Civil rights activist Tamika Mallory became a national figure weeks after Donald Trump’s first election, when she was tapped to co-chair the Women’s March as the shock of Hillary Clinton’s loss led to a feeling of feminist revolt. She had already made a name for herself as an organizer against gun violence in New York City, and when she spoke in Washington, DC, on January 21, 2017, she connected her past work to the moment in a few simple words: “Today I am marching for Black and brown lives.”
Those who have listened to Mallory speak have likely heard snippets of the painful moments that built her commitment to social justice. But in her new book, I Lived to Tell the Story: A Memoir of Love, Legacy, and Resilience, she weaves her experiences with school struggles, abuse, motherhood, and loss into a story full of reflection and sociological detail.
And yet she wanted her memoir to strike a balance. “It brings up night tremors, it brings up feeling sick in my stomach. There were moments that I definitely had to turn it off in order for me to be able to just get through life,” Mallory tells Vanity Fair. “So I would say, as with everything else, as with the actual story, there’s the balance of the wonderful, exhilarating, special moments. And then the trauma, if you’re being honest, is also real.”
Courtesy of the publisher.
Mallory’s parents, who were founding members of the National Action Network with Reverend Al Sharpton, raised her at community meetings and protests, and by her teen years, she displayed a preternatural skill for translating the philosophies of old-school Black Power into language that resonated with the hip-hop generation. In 2009, at 28, she became the executive director of Sharpton’s National Action Network, eventually becoming an adviser to Vice President Joe Biden on the Obama administration’s gun control initiatives. In 2019, Mallory cofounded a new group called Until Freedom, and she currently cohosts TMI, a show on the Black Effect Podcast Network, with fellow Until Freedom cofounder Mysonne, a rapper and activist.
State of Emergency, Mallory’s 2021 book about politics and race in America, was one of the first books published by Black Privilege, Charlamagne Tha God’s Simon & Schuster imprint. I Lived to Tell the Story is one of the imprint’s marquee titles for its fifth anniversary, and Mallory considers Charlamagne a friend and literary adviser. She originally signed a two-book deal with the idea that the first would be political and the second would be personal, but she felt apprehension when it was time to start the memoir.
“I didn’t necessarily feel like people would be interested in hearing about my humble beginnings. I’m 44, so I think I’m at the almost midpoint if we look at a hundred-year span,” she says. But she had encouragement: “Once I saw it coming to life, I began to believe in it as well.”
Looking ahead, Mallory hopes that feminists can learn from the collective experiences of the recent past—as long as they recognize the lessons, including ones about the racism that white women perpetuate. “We could have maintained a very powerful, diverse movement and made it even more diverse,” she said. “The first form of the women’s movement was the suffrage movement. The Women’s March was better, and it could get better the next time.”
Vanity Fair: Through the National Action Network and Until Freedom, you’ve spent a lot of time working with families who have experienced something terrible. How did you develop the skill set for that?
Tamika Mallory: I became very intentional about my relationship to the families that I work with because they are at the center of our fight. Oftentimes people are passionate, and they want to make a difference and they want to lift an issue or lift a person who has been brutalized, who’s been murdered, who has been harmed. But they forget that there is a family that has been deeply impacted by everything you do, everything you say. So if, in fact, there are protests that turn violent, you will have families impacted in the way in which the city responds to them, in the ways in which other people in general look at their movement. I’ve always tried to be conscious of that.
Your organizing strategy harnesses social media and traditional grassroots door-knocking. How do you balance the old-school and new-school approaches in your work?
It’s hard to balance. And there’s a lot of chaos around us being in the thing, out the thing, managing the day-to-day of how you are surviving, but then your neighbors—because especially when you, again, pick up your phone, you are in everybody’s living room at one time. So it’s difficult, especially for me because I’m an empath, so I’m taking it all in and I’m like, Maybe we didn’t do enough. Maybe we didn’t show up in the right way. Maybe our messaging—
