While most of the national headline-grabbing incidents of violence against unarmed Black people, from Treyvon Martin to Michael Brown to George Floyd, have involved male victims, Black women and Black transgender women also experience police brutality and are often the backbone of the fight to raise awareness and change minds. This is why we’re turning the spotlight to the women leaders who so often go unsung. A part of our Black (Women’s) Lives Matter feature, this story focuses on civil rights veteran Monica Lewis-Patrick.
The humidity was thick, and the crowd was hot and weary on the 11th day of Black Lives Matter protests in Detroit when Monica Lewis-Patrick jolted everyone to attention. They had marched this time to the site of the Algiers Motel, where three Black teenagers were shot to death during the 1967 racial unrest by white cops who later were acquitted of wrongdoing, and Lewis-Patrick says she was unexpectedly handed the microphone.
Eight minutes later, when the 54-year-old in the sleeveless paisley tunic concluded a rousing pass-the-baton speech so emotional she had to pull the COVID-19 mask down to reach the preacher’s-pulpit volume she intended, many of the young Black Lives Matter protesters around her were in tears.
“Black mothers have not always been able to take that we were releasing you into what could be the belly of the beast,” said Lewis-Patrick, otherwise known as the Water Warrior for her leadership of We the People of Detroit, an advocacy group best known for its current efforts to secure affordable water. “We have been praying for this moment! We have been praying for you! You are our hope! You are our promise! Everything that we’ve done has been for this moment for you to recognize your value and your worth. You are so precious. I’m telling you. This is your moment, and we will not allow anyone to deny you your moment. But you better know your momma is waiting, and we will stand between heaven and hell to protect you and to defend you.”
To a veteran civil rights activist like Lewis-Patrick, the multiracial demonstrations across the nation over police killings of unarmed African Americans represent the realization of a dream deferred. That intense address, she says, came from “the elation of seeing them come down that street, a mighty force of humanity representing every hue, every racial and sexual identity, but still centering that Black lives matter. It really demonstrated the transformation of a promise and a dream that our grandparents gave their lives for in pursuit of, as Dr. King said, little white children and little Black children walking hand in hand. That to me was the manifestation of that moment.”
“You stay in the room till you get what we came for. we came for freedom.”
–Monica Lewis-Patrick
It has been a long time coming for leaders like Lewis-Patrick, whose first civil rights cause — when she was 12 — was urging her Tennessee hometown school board not to remove Black literature from the curriculum. “I don’t remember not being in some kind of organizing, mobilizing movement,” she says. Her mother, she says, was the first Black female U.S. Army master sergeant and later organized tenants in their public housing project to demand more public educational support.
She moved in the aughts to Detroit, where her family had a long, illustrious history. One uncle, Willie Horton, was a Detroit Tigers great. Another, Junius Griffin, became a speechwriter for Martin Luther King Jr. and later vice president of public relations at Motown Records. Once she arrived here, she says, she was mentored in activism by the famed artist Gloria House, former Detroit councilwoman JoAnn Watson, and others.
“I sat at the knee of some of the greatest minds and some of the greatest women that have held down policy and education and human rights in this city,” she recalls.
Today, Lewis-Patrick is a powerhouse in her own right. In 2010, she banded together with four other women to prevent the mayor’s office from taking control of Detroit’s public school system. They then transitioned to focusing on the high rate of water shut-offs in the city, a result, she says, of misplaced financial priorities that have benefited developers like Dan Gilbert while putting thousands of families at risk.
“Now to see those same captains of industries celebrating and championing Black Lives Matter while they will not commit to a water affordability plan that would ensure the Black lives have water, we have to question all of those intentions,” she says. “At the end of the day, this is the operation that we come with is that as a Black mother, I understand I am the mother of all civilization. I understand that even if people don’t think I’m worthy of water, I still have an obligation to uplift that all humanity is worthy of water.”
Lewis-Patrick says she and other activists of her vintage are trying to stay in the background to allow younger civil rights leaders to emerge. That day at the Algiers site, she just wanted to embolden them.
“Don’t you back away until you get what you came for,” she exhorted the crowd. “You stay in the room till you get what we came for. We came for freedom.”
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