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Welcome to St. Louis.

Not only are the local court system and law enforcement community committed to reinforcing that black lives do not matter here, but the police also continue to escalate tensions and foment distrust between them and protesters.

Around noon on Friday, my colleagues and I, along with other protesters, were marching peacefully through the streets of downtown St. Louis when we saw the police department bringing in hundreds of officers in riot gear. In an ostentatious show of force, they lined up along the street to face us, holding their shields and batons aloft so protesters could clearly see them.

To say that these actions were unnecessary and exaggerated would be an understatement. They were clearly intended to make protesters fearful and to provoke unrest.

Demonstrations continued over the weekend and more than 80 people were arrested. By Sunday night, as I and other lawyers and advocates worked to bail out protesters, stories were flooding in about the unscrupulous methods officers were using to engage protesters and ultimately arrest them. Officers had shot rubber bullets into crowds of people, hitting pedestrians and innocent bystanders. Some who took off running to escape the onslaught of rubber bullets were chased and tackled by officers. Videos have since surfaced all over social media that substantiate protesters accounts of police in riot gear cornering protesters and refusing to let them leave and go home, which resulted in numerous arrests.

As if this werent problematic enough, St. Louis police officers were heard chanting, Whose Streets? Our Streets! This is a vile appropriation of a familiar chant that courageous demonstrators used in Ferguson. Can you imagine hearing police officers say those words as they advance on a crowd of protesters?

That sentiment isnt out of place in the St. Louis police department: Top brass echo it as well. At a news conference, Lawrence OToole, the acting police commissioner for the city of St. Louis, proclaimed that police owned tonight. This is the kind of leadership that forces people of color and poor people into survival mode in this region.

In addition, our local officials lament the property damage that has occurred here, but not the grievances of the black community. On a Twitter post, Mayor Lyda Krewson labeled protesters alleged to have committed property damage downtown as criminals. Her and Mr. OTooles willingness to speak out so emphatically against people who break windows, but not against police officers who kill citizens, is enraging for those of us in the black community and for our allies.

These protests are about so much more than Jason Stockley. They are about the many other Jason Stockleys in the St. Louis metropolitan and county police departments, and the citys refusal to acknowledge the pain that remains in this community before and since Aug. 9, 2014.

These protests are about the continued predatory practices of the municipal court system here, which bleeds people dry in fines and fees. Some of our clients have taken out payday loans and borrowed against life insurance policies to pay such fines. Just last year, ArchCity Defenders reached a $4.75 million settlement in a debtors prison class action lawsuit against the city of Jennings, which borders Ferguson, for illegally jailing people who were unable to pay traffic tickets or minor ordinance violations.

All of this is exhausting. The insensitivity. The mockery of real struggle and pain. The disregard. The arrogance.

When will Black Lives Matter in St. Louis? Which local leaders will finally step up and stop the government from continuing its long, complicated and devastating history of racism? From our view, military tanks, tear gas, rubber bullets and dishonest narratives wont be bridging this gap anytime soon.

The Ferguson Commission and the Movement for Black Lives, a collective of more than 50 organizations representing black Americans, have outlined a number of policy recommendations that would positively affect the black community and poor people: end cash bail, demilitarize law enforcement and stop criminalizing poverty. St. Louis officials must take these demands seriously and be willing to implement them.

Until then, St. Louis law enforcement officials will continue to find themselves locked in this pattern, wondering why black citizens take to the streets demanding that the police stop killing us.

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This past summer, the FBIs Counterterrorism Division, which investigates terrorist threats from groups such as al-Qaeda, invented a brand new label and a brand new threat. In an intelligence assessment written in August but first disclosed by Foreign Policy last week, the FBI designated a new group of domestic terrorists: Black Identity Extremists, or BIEs. The report broadly categorizes black activists as threats to national security. It uses unrelated acts of violence, such as the July 2016 shootings of police officers in Dallas and Baton Rouge, as justification for targeting black dissident voices. And it labels black activists whose central demands are that government officials be responsible stewards of their power, accountable to the people who elect them and transparent about decision-making as a threat to national security.

According to sources close to the FBI, the term Black Identity Extremist didnt exist before the Trump administration. But while the designation is newly manufactured, the strategies and tactics behind it are not. For anyone who remembers how the FBI used extrajudicial means to target civil rights leaders and other activists through COINTELPRO, the pretext is clear: Neutralize people or organizations whose attitudes or beliefs the federal government perceives as threatening.

That technique was used against the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., the Black Panthers against every major advocate for the rights of black people in the nations history. Those of us in existing resistance movements saw it coming, and we are warning the rest of you before it goes too far.

The history lesson couldnt have been starker, in fact. Just a few days before news of the new label broke, The Washington Post had reported on the cold case of a civil rights activist named Alberta Jones. Sixty years ago, Jones, the first black prosecutor in Louisville, was beaten over the head with a brick and drowned in the Ohio River. Despite sufficient evidence, her killers were never found and brought to justice.

Her death was just one of dozens of well-documented stories of civil rights leaders who were profiled, targeted and killed for insisting that black people receive equitable treatment under the law in a country whose Constitution guarantees it.

Decades later, unarmed black people are still disproportionately the victims of police shootings. Just since the Black Lives Matter movement got started, hundreds of us have been killed. But the FBIs report claiming how dangerous black activism is begins by asserting that violence inflicted on black people at the hands of police is perceived or alleged, not real. And it suggests that BIE ideology was birthed from frustrations after the death of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Mo. a not-so-subtle reference to the sustained resistance of black leaders in that city, the Black Lives Matter Network, and the broader movement for black lives and our allies.

[I yelled Black lives matter! at a Trump rally. This is what happened next.]

In the four years since Brown was killed by police officer Darren Wilson, black organizers and allies have used protest, direct action and other forms of dissent to demand equitable treatment under the law, and equally important, to see our dead receive the dignity they were refused while alive. We have faced pushback from the start, but this new designation takes it up a notch by suggesting that it is our demand for less violence by the state against civilians that leads to more violence against the state by civilians.

Designating protesters as terrorists makes clear that the Trump administration thinks the government bears no responsibility to end deadly police violence and other state abuses of power against everyday Americans. It suggests that simply demanding the right to live free of police profiling and violence and to have equitable access to food, health care and education can land you on an FBI watchlist. And it raises a fundamental question: What constitutes a threat to national security and who decides?

Journalists and government officials have warned about the rising deadly threat of white supremacists in the United States for years, and even the Trump administration must surely be aware of the problem. A joint intelligence bulletin warned this spring that white supremacist groups had already carried out more attacks than any other domestic extremist group over the past 16 years and were likely to carry out more attacks over the next year.

Two months after the report, white supremacists descended on Charlottesville with firearms and tiki torches, killing anti-racist activist Heather Heyer and injuring 19 people. The FBIs Joint Terrorism Task Force said the white supremacist accused of killing Heyer James Alex Fields Jr. of Ohio will not face domestic terror charges. Shortly after, House Democrats called for hearings to examine racist fringe groups, including those that organized the deadly attack. But the Trump administrations allies in Congress have failed to take decisive or meaningful action.

[White people think racism is getting worse. Against white people.]

The warning from the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security appears to be all smoke and mirrors. According to journalist and activist Shaun King, the FBI has done little to pursue the brutal beating of 20-year-old DeAndre Harris in a parking garage next to the Charlottesville police station.

And since taking office, President Trump and his administration have reversed Obama-era policies that would have otherwise protected everyday Americans from pervasive police violence. The administration has resumed giving police access to military surplus equipment typically used in warfare, such as grenade launchers, armored vehicles and bayonets. In February, Attorney General Jeff Sessions and his hard-line sidekick,Steven A. Cook, catapulted America back decades by overturning hard-fought, bipartisan sentencing policies for nonviolent offenders. Instead, Sessions instructed federal prosecutors nationwide to seek the strongest possible charges and sentences against targeted defendants. And just last month,he withdrew the Department of Justices Community Oriented Policing Services program, which provided training and accountability measures for police departments plagued with cultures of violence. Taken together, these actions have dramatically increased the possibility of violence at the hands of police and decreased the security ofordinary Americans.

Yet the FBIs new designation sends a clear message to anyone, but especially to black organizers, who would dissent that we had better lay down and take it or else.

While this gaslighting approach targets black activists, we are certainly not the only ones. Resistance organizers working to keep Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals recipients safe, those fighting back against fascism and white supremacy, Muslim communities and even animal rights organizers are being surveilled and threatened with jail time and deportation. Of course, none of this is novel to our current era of resistance. History has shown us that FBI tactics perfected against one movement can be used against other movements. This is why, together, we must stand up and say that we wont let it happen again.

Before she reached her quest for justice, Alberta Jones was murdered, and her killers went scot-free. History tells us that todays pattern of surveillance, harassment and violence against political activists is frighteningly reminiscent of her era. Must we wait for the bodies of todays black activists to fall before we take unchecked police and vigilante power seriously?

Read more:

Black America should stop forgiving white racists

Dont criticize Black Lives Matter for provoking violence. The civil rights movement did, too.

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We say black lives matter. The FBI says that makes us a ...

Ms. Baker considered the top-down, male-centered, charismatic model of leadership a political dead end. It disempowered ordinary people, especially women and low-income and working-class people, because it told them that they need a savior. If that person is assassinated or co-opted, the movement founders.

At the same time, local leadership is not a magic solution, since local leaders can also be dominant, hierarchical and self-aggrandizing. Group-centered leadership practices, where even celebrities in the movement are responsible to the will of rank-and-file members, help to keep organizations honest.

The lead organizers of the Movement for Black Lives have been influenced by 40 years of work by black feminist and L.G.B.T. scholars and activists. Their writings and practice emphasize collective models of leadership instead of hierarchical ones, center on societys most marginalized people and focus on how multiple systems of oppression intersect and reinforce one another.

This year, the Movement for Black Lives, with support from a team of strategists called Blackbird, coordinated three major days of action: two to commemorate Dr. Kings Beyond Vietnam speech and a day of national protests against symbols of white supremacy after the racist attacks in Charlottesville, Va. In each case, national coordinators kept a low profile, offering support while encouraging local groups to set their own agendas.

Critics argue that the Movement for Black Lives needs to tighten control of its messaging, discipline its local affiliates and shore up its brand. Its too bad they cant see the momentum happening at the grass-roots level. To paraphrase Ms. Baker, leaders who teach following as the only way of fighting weaken the movement in the long run.

Local organizers are not passive followers. They are leading creative campaigns in major cities. For example, the Black Youth Project 100, along with other local groups, is working to overturn the New York City Housing Authoritys permanent exclusion policy, under which people convicted of a crime can be barred from living in or visiting public housing.

Seshat Mack, a student at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai and a leader of the Black Youth Project 100s New York chapter, explained to me that the campaign, called Housing Over Monitoring and Eviction, has relied heavily on local leadership in particular, black New Yorkers who live in public housing.

In Chicago, one of the most segregated cities in the country, an expanded sanctuary campaign has brought together black people and Latino immigrants to demand an end to punitive practices like the citys gang database. Activists have argued that the criteria for inclusion is vague and that people often dont know theyre on the list. A lead organizer in that campaign, Maxx Boykin, underscores the importance of building trust between people and organizations, which can happen only on the local level.

The fight to end cash bail was bolstered by Mamas Bail Out Day, a campaign that is the brainchild of the Atlanta organizer Mary Hooks, a director of Southerners on New Ground, a queer social-justice organization. The organizers raised over $1 million to bail out more than 100 low-income black women on Mothers Day this year. The Movement for Black Lives umbrella group oversaw the effort by pulling in local bail-reform groups.

One of the most intense efforts within the Movement for Black Lives has been to develop an electoral strategy that can be applied locally. Recently, activists started a project to lay the groundwork for creating local black political power. According to Kayla Reed, a St. Louis organizer who helped develop the project, the goal is to transfer the clarity and radical vision brought to the protest lines to electoral campaigns. The organizers of the project are drawing lessons from the successful progressive mayoral campaigns of Chokwe Lumumba in Jackson, Miss., and Randall Woodfin in Birmingham, Ala., as well as the narrow defeat of Tishaura O. Jones in St. Louis.

Despite progress on many fronts, there is still work to do. The movement does need an easier way for people to get involved and more transparent collective decision-making, as well as space for broader ideological and policy debates.

The Movement for Black Lives is distinctive because it defers to the local wisdom of its members and affiliates, rather than trying to dictate from above. In fact, the local organizers have insisted upon it. This democratic inflection will pay off if they persevere. Brick by brick, relationship by relationship, decision by decision, the edifices of resistance are being built. The national organizations are the mortar between the bricks. That fortified space will be a necessary training ground and refuge for the political battles that lay ahead, as white supremacists inside and outside of our government seek to undermine racial and economic justice.

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Opinion | Black Lives Matter Is Democracy in Action

For all its talk of being a street uprising, Black Lives Matter is increasingly awash in cash, raking in pledges of more than $100 million from liberal foundations and others eager to contribute to what has become the grant-making cause du jour.

The Ford Foundation and Borealis Philanthropy recently announced the formation of the Black-Led Movement Fund [BLMF], a six-year pooled donor campaign aimed at raising $100 million for the Movement for Black Lives coalition.

That funding comes in addition to more than $33 million in grants to the Black Lives Matter movement from top Democratic Party donor George Soros through his Open Society Foundations, as well as grant-making from the Center for American Progress.

The BLMF provides grants, movement building resources, and technical assistance to organizations working advance the leadership and vision of young, Black, queer, feminists and immigrant leaders who are shaping and leading a national conversation about criminalization, policing and race in America, said the Borealis announcement.

In doing so, however, the foundations have aligned themselves with the staunch left-wing platform of the Movement for Black Lives, which unveiled a policy agenda shortly after the fund was announced accusing Israel of being an apartheid state guilty of genocide.

Released Aug. 1, the platform also calls for defunding police departments, race-based reparations, breaking, voting rights for illegal immigrants, fossil-fuel divestment, an end to private education and charter schools, a universal basic income, and free college for blacks.

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As far as critics are concerned, the grab-bag platform combined with the staggering underwriting commitment offer more evidence that Black Lives Matter is being used as a conduit for left-wing politics as usual.

Its about time people woke up to the fact that big money is using people as pawns to stoke racial hatred and further their global agenda, said the Federalist Papers Projects C.E. Dyer.

Bill Johnson, executive director of the National Association of Police Organizations, said corporations and others may want to think twice about partnering with the Ford Foundation, the fifth-largest U.S. philanthropy with $12.4 billion in assets.

The Ford Foundation has traditionally been leftist, at least since the 1970s, on law-enforcement matters. So its not a huge surprise, but its certainly disappointing, said Mr. Johnson. I guess potential donors may want to look at the [Black Lives Matter] movement and see the damage, destruction and murders that theyve left in their wake.

For Black Lives Matter, the grant-making partnership isnt risk free, lending legitimacy to the movement but also credence to those who say it has strayed from the concerns of black Americans calling for equal treatment at the hands of police.

I think whoevers in charge of vetting a grant like that didnt do their homework, said Mr. Johnson. Or maybe this was already in the works before they realized what exactly they were dealing with before this platform came outbefore it became more apparent that its become todays Velcro for what the leftist-fringe movement desires.

And thats a shame, he said, because instead of having a serious movement that might have been a basis for dialogue and improving relations in communities, especially communities of color, its kind of become in some ways a very violent movement, in some ways a very, very far-left [movement] with an almost statist agenda.

Borealis and Ford did not return requests Wednesday asking for comment, but one of the newly launched funds partners, the Movement Strategy Center in Oakland, California, praised the foundations for bringing resources to this transformative movement.

Ensuring that all Black Lives Matter, in this land and around the world, will require an infusion of assets into Black communities, said the center in an Aug. 8 statement.

In their July 19 announcement, Ford Foundation program officers Brook Kelly-Green and Luna Yasui said that, Now is the time to call for an end to state violence directed at communities of color.

And now is the time to advocate for investment in public servicesincluding but not limited to police reformtogether with education, health, and employment in communities for people that have historically had less opportunity and access to all those things, they said. These are the reasons we support the Movement for Black Lives.

Ford and Borealis are hardly alone: They said the fund will complement the important work of charities including the Hill-Snowden Foundation, Solidaire, the NoVo Foundation, the Association of Black Foundation Executives, the Neighborhood Funders Group, anonymous donors, and others.

In addition to raising $100 million for the Movement for Black Lives, the Black-Led Movement Fund will collaborate with Benedict Consulting on the organizational capacity building needs of a rapidly growing movement.

Ford has locked horns over Israel before: In 2003, the foundation announced after years of criticism that it would not renew its funding for leftist causes through the New Israel Fund, according to Forward.

The Black Lives Matter movement exploded in August 2014 after an officer shot dead unarmed 18-year-old Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri. Since then, police shootings of black men have prompted rioting and protests in dozens of U.S. cities, as well as the deaths of eight officers in separate incidents this year at demonstrations in Baton Rouge and Dallas.

Mr. Johnson confirmed that his organization, an advocacy group for police, has no grant-making alliance with Ford.

We dont receive any funding from Ford. But yeah, thanks very much, he said with a laugh.

Not that he wouldnt take it. Of course it would come in handy look at whats going on across this country with the attacks on police, Mr. Johnson said. Were not looking for a handout from Ford, but it would be nice to see groups like that or George Soros try to give some nuts-and-bolts help for people who are hurting, instead of throwing money around on grand schemes.

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Black Lives Matter cashes in with $100 million from ...

Helm, the so-called cofounder and core organizer of Black Lives Matter Louisville, explained in an article published at Leoweekly.com the things she says need to change.

White people, if you dont have any descendants, will your property to a black or brown family. Preferably one that lives in generational poverty, Helm writes in an article titled White people, here are 10 requests from a Black Lives Matter leader.

White people are asked, Give up the home you own to a black or brown family, pass on anyinherited property to a black or brown family, or re-budget your monthly so you can donate to black funds for land purchasing.

White women, especially, are urged to get a racist fired or get your boss fired cause they racist too, Helms writes.

She concludes, Commit to two things: Fighting white supremacy where and how you can (this doesnt mean taking up knitting, unless youre making scarves for black and brown kids in need), and funding black and brown people and their work.

During a press conference in New York City last Tuesday, President Donald Trumpcondemned the neo-Nazis and white nationalist protesters in Charlottesville.

Ive condemned neo-Nazis. Ive condemned many different groups, Trump said before calling the man who rammed a car intocounter-protesters andkilled a womana disgrace and a horrible murderer.

FollowJerome Hudsonon Twitter@jeromeehudson.

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