“We Must Summon the Courage”: Black Activist Mothering Against Police Brutality

Abstract

Activist mothering by marginalized women is well specified, but the paths by which women seize agency to move from the margins of motherhood to the center of social movements have been under-theorized. This chapter advances the literature by examining how a Texas-based organization, Mothers Against Police Brutality (MAPB), frames that shift. MAPB was founded by Collette Flanagan, a Black woman, after the police shot and killed her son. The MAPB website data indicate that the organization draws on activist mothering to explain the devaluation of Black and brown children and their mothers via racialized state violence, to frame MAPB as lifting up the value of those children and their mothers, and to present MAPB as striving to ameliorate the effects of race and gender inequalities on family and community life. As illustrated here, following a child’s death in police violence, women are mothering from the margins in a new way. In that context, a mother’s shift from those margins to a central role in an activist movement is a powerful transition toward a redefined self. The process neither erases the loss of a child nor elides grappling directly with their death; rather, it redefines the mother’s engagement with mothering once the traditional referent for that identity and practice, her child, is no longer living. In this way, a unique path by which marginalized mothers “summon the courage” to enter activist mothering is elaborated.

Citation

Chatillon, A. and Schneider, B.E. (2018), "“We Must Summon the Courage”: Black Activist Mothering Against Police Brutality", Taylor, T. and Bloch, K. (Ed.) Marginalized Mothers, Mothering from the Margins (Advances in Gender Research, Vol. 25), Emerald Publishing Limited, Leeds, pp. 245-258. https://doi.org/10.1108/S1529-212620180000025015