Resisting Attacks on Black, Indigenous, and Palestinian Organizing Through Solidarity

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Palestine Legal participated in this year’s National Lawyers Guild #Law4ThePeople convention in a panel on "Criminalizing the Right to Protest: State Crack Downs on Black, Indigenous, and Palestinian Resistance."

Senior staff attorney Radhika Sainath spoke alongside movement lawyers and activists from Greenpeace USA, the Water Protector Legal Collective, Law for Black Lives, and Black Lives Matter DC.

The panel addressed anti-protest legislation attacking Black activists, Indigenous water protectors, climate justice activists, and the movement for Palestinian rights—as well as court challenges against this legislation. Panelists also discussed political prisoners, false accusations of terrorism, militarized policing, law enforcement surveillance, and infiltration.

Below are some highlights from each speaker:

Maggie Ellinger-Locke is a staff attorney at Greenpeace USA, where she supports resistance to the climate crisis. Her background in legislative advocacy and mass defense has positioned her to fight back against efforts led by the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) to restrict the right to protest.

She highlighted ALEC’s attempts to intimidate protestors by pushing critical infrastructure bills, which target environmental justice activists with increased penalties for pipeline protests. Greenpeace activists are facing felony and federal charges under a new critical infrastructure law for blocking the largest fossil fuel shipping channel in the country. Greenpeace is also fighting two strategic lawsuits against public participation (SLAPP) for their work in Standing Rock and opposition to unsustainable logging practices on Native land in Canada.

Ellinger-Locke also highlighted state efforts to infiltrate the environmental movement and lifted up the Protect Dissent Network as a group that was created in response to these censorship campaigns.

Radhika Sainath, senior staff attorney at Palestine Legal, provided a brief overview of the array of cases of Palestinian advocacy that have been met with surveillance or punitive measures.

She explained that while 27 states have adopted anti-boycott laws, over 100 similar bills have failed to pass around the country, in part thanks activists and organizers on the ground.

She shared the story of Bahia Amawi, an elementary school speech pathologist in Texas who lost her job after she refused to sign a loyalty oath to Israel. Not only did Amawi sustain a tremendous professional loss and a disruption to her personal life—her community was harmed too since Arabic-speaking children with disabilities lost their only speech pathologist in the district.

Thanks to lawsuits against the Texas law—including from the ACLU and Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR)—a federal judge affirmed that boycott activities are protected by the First Amendment.

Carl Williams is the executive director of the Water Protector Legal Collective, which assists Indigenous movements defending the earth and water. He has provided support to Indigenous activists who were indicted for their activism in Standing Rock.

He made an appeal for people to write to political prisoners and show them support. During his presentation, he shared 10 ways to fight the criminalization of protest around the country:

  1. Build movement solidarity that connects struggles to each other;

  2. Create coalitions with other organizations;

  3. Lobby your state legislators to stop these bills before they get passed;

  4. If the laws get passed, protest and fight against them;

  5. Challenge the laws in court, as organizations and organizers;

  6. Fight corporations backing reactionary organizations;

  7. Challenge the organizations themselves, like ALEC;

  8. Challenge the foundations and funders behind these organizations;

  9. Educate ourselves and others about these issues;

  10. Communicate the idea that we are winning.

Williams added a bonus point to fighting the criminalization of protest: “Break the law because these are unjust laws.”

Leoyla Cowboy is a citizen of the Dine Nation born to the Salt Water Clan. She is a legal worker for the Water Protector Legal Collective and an active member of the NoDAPL political prisoners support committee. Her talk focused on centering political prisoners, discussing probation and parole, and supporting activists and their communities.

She highlighted the different needs that Indigenous prisoners have and the difficulty of overcoming administrative obstacles in the prison industrial complex. She also stressed the importance of supporting political prisoners, including their families and communities.

Finally, she shared her struggles navigating the parole and probation system without support and the enormous cost that it has to the families and communities of activists.

Marbre Stahly-Butts is the executive director of Law for Black Lives and founder of the National Bail Out Collective. She talked about the history of L4BL and its emergence in the aftermath of police brutality in Ferguson and Baltimore.

As a movement lawyering group, L4BL supports the power of social movements and shifting power outside of courtrooms and into the streets. Marbre highlighted the chilling effects of legal attacks on movements, including activists who have faced terrorism and conspiracy charges because of their work on racial justice issues.

She also emphasized the need to support activists engaged in international solidarity work—especially for people who have visited Palestine. Marbre herself attended an L4BL delegation to Palestine. During this trip, Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) Movement co-founder Omar Barghouti stated that the Movement for Black Lives supporting BDS was a “gamechanger” because it showed that Black people in the United States understood the struggle of Palestinians and this recognition changed the conversations around Israel.

April Goggans is a core organizer with Black Lives Matter DC and a founding board member of the Diverse City Fund. During her panel, she shared her concerns about the militarization of police in the D.C. area. She explained that as Black Lives Matter has grown, activists have faced increasing surveillance and intimidation from the police.

Police officers blocked their Twitter feeds, interfered with their cellular communications, tailed activists for months while they drove around the city, and set up semi-permanent surveillance outside the house of BLM activists.

BLM organizers began hosting Black Joy Sundays to celebrate Black identity and build community with other activists in the face of this repression.

What joint struggle means to us

Black, Indigenous, and Palestinian movements have all come under intense attack from the state, and this panel demonstrated the value of uplifting those in joint struggle. From legislative attacks on the right to protest, to labelling oppressed people as dangerous or criminal, to the proliferation of right-wing donors funding these attacks, this panel highlighted the ever-pressing need to connect in solidarity with each other in the fight for justice.

These attacks are a reminder that our liberation is a shared and collective process.

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