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The loneliness came back. Worse than I remember. I don’t get it. I know I’m doing the right thing. You have to see that. Then what is this? Why do I feel this empty void inside?

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JANUARY 5, 2018

America hates to acknowledge Black pain. We prefer expressions of Black suffering to be academic, and Erica was an uncompromising reminder of the human cost of that pain. She was determined to call out American racism and anyone she felt was hindering her mission to get justice. She didn’t care if they were media organizations, other organizers, politicians or presidents, and she paid dearly for it.

Articles she submitted to news orgs went unpublished. Requests for interviews were denied. When she was heard, her frustration and the way she expressed it was labeled, by so-called allies, as an example of the unruly, angry, lower class Black woman; too unsophisticated to be allowed a say in policies that directly affect her, too emotional to be admitted into establishment movements, too loud, too direct, and too invisible, until it was time to collect her vote.

Even in death, she wasn’t seen. Her movement work became the focus of an online tug of war between centrists who feel she was too confrontational, far leftists using her words to attack centrists, and other activists who felt she was too focused on one aspect of the collective struggle. Yet again, a Black woman was being used by “allies” as a political tool with no regard for the actual person.

America loves silent martyrs. A photograph of a dead hero coupled with a quote is easier to deal with than the complex reality of their work. Martin Luther King is the most famous example of this, but every Black person who sacrificed to move America towards justice has had their messages sanitized or ignored. My fear for Erica’s memory is that she’ll become another cypher in the Black history pantheon, a face and a name that politicians and opportunists use when convenient, without addressing the conditions that created her.