'It's our duty to fight for freedom': The LA teen who fought for change and won | Los Angeles

A demonstration can represent so many things at once. It can be a forum to fight injustice, an artistic outlet, an outlet for anger, a birthday party. Watch Kahlila Williams protest and you'll see all of the above.

The day before Kahlila's 17th birthday, in October 2020, she stood in the back of a truck holding a bullhorn, leading more than 100 people in chanting “Black lives matter here.” The truck drove through downtown Los Angeles, passing courthouses, City Hall and police headquarters.

At previous protests, other demonstrators had exclaimed, “She’s so cute!” and “She’s so little!” when she rushed past them, 5 feet tall and fast, but that day her voice was strong and sure (people tell her she speaks “like she was 7 feet tall”). She called out the names of people killed by police in Los Angeles and demanded justice for them. Her energy electrified the people around her, the older activists and other teenagers, and they chanted back.

Kahlila had launched into activism in the spring following the killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis, initially focusing on defunding school police in the Los Angeles Unified School District.

She spoke at her first school board meeting in late June 2020, when the LAUSD school board was deciding whether to cut the school police budget. When she introduced herself as a rising senior, her voice was soft, even shy. But as she began to talk about the end-of-year picnic her sophomore year, where she passed out from dehydration and woke up to the school policeman asking if she had used drugs, his voice became louder and more passionate.

“Instead of getting the help I needed from a nurse, a school police officer was there when I regained consciousness,” she told the board. “Instead of getting help, I was accused of overdosing on drugs. » She was referring to the fact that not all Los Angeles high schools had nurses on campus every day, but there were police officers on campus every day. The money intended for 435 uniformed officers could, in his opinion, be much better spent.

Kahlila was not under the influence, but she asked the board: what if she was abuse drugs at this picnic? Would a police officer be more helpful in this situation, or should schools spend that money on someone with more expertise in drug abuse? “The police sow fear into the daily lives of our students. Hiring a substance abuse counselor would provide real help to students who need it. This is why funding for nurses, school counselors, [therapists] and ethnic studies are what we need.

In an interview at the time, she said she considered herself lucky that her third foster home was the one she had lived in for six years, where she felt safe and cared for. But this is not a reality for many children.

Kahlila said she wanted school to be a safe and stable place for her and for children like her. That's what drove her to do this work, and the police don't make her feel safe or stable.

She experienced her first big victory as an activist that night: when the school board voted to cut the police budget by 35 percent.

The next day, a resource specialist at her school told her she was going to join a protest demanding the ouster of Los Angeles District Attorney Jackie Lacey, a protest that had taken place every Wednesday for three years. Police killed hundreds of people on Lacey's watch, and activists accused her of not trying to punish those officers, even though her job was to pursue criminals, the school resource specialist said.

Still in great shape after the school police victory, Kahlila joined us.

Throughout this summer and fall, Kahlila found adults who became mentors and teenagers who walked their entire lives for justice. She became a member of Black Lives Matter Youth Vanguard and taught other students at her school about police brutality.

At the weekly Wednesday protests, the teen danced with her friends and hugged families of victims of police brutality. She learned their names and stories and comforted some when they cried. Afterward, Melina Abdullah, co-founder of Black Lives Matter LA, often attacked Kahlila and took her home, where she and other organizers ordered food and watched Lovecraft Country. For the third or fourth time in her life, Kahlila had found a new family.

When Kahlila joined the student movement to defund school police, she, like many of her peers, kept her camera off during her first Zoom meeting. But as activity to defund school police has intensified, she has taken on a more prominent role, speaking at protests while recruiting younger students to her school.

When she picks up the microphone or the megaphone, her voice rings out and people listen. Abdullah says Kahlila is a natural organizer; she knows when to lead a crowd and when to pause, listen to what they say and follow their lead. She knows when to turn down the loudspeaker and dance.

At the end of each protest, she returned to the stage with other members of Youth Vanguard to end the action as they did every week – repeating the words of activist Assata Shakur:

It is our duty to fight for freedom.

It is our duty to win.

We must love and support each other.

We have nothing to lose except our chains.

Victory at the polls

As fall 2020 sets in, a new stage appears in the activists' calendar: the November 3 elections. Kahlila was still too young to vote.

“It’s a shame that I can’t vote because it’s a really big election year, and I really wish I could,” Kahlila said at the time. “But at the same time, even though I'm trying to inform people about which propositions to vote for, who to vote for and not to vote for, I feel like, in a sense, I'm voting.”

She loved victories. On November 7, 2020, the Saturday after Election Day, Kahlila was already scheduled to lead a rally and march with a group of organizations, including local unions and BLMLA, to “defend democracy” and demand a fair vote count. But that morning, news organizations widely projected Biden as the winner of the 2020 presidential election. Earlier in the week, Jackie Lacey had conceded her candidacy for district attorney, and a local measure, which would redirect part money from the city budget toward alternatives to incarceration, was also passed.

“We got Trump out of office,” she told the crowd at a rally that day, her voice tearing from all the shouting she had been doing lately. “And now we must organize to hold Biden accountable!” »

A difficult choice

Kahlila is currently studying sociology and African American studies at the University of California, Los Angeles. She and her generation worked to hold Biden accountable during his first presidential term — by educating themselves and their communities, by organizing protests and disruptions. Now, she says, she faces a difficult decision in her first presidential election.

“It leaves you in this predicament of: Do I vote for Joe Biden who has supported genocide over the past few months and who has been repeatedly asked to call for a ceasefire? [in Gaza]? …Or do you vote for Donald Trump, who incited an insurrection at the Capitol, who does not want to support any undocumented individual in any way, who wants to limit the free speech rights of protesters, especially given the recent encampments at colleges ?

Regardless of who wins the next presidential election, Kahlila's commitment remains firm: to maintain accountability by “disrupting our status quo ideology” through her movement work.

“That’s the whole point of protesting. That's the whole point of the action. That’s the whole point of doing anything in society to bring about change,” Kahlila said. “So I remain firmly convinced that calling people out publicly – including through action, including through disruption, including through protests – is a great way to hold people accountable for what they have said . »