On Friday, Black organizers and leaders from around the country held a virtual Black National Convention. The event, organized by the Movement for Black Lives, featured conversations on issues including electoral justice, the criminal justice system, labor, the climate crisis, disability justice, trans rights, feminism and immigration. This is North Carolina activist Bree Newsome Bass, who was arrested five years ago for scaling a 30-foot flagpole at the South Carolina Capitol to remove the Confederate flag.

Bree Newsome Bass: “We’re trying to transform a system and a government that was fundamentally organized around our enslavement. Right? So we’re already alienated in many ways from that. But even beyond that, even when we elect someone who we can consider a comrade or someone who, you know, has gone into the office promising to put forward our agenda, again, the reality is that the system that they come up against is so highly organized that if we are not organized on our end to both support them and to continue pushing, it will be very difficult for that person to do anything.”