth attendees will be served a breakfast snack, lunch, and afternoon snack.
The Youth Activist Camp organizer is Dr. Anthony Ratcliff, who is also a professor of Pan-African Studies at California State University, Los Angeles (CSULA). When he was hired in 2015, the department – headed by Black Lives Matter-LA leader Melina Abdullah – announced:
We are on our way to building one of the strongest, most vibrant, visionary, brilliant, nurturing, active/ist departments in the world!
Ratcliff, who has referred to Abdullah as his “comrade,” is also BLM-LA’s Political Education Coordinator. He recently posted a meme promoting the camp on social media. It featured an image of two youths attending a Black Panther Party (BPP) “Political Education Class” in 1972. A quote from Huey P. Newton, who co-founded the Black Panthers in 1966, reads: “The young always inherit the revolution.”
The Black Lives Matter-LA Youth Vanguard, which consists of students ages 6-18, is part of Ratcliff’s camp organizing efforts. Last September, the Youth Vanguard headlined Black Lives Matter’s first official event inside a Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD) facility. With an enrollment of more than 640,000 students, LAUSD is the second-largest school system in the nation. The United Teachers of L.A., the union representing LAUSD’s non-administrative staffers, was a co-sponsor.
“It’s about having a movement, not a moment,” Cecily Myart-Cruz, a Vice President with UTLA, told KCAL-9 Los Angeles, repeating a slogan often used by Black Lives Matter activists.
BLM-LA leader Melina Abdullah led students in chants, while her daughter, who was 12-years-old at the time, sat on the Youth Vanguard panel leading a discussion similar to grown-up BLM themes, like a distrust of law enforcement.
“Whenever I see a cop car, when I’m leaving home for practice, I actually get mad,” an 8th grade Youth Vanguard member named Aeron told the audience assembled in Dorsey High School’s auditorium. “I should actually feel protected whenever I see a cop,” he continued. “Instead, I feel unprotected.”
Ever since that first event inside an LAUSD school, Black Lives Matter has continued to organize students. It teamed up with a school reform coalition backed by the teachers’ union and a nonprofit that has received funding from George Soros’ Open Society Foundations to create an off-campus program called “Transformative Justice Training.” The orientation taught students to “shift school culture away from policing, punishment and criminalization.” Children interested in attending were instructed to RSVP to a Gmail account belonging to an LAUSD teacher.
“It is both possible and necessary to move beyond a world with police,” a promotional flyer imputed.
On May 30, Black Lives Matter-LA is co-sponsoring a demonstration at LAUSD headquarters – almost two weeks before the Youth Activist Camp begins.
According to BPP co-founder Bobby Seale, Political Education training was vital to the Panthers’ foundation. It was mandatory for recruits to participate in Political Education training before becoming official members of the Black Panther Party. As Seale wrote:
The root of the growth and development of the Black Panther Party has to be the Political Education that the Black Panther Party members taught and learned. Reading and studying was heavily stressed in the Black Panther Party. A person wanting to join the Party had to attend Political Education classes as a Panther-in training and read 2 hours a day to stay abreast of the changing situations in the community and world. (Each one = Teach one).
As the Black Lives Matter movement has re-strategized away from street protests, organizers appear to be implementing Black Panther-inspired strategies to groom future activists, and LAUSD’s more than 900 schools are fertile ground.
Black Lives Matter-LA has set up a crowd funding account to support next month’s activist camp. At the time of publication, the campaign had raised $610, far short of its $10,000 goal.
Here's Ratcliff speaking at the 2016 International Workers May Day march and rally in Los Angeles:
