September 2020 Issue

The 20 Remarkable Activists On Vogue’s September Cover Are Ready To Change The World

In the weeks following the killing of George Floyd, the Black Lives Matter movement gave voice to a global cry for change. From systemic racism to disability discrimination and domestic abuse, gender inequality to the climate crisis, in the  cover story, Afua Hirsch meets the activists determined to make a difference the world over.
Image may contain Riz Ahmed Jesse Williams Advertisement Collage Poster Human Person Jane Elliott and Janet Mock

On a Saturday in early June, I found myself blinking into the summer light as I emerged from London Underground’s Vauxhall station with two little girls beside me, witnessing something new. It was not the first major protest that month, not even the first Black Lives Matter protest, but as I stepped up on to that street, I felt an outpouring of raw, ancestral anger and outrage against racism on a scale I’ve never experienced before.

We had come to march because of the May killing of George Floyd; an act so callous and brazen his family described it as a “modern-day lynching”. The pain gathered after his death in Minnesota like an ocean swell, then rolled over the planet like a tsunami of Black rebellion, while injustices against Breonna Taylor, Ahmaud Arbery, Belly Mujinga, Shukri Abdi and so many more took centre stage. In London, we found ourselves surrounded by people of all races and ages, motorists beeping “Black. Lives. Matter” in unison with the march and bus drivers throwing Black Power fists from behind their windscreens. As the veteran Black liberation activist Professor Angela Davis remarked about the protests in America, and the same was true of Britain, “We’ve never witnessed sustained demonstrations of this size that are so diverse.”

Activists from all over the world feature across Vogue's special pull-out September issue cover. 

We marched against the violence done to the bodies of Black people; we marched against the violence done to our minds. As we joined the crowds, my nine-year-old daughter and her friend clasped my hands, and I thought of the late Toni Morrison’s description of how, for Black people and especially Black girls, racism tries to take root, so that “something as grotesque as the demonisation of an entire race” is planted inside your very being.

The pain, I expected. But it was the joy that took me most by surprise. Protester after protester began coming up to my girls, stopping to call them “Black queens”, making way for them, boosting them, reminding them that they are beautiful. In their faces, I saw the unmistakable look of relief that I instantly recognised. It was as if the rest of the world had finally, as the writer Clarissa Brooks wrote, woken up to the Black experience, to think about “what it means to see, participate and be an oppressed person in a world that feeds off of your body”.

This is a year that shredded complacency. Just like the great rebellions of times past – the anti-war movements, civil rights struggles, decolonisation protests – people have taken to the streets in their millions and participated in co-ordinated activism against government at all levels, simultaneously protesting on social media and against social media.

All around us, activists from different walks of life have risen to the surface, like bubbles in a glass. As Black and ethnic minority people faced a lethal double failure – to recognise quickly that they were more at risk from the Covid-19 pandemic, and then to provide them with the necessary personal protective equipment – doctors such as Meenal Viz became their voice, protesting outside Downing Street, sometimes solo, while heavily pregnant. As domestic abuse surged under lockdown, campaigners like Fiona Dwyer, from the women’s rights group Solace, made hidden violence impossible to ignore. Cultural historian Patrick Vernon persisted in highlighting the ongoing plight of the Windrush generation, who, it emerged in 2017, had been facing deportation in spite of being British, while the fight for justice for those affected by the tragedy of Grenfell Tower continued with the tireless efforts of Yvette Williams.

Patrick Hutchinson – a personal trainer from London – became a powerful symbol for peaceful protest when he was photographed lifting an anti-BLM protester from a fight in Waterloo. Veteran change-makers such as Doreen Lawrence continued to speak out on police failures, while broadcaster and BBC Radio 1 DJ Clara Amfo used the tool of mainstream media to educate a new generation with an impassioned anti-racism message.

It is a year that has elevated the visibility of legendary figures from those past battles, and ushered in a new generation of young activists, in which previously unknown campaigners and celebrities alike became unapologetic about demanding change. Take Marcus Rashford, the 22-year-old Manchester United and England footballer, who stood up against both racism and child poverty. Rashford teamed up with the food-waste charity FareShare, helping to raise millions to keep feeding vulnerable children while schools were closed. His letter demanding the government take urgent action received such a groundswell of public support that within 24 hours funds were sanctioned to continue the provision of free school meals through the summer holidays. “I’m by no means a politician but I had a voice and a platform that could be used to at least ask the questions,” says Rashford. “If I didn’t put myself out there and say, ‘This is not OK and it needs to change,’ I would have failed my 10-year-old self.”

It has felt like a truly global moment, as reflected in these portraits, taken in 13 cities on four continents. Alaa Salah, student and anti-government protester from Khartoum, drew global attention to the women-led protests in Sudan in the months before the eventual toppling of the former Sudanese regime, while in New York, two music industry executives – Brianna Agyemang and Jamila Thomas – led a worldwide social media blackout with their #theshowmustbepaused movement in the wake of Floyd’s death. The enduring work of disability awareness transcended generations, from San Francisco-based activist, and former Obama advisor, Alice Wong, who recently published Disability Visibility, a landmark anthology of disabled voices, to the taboo-vanquishing British founder of Able zine, Claudia Walder. Intersectional approaches to climate change were amplified by the Ugandan climate justice organiser Vanessa Nakate, and the British student Anna Taylor.

Model Joan Smalls sent necessary shock waves through the fashion world when she took to social media to relay her experiences as a woman of colour in her industry and to demand change. And a powerful call from activists such as Janet Mock, Jari Jones and Munroe Bergdorf for trans rights to be included across movements manifested in a new slogan: All Black Lives Matter.

As ever with collective protest, there is nuance and dissent. What is newly gifted by the immortal, painful legacy of George Floyd, however, is that it has opened up a whole new realm of awareness about the role of racism in all aspects of life on Earth. And not least, of course, in America, where a vocal roster of activists, from Brittany Packnett Cunningham to iO Tillett Wright, Kendrick Sampson and Janaya Future Khan have emerged as cultural leaders. “What’s happening is white folks realising it’s not just overt, vicious racism that has an impact,” says Jesse Williams, the LA actor whose speech in support of Black Lives Matter at an awards ceremony in 2016 became a global talking point. “It’s their silent complicity that underpins the whole thing and holds the body together. It’s the passive racism, it’s pretending America is about pulling ourselves up by the bootstraps,” Williams says. “When we don’t have boots. And you have all the straps.”

Marcus Rashford and Adwoa Aboah, captured by Misan Harriman for the September 2020 cover. 

Misan Harriman

For those who have been offering this message for decades, such as anti-racism activist and educator Jane Elliott, now in her mid-eighties, what feels new is that the message is getting through. “People of all colours are reacting to seeing what they now realise is a member of their species – a human being – being treated worse than an animal,” Elliott tells me. “It’s about time we woke up and realised that we have been lied to about race.”

Elliott, whose lifetime of work is currently gaining unprecedented attention, is crystal clear about where the problem lies. “Our educators have been taught thoroughly how to teach racism,” she explains. “I’d like to see parents go to the schools this fall in massive numbers, and say to educators, ‘You are not going to miseducate my child again where race is concerned.’ We need to change the education system so that it’s no longer about indoctrination, and people stop believing in the rightness of whiteness.”

One of the ways people have been correcting their education is by purchasing the works of Black authors in numbers never before seen. Layla F Saad’s Me and White Supremacy was suddenly on every Zoom book club reading list, while, in June, Reni Eddo-Lodge, whose book Why I’m No Longer Talking to White People About Race was published in 2017, became the first Black female author to top the bestseller list in the UK. “We are seeing the fruit of seeds that were planted in 2013, when Black Lives Matter was first formed,” Eddo-Lodge says. “A contemporary layer has now been added to the foundation that’s been being built for hundreds of years. A layer of activism, literature and culture that has boosted this to the top of the agenda.”

I have always felt as if I live a double life. There are the conversations I have with Black people, where I never have to explain what I mean by “the system”, or the omnipresence of racism. We simply weather the struggle against white power and Eurocentric norms with the same inevitability as the wind and rain. Then there are the conversations I have with many white people which, by contrast, have involved contorting myself into some kind of shape with which they’d be able to cope. I will never forget speaking frankly about the experiences of Black people at work, in front of several thousand white employees at a large corporation, only to be told they might need counselling afterwards. That’s apparently how traumatic it was for white people to hear, for a few minutes, about their role in the system Black people endure all the time.

For me, personally, the eruption of activism has emboldened me to close the gap, to speak unapologetically in every space, to have the confidence to recognise and call out racism in all its forms. That’s not to say it comes without trepidation – being honest while being Black carries a penalty, something that the British actor John Boyega captured profoundly. “Look, I don’t know if I’m going to have a career after this,” he said, in a spontaneous speech at a Black Lives Matter march in Hyde Park that went instantly viral. “But f**k that!”

Munroe Bergdorf bore that penalty in the full glare of social media. Just days after the model and activist was announced as the first trans woman to front a L’Oréal campaign, in 2017, she was sacked for her comments explaining the complicity of white people in structural racism. Three years on, after enduring abuse from the press and public, Bergdorf received an apology about the handling of the situation and has been asked to join the company’s UK diversity and inclusion advisory board. “For three years I’ve been gaslit into feeling I’m some kind of renegade, when what we’ve been saying is common sense,” Bergdorf says. “Denying that something exists for long enough, doesn’t stop it from being true. Now we are all being vindicated as a community. It’s made us stronger, and I’m proud of that.”

A woman who made history in the ’70s as one of the first high-profile Black models, Bethann Hardison has watched the storm of this year’s activism build over time. “I think this movement has unleashed a lot of emotion for the people of fashion,” Hardison tells me. “It has allowed a lot of people of colour in the industry to speak up. I don’t stand up in accusation, but in education – to make people aware, and to reflect.”

Joan Smalls, the Puerto Rican model who is donating 50 per cent of her earnings for the rest of 2020 to Black Lives Matter charities, believes fashion has a key role in the change. “The industry narrates visuals that reach so many demographics it can steer the conversation towards a more inclusive normality. In addition,” she believes, “it can lend its platforms and monetary support to organisations making a difference in the systematic legal reforms that need to take place.”

Meanwhile, Adwoa Aboah, model and activist, has used her visibility to change perceptions around mental health, most notably through her platform Gurls Talk. “For some time it’s felt to me to have been quite a box-ticking approach to racial justice, mental health, sustainability,” she says. “Now I have hope it’s changing. I don’t think you’re going to get away with just spraying perfume on the situation anymore.” For Aboah, who says she often shaves her head to protect herself from the painful experience of finding hairstylists unable to cope with her hair texture on shoots, those who already held the industry to account are now doing so with a newly unapologetic tone. “I’ve always felt indebted to an industry that gave me a massive platform, but that didn’t allow me to express my qualms,” she says. “The fashion industry’s approach can come across as inauthentic at the best of times – like just creating a T-shirt with a slogan on it, as if that was doing the work. I always felt as if my position was so fragile, and I had to emphasise that I’m so grateful to be here. That is changing within me now, and the more other people who haven’t spoken up in the past now speak, the less I feel alone.”

It’s that sense of strength in numbers that resonates across the ages. Dr Bernice A King, daughter of civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr, tells me from Atlanta of her optimism at seeing so many younger voices coming to the fore. “This movement is setting to change their own pathway – I commend them for lifting their voices, for utilising their strength, their courage and their tenacity to see significant change in our nation as it relates to Black lives. But now,” she adds, “there’s a great demand that we move from words to action.”

The immediate course of action has been a focus on the criminal justice system. It’s no coincidence that LA-based Patrisse Cullors, one of the pioneers behind the Black Lives Matter movement in 2013, has channelled much of her energy into specific legislative change addressing the plight of Black people in American prisons. Demands to “defund the police” – reallocating public funding away from violent police forces and into alternative initiatives designed to improve public safety – are gaining ground, after Minneapolis, where Floyd was killed, made it official policy.

“We must change laws that allow people to operate with impunity,” says Tamika D. Mallory, a social justice activist from New York, whose charisma and clarity have seen her amass more than a million followers on social media. “This must first be a movement of accountability and then we can enter the next phase of designing a system that truly serves the people.” “It is nice to see people gathering together, but it’s not the emotional ‘Kumbaya’ that we want,” adds Jesse Williams. “It’s taking down the power structure.”

While policing in the UK works very differently from in the US, the Black Lives Matter movement in Britain has also focused on the deaths of Black people in police custody, including Joy Gardner, who suffocated after being gagged and restrained by police with a body belt at her home in 1993; Sean Rigg, who died in police custody in 2008; and Mzee Mohammed, who was only 18 when he died surrounded by 18 police officers in Liverpool in 2016.

Anti-Black racism – which Britain did so much to help export throughout its empire – has always been global, making protest movements inevitably global in response. It is a response that was just as relevant in the 1960s, when Martin Luther King Jr spoke of the need to “planetise our movement for social justice”. And in 2020, it looks distinctly more female – undeniably led by black women, many young and tech-savvy, as social media has enabled activists to organise and amplify both historic legacies and new voices, such as Temi Mwale, founder of the celebrated community organisation The 4Front Project; writer Mireille Cassandra Harper (photographed alongside her mother, Elaine, who campaigned against the imprisonment of Nelson Mandela during the 1980s); Quinn Wilson, activist and creative director of Lizzo’s videos; protest organiser and actor Imarn Ayton; Phyll Opoku-Gyimah, co-founder of UK Black Pride; and Lavinya Stennett, whose The Black Curriculum social enterprise counters the erasure of Black people from Britain’s history teaching in schools. It has seen a burst of new interest in recent months.

“This is a turning point,” Stennett says. “We have huge cultural power. Now it’s about building upon our work globally, so that every young person across the world is walking into a future that is actively breaking down the structures of racism and colonialism.” As Martin Luther King Jr once said, “This sweltering summer of the Negro’s legitimate discontent will not pass until there is an invigorating autumn of freedom and equality.”

We had our sweltering summer of legitimate discontent. The autumn starts now. 

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