Local Roots, National Stage

How a campaign to protect Alabama girls from sexual violence blossomed into a movement to lift up women around the country

Birmingham Magazine — November 2019 Original Story here:

When the day of reckoning for sexual violence in America came (with the virality of the #MeToo movement), most were caught off guard, but none more than Tarana Burke.

An activist and grassroots organizer since the late 1980s, for decades Burke worked away from the spotlight to help underserved communities protect young women and girls against sexual violence, primarily through her nonprofit, Just Be Inc. Her work through Just Be eventually spurred the first “Me Too” campaign in Selma, Alabama in 2005.

But it wasn’t until 12 years later, when actress Alyssa Milano sent her famous tweet, that the movement gained national attention. On October 17, 2017, Milano tweeted, “If you’ve been sexually harassed or assaulted, write ‘me too.’” The phrase detonated across social media, triggering revelations from millions of women who have experienced some form of sexual assault.

The moment that the hashtag went viral, we were in a position where millions of people, just the day before, were not even thinking about an opportunity to talk about what they experienced,” Burke says. “People had been holding these secrets in their bodies, in their minds and hearts for years, and never thought they would have an opportunity to say it out loud.”

Overnight, Burke was catapulted into the national spotlight, becoming both the spokeswoman and symbol for the nascent national movement. It was not a position that she necessarily anticipated, but the movement couldn’t have been gifted a better leader. Few can claim the clarity of vision or the decades of experience working on the ground-level that Burke can. So when the moment arrived, however unexpectedly, she was ready.

“It isn’t something that folks who do community work think about, or even work toward, because our goal is to stay as close to the ground and the people as possible. But, there’s also a benefit in being able to reach larger amounts of people in shorter periods of time. To have that kind of visibility for this work, I could never have imagined it,” Burke says. “You never know how life is going to change.”

Born and raised in the Bronx, New York, Burke’s work in community activism began with the 21st Century Youth Leadership Movement, a Montgomery-based organization founded by veterans of the Civil Rights Movement. She stayed with 21st Century while in college at Alabama State University andAuburn University Montgomery, training young people to recognize deficits in their community and giving them the tools to fix them.

“21st Century is largely responsible for shaping me and my political ideology, and also grounding me in an organizing foundation that I still employ today,” she says of her early experience.

Remaining in Alabama, Burke worked with a variety of organizations throughout the mid-1990s and early 2000s, including the People of Faith Network, the Central Alabama Fair Housing Center, and the Black Belt Community Foundation. She credits each experience with shaping her own views.

“My experiences with Fair Housing really gave me a deeper and more tangible understanding of what kinds of oppressions people were actually facing. When you get out there and see things in real time, it changes the way you think about the work.”

In 1997, while living in Selma, Burke gave birth to a daughter, Kaia. Though she could not have foreseen it at the time, raising a daughter would have an outsized impact on her own vision for the future.

“I think any parent will tell you that parenthood changes them, but for me, having a girl meant that I wanted the world for girls to be different. I wanted to have a bigger impact on what happened in the material lives of girls, and black girls.”

Burke co-founded nonprofit Just Be Inc. in Selma in 2003, as a way to build up young girls in that community. One of its first initiatives was the JEWEL program, a leadership-training model that uses self-development as a roadmap for building community leaders. In 2005, Just Be Inc. implemented the first “Me Too” campaign using “empowerment through empathy” to help young women of color overcome their experiences with sexual assault, abuse, and exploitation.

“I was exposed to intimate relationships with young girls from the community through our program, which is about leadership and self-worth. Many of those girls experienced sexual violence, or their lives had been touched by it, so it became apparent that we needed to have some level of community response to this because these were community children.”

While Just Be Inc. continued to operate, Burke remained active outside of the nonprofit.

As executive director for the Black Belt Arts & Cultural Center from 2004 to 2007, Burke oversaw all projects for the facility and for

after-school programs. She was a consultant for the National Voting Rights Museum and Institute for nearly a decade. She even was tapped as a consultant and production assistant for the 2014 feature film “Selma.”

But when “Me Too” became a national movement, Burke again focused her efforts toward eradicating sexual violence. In particular, as the movement spread, she grew concerned that its focus had shifted to identifying high-profile predators, while neglecting the survivors themselves.

“Our work started as an event in Alabama with black girls. When I talk about focusing on black women and girls, or focusing on marginalized folks, it’s not excluding anybody—it’s the only way that we can make sure that everybody gets served. Sexual violence doesn’t discriminate; we know that sexual violence crosses all demographics—race, ethnicity, religion, class, social status—there’s nobody who isn’t susceptible to that level of violence.”

In 2020, Just Be Inc. plans to unveil an online submission form and self-assessment test on their website where people can share their own “Me Too” stories without fear of repercussion. Burke also is part of a major campaign to review sexual violence laws in every state. Her main objective in the short term, however, is to redirect the movement back to the people it was created for.

“We’ve created this mechanism for people to take action in small ways, every day, for an end to sexual violence. It’s not going to be taking down individual [celebrities] for the next 20 years, because that’s not going to impact the systemic issues that are related to why sexual violence is so prevalent,” Burke says. “If your heart has just been opened and you want to be involved, the answer to that is not to point a finger at the folks doing the work and say ‘Well, why aren’t you…’ The answer is to ask, ‘How can I?’”