Two sisters, Salamishah and Scheherazade Tillet, have been fighting for decades to end violence against black women and girls.
In 2003, the sisters founded A Long Walk Home (ALWH), a national organization based in Chicago that trains black girls and women to become artists and activists against violence to women and girls — whether it be police violence, sexual assault or domestic violence.
“A lot of institutions and systems require black women to suffer silently to maintain themselves,” said Salamishah, 44, a co-founder of ALWH. “The requirement that black girls and black women have to suffer silently as a part of being a member of the community, as part of being an American citizen, it’s such an expectation … and we then take that on, and there’s so many repercussions, like healthwise, to our silence.”
The organization’s first tool is healing, and then organizing. With the pandemic, and then the uprisings, a main focus for the Tillet sisters has been the wellness of the young women in the organization.
“Before this movement, we were also working on just holding our young people during the COVID crisis,” said Scheherazade, 42, also a co-founder of ALWH. “Why this moment means so much more than ever is because everyone got to see the inequalities, and being in Chicago, we really got to see it.”
Many young girls in the organization worked as essential workers to help provide for their families because of unemployment; some even had to be caregivers, explained Scheherazade.
“There are so many different ways that, particularly on the South and West sides, (girls are) disproportionately impacted by this, and the uprising breathes from that as well,” she said. “The girls are actively involved in a way their lives are put at risk, but there is a grief knowing your stories won’t be as central to the movement.”
Salamishah underscored how the erasure of black women and girls’ experiences produces a depth of grief, especially during this current climate.
“There’s no moment where (black girls and women) will be centered, and so that kind of invisibility creates a different level of grief,” she said. “Our work is very much about making sure that black girls and black young women are at the center of their own lives, but also at the center of our social justice movements. We believe their freedom will necessitate the freedom of everyone else.”
On Monday, news broke about the death of Oluwatoyin “Toyin” Salau, a 19-year-old activist who was found dead in Tallahassee, Florida, more than a week after she went missing, according to police, and after she tweeted about being sexually assaulted. A Long Walk Home held a virtual healing circle for its girls the next day.
Martinez Sutton, the older brother of Rekia Boyd, a 22-year-old woman who was fatally shot in Chicago in 2012 by then-police Officer Dante Servin, who was off duty, moderated the healing circle.
“(Toyin) is a very hard one because she, to me, represents all the girls that we work with,” said Scheherazade, “and is really at this intersection as a survivor and racial justice movements.”
The organization’s Girl/Friends program also organized a petition for Salau as a way to bring more awareness to her story. “Her case just speaks so much about our work,” said Scheherazade.
For the last five years, A Long Walk Home has been working with the family of Boyd to create a public art project in Douglas Park, where she was killed.
“It’s really reclaiming what Douglas Park is,” said Scheherazade, “but it’s also creating a new form of justice because Dante Servin lives across the street from it. And Rekia will become more of a symbol for all the stories of black women and girls’ stories that face gender and police violence.”
Since “so much of the Say Her Name movement began with Rekia’s story,” Scheherazade said, the sisters are gearing up to start the Say Her Name Memorial, where they create monuments to black girls and black women who have been victimized by police violence.
“There is no such monument anywhere in the country,” said Salamishah, “and it’s a long-term insistence on being and centering these experiences in the midst of all the erasure.”
