By Dianne Anderson

Most of the resistance that fueled the start of the local Black Lives Matter movement began about two years after 17-year-old Trayvon  Martin was killed, when justice for the innocent youth was nowhere in sight.

Audrena Redmond remembers visiting family in Chicago when protests erupted in Los Angeles in 2014. At that time, she was too far away to attend.

“We looked around in our collective spirits. We knew something had shifted in the world. Whatever modicum of safety we had for Black people had slipped away. It was not just the police. It was the vigilante,” said Redmond, co-founder of Long Beach BLM.

A few months later, she connected with advocate Dawn Modkins, and their vision expanded to reach harder impact areas, including local deaths of young Black men, as part of the growing national crisis.

Since then, the local effort has focused on helping families. While it’s not the kind of justice they deserve, she lets families know they are seen and heard.

“In the case of people whose loved ones are taken by state-sanctioned violence, what makes it worse is the way the system treats them. Police criminalize even the families of people whom they’ve murdered,” she said.

At one point, the community protested in front of the police station after the 2016 fatal police shooting of Lionel Gibson. BLM and the family held a prayer and marched, and the police locked the doors.

“And they laughed at us. How horrible. Here is Lionel Gibson’s mother, banging on the door, and they’re laughing at her. It’s cruel,” she said.

From the start of the local BLM, she said the goal is calling out the city in all forms of state-sanctioned violence, including police violence. Last year, they also pursued more attention to the unsolved case of 57-year-old Fred Taft, who was murdered by what family believes were white supremacists. He was shot in the back of the head in 2019 in a restroom at Pan American Park.

Redmond said that BLM keeps striving to make progress. They helped raise awareness toward policy change, and worked with the health department to achieve funding that secured mental health providers. She and other BLM members also participated in developing plans for city employees to respond to non-emergency mental health crises to avoid police showing up with guns, which often escalate tensions.

During the pandemic, the organization also spent time with the Long Beach Arts Council for placement of two memorial benches at parks, one in memory of Fred Taft. The other was for Donte Lamont Jordan, who was killed by Long Beach police in 2013.

She said that BLM had an active role in the Framework for Racial Reconciliation, which guided the city in developing its ongoing racial justice policy.

“We are proud to have been a part of that, to raise the alarm about the lack of funding for our health department, and alternatives to policing for mental health services. The city has hired 24, who can handle mental health crisis,” said Redmond, also director for Anti Racism & Social Justice at California Faculty Association, a union of 29,000 professors, lecturers, librarians, and counselors with the CSU system.

Lately, jobs and housing are her top concerns, especially educating the Black community on the law, and how to protect themselves from evictions through her partnership with LiBre, Long Beach Residents Empowered.

She said many people want to stay in the city where they grew up and went to school, but they have moved to the High Desert and IE to cope with the soaring cost of living.

Again, she knows the housing crisis and unhoused in Long Beach are issues that face almost any city in America.

“It tells you that they’re steeped in a system of racial oppression. Tons of Black folks on the streets, Black mothers are the most impacted and stressed by the cost of living,” she said.

When BLM first started outreach at a Poly High School event, it was to address school police and harsh discipline disparities on Black boys at LBUSD. Participants came out, but they also talked about other important immediate needs, like living in the food desert.

“One woman said I am concerned that we don’t have quality grocery stores in my community. That never left me,” she said. “We want to talk about these big things, but people want to talk more concretely about what they notice on a daily basis.”

Recently, BLM Grassroots released its 2023 Action Report, marking ten years since the organization was founded, now with 33 chapters focused on raising awareness, policy, and holding public officials and police accountable.

“Our work is our pledge to our people, our children, and future generations that we will fight for and achieve the world divinely intended —a world we all want, need, and deserve,” said Melina Abdullah, Ph.D., Co-Founder and Director Black Lives Matter Grassroots.

To see the BLM Grassroots report, see https://bit.ly/4ceqYw2
For LiBre, see https://www.wearelbre.org/