Samaria Rice is the mother of Tamir, not a “mother of the movement.”
In those early weeks after Tamir’s death, various organizers offered Rice guidance. She describes her relationship with her first two attorneys (the original one was a local litigator; the second was famous movement attorney Ben Crump) and how anxious she was about saying the wrong thing. “You can see I look like a deer in headlights,” she says of early interviews. She was angry, but she had been told she wasn’t supposed to show her rage. She felt constrained and underinformed, and she didn’t want the organizers and lawyers to “handle everything.” She wanted to be involved in strategy, court filings, and decision-making.
Not every parent of a slain child shares this desire, Rice acknowledges. But she felt her intelligence was being insulted. At times, she lashed out; at other times, she retreated. “You can lose your mind in a situation like this,” she tells me. “Especially with my son being global.” Often, she worried about her other children and the families across the country who belong to a club no one wants to join: the surviving families of “police-involved killings.” She was frustrated that, while many people surrounded her, she didn’t know whom to trust or how to protect Tamir’s story. She asked people, including some artists and organizers, to stop using his face without permission. In a sense, Rice wanted to maintain her authority over both her own voice and her son’s legacy. To an extent, this was never possible. Although Tamir was her child, when we saw his sweet face emblazoned across our televisions, he became everyone’s.
