It was the spring of 2007 and  my students were amped about the US social forum in Atlanta.  I was the Executive Director of the Philadelphia Student Union and also organizing at Sayre High School in West Philadelphia. My students were so excited and I committed to taking a group of about a dozen students to Atlanta, and then had to set about figuring out how to do that logistically and monetarily.

What began with those students resulted in PSU effectively organizing the bus from Philly to Atlanta for the whole city that would enable us to go. We had to figure out everything and transportation, food and accommodations for all the students and staff members that came along was not easy.

Through some friends I was able to secure housing for all of us in an apartment complex where the residents were going to be away during the time of the forum.  We got in to Atlanta, had to carry our bags to the restaurant where the person with our key was, then truck out to the where we were staying.

It was a trying trip.  A dizzying array of workshops and activities; the Georgia summer heat; I believe I was approached by some kind of undercover agent who started questioning me about Philly groups and people (strange because at the time I was not wearing a social forum badge); and a notebook of mine went missing.  Being right in downtown Atlanta meant that my students’ attention was constantly drawn to the kaleidoscope of tricked out cars with rims, hydraulics, and candy coated gloss constantly riding by on the strip.

One of my student’s birthdays fell during the forum and we got him a cake to celebrate. We were all back at the apartment around midnight, singing happy birthday (quietly I remember, because we were being thoughtful about how late it was) when I heard a knock on the apartment door.  I thought at first that one of the students was pranking me when I looked through the peephole and saw no one there.  I opened the door, looked outside and to my shock saw an armed white male in plain clothes off to the left of the doorframe with his arms extended.  In his hands was a gun pointed toward the ground like you see when cops are getting ready to barge into a situation, and his finger was on the trigger.

I immediately closed the door to put a barrier between him and the young people.  I was thinking about the students circled in the living room on the other side of the door, eating cake and laughing and how I had a duty to protect them and would do so at any and all cost.  Thinking about my body language and tone and not wanting to escalate the situation I began to engage him.  I wanted to be calm yet extremely firm.  “What is going on?” “You can’t be here right now,” he said. I explained that we had permission from the residents of the apartment to use their space for the week.  He said, “This is a private apartment complex and you are not allowed to have so many people staying here.”

We went back and forth for a couple of minutes during which time he put away his gun.  I remained insistent that we were within our rights to be staying in the apartment and made it clear that under no circumstances was he coming inside.   When I asked why he was profiling us he said that someone who lives in the complex had called him.  I think that I remember him saying that he was an off-duty cop.  He ended by telling me that the residents would get a citation and possibly get evicted for having us stay in the apartment.

After he left, I went back into the apartment, shocked and numbed.  I had to tell the young people that a man with a gun had just been standing right on the other side of our front door.  I told them what had happened, that presumably, someone or several people from the apartment complex had called this off-duty cop/vigilante on us because they felt that “we didn’t belong there”, and he took it upon himself to come over and check out what was going on.

I was so angry and made no effort to hide this from the students.  We had to come up with a plan, some kind of response.  After checking in for a few minutes, we decided to go outside.  If they think we don’t belong here, we should show ourselves to them, to contest their cowardly actions, right here right now.  We’re going to show them that we’re not afraid.  So the 12 or so of us, went outside, and stood there.  There was a light rain coming down and it was after midnight, but we stood there, daring the people watching us from inside their apartments between their blinds to come out themselves and meet us, or do something else about it.  But we weren’t going away.

I was angry about the whole situation. I was angry that we had been referred to stay in a place where that would happen to us.  I was angry that the folks who rented the apartment didn’t warn us or give us any concept of what the people living there were like.  I was angry that a vigilante came to our door and came within feet of my students with a fucking gun!

There is no doubt in my mind that we were profiled because of the racial fears of the folks in the apartment building on seeing a group of Black youth in “their” space.  The thing that makes me the angriest and saddest is that not one of those people who were looking at us, watching us, made the effort to introduce themselves or to talk to us and ask us directly what we were doing there. Instead, they called on an armed man to intervene for them.

I’m glad that I was there physically in between the vigilante and my students.  In my (to some) racially ambiguous skin perhaps I was able to elicit a different reaction from this man than if someone else had been at the door.  There is no neat and tidy ending to this story, only an ongoing fierce commitment to act every day on the conviction that #blacklifematters and to consciously dismantle the barriers that keep us from being able to see each other as full human beings.