A protest can be so many things at once. It can be a forum to fight injustice, an artistic release, an outlet for anger, a birthday party. Watch Kahlila Williams protest, and you’ll see all of the above.
The day before Kahlila’s 17th birthday, in October 2020, she stood on the back of a truck holding a bullhorn, leading more than 100 people in chants of “Black lives, they matter here.” The truck rolled through downtown Los Angeles, past courthouses, city hall and police headquarters.
At previous demonstrations, other protesters had exclaimed, “She’s so cute!” and “She’s so little!” when she darted past them, 5ft tall and quick, but on this day her voice boomed loud and sure (people tell her she speaks “as if she were 7ft tall”). She called out the names of people who were killed by police in Los Angeles and demanded justice for them. Her energy electrified the people around her, older activists and fellow teenagers alike, and they chanted back.
Kahlila had thrown herself into activism that spring after the murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis, focusing initially on defunding school police in the Los Angeles Unified School District.
She spoke at her first school board meeting in late June 2020, when the LAUSD board of education was deciding whether to cut the school police budget. When she introduced herself as a rising senior, her voice was soft, timid even. But as she began to talk about the end-of-year picnic her sophomore year, where she passed out from dehydration and woke up to the school police officer asking if she had consumed drugs, her voice grew stronger and more passionate.
“Instead of getting assistance I needed by a nurse, a school police officer was there when I regained consciousness,” she told the board. “Instead of getting help, I was accused of having a drug overdose.” She was referencing the fact that Los Angeles high schools did not all have nurses on campus every day, but they did have police on campus every day. The money on 435 uniformed officers could, in her opinion, be spent so much better.
Kahlila had not been under the influence, but she asked the board – so what if she was abusing drugs at that picnic? Would a police officer be most helpful in that situation, or should schools spend that money on someone with more expertise in substance abuse? “Police instill more fear into our students’ day-to-day lives. Hiring a drug counselor would provide a real assistance to students who need it. That’s why funding toward nurses, school counselors, [therapists] and ethnic studies is what we need.”
In an interview at the time, she said she considered herself lucky that her third foster home was the one she’d been in for the last six years, where she felt safe and cared for. But that’s not a reality for many kids.
Kahlila explained that she wanted school to be a safe and stable place for her and for kids like her. That’s what drove her to this work, and police don’t make her feel safe or stable.
She experienced her first big win as an activist that night – when the school board voted to slash the police budget by 35%.
The following day, a resource specialist at her school told her that she was going to join a protest demanding the ousting of Los Angeles’s district attorney, Jackie Lacey, a demonstration that had been going on every Wednesday for three years. Police had killed hundreds of people under Lacey’s watch, and activists accused her of not trying to punish those officers, even though her job was to prosecute criminals, the school resource specialist explained.
Still flying high after the school police victory, Kahlila joined in.
Throughout that summer and fall, Kahlila found adults who became mentors, and teens who had been marching for justice their whole lives. She became a member of Black Lives Matter Youth Vanguard and taught other students from her school about police brutality.
At the weekly Wednesday protests, the teenager danced with her friends and hugged the families of police brutality victims. She learned their names and stories and comforted some when they cried. Afterwards, Melina Abdullah, the co-founder of Black Lives Matter LA, often swooped Kahlila up and took her home, where she and other organizers ordered in food and watched Lovecraft Country. For the third or fourth time in her life, Kahlila had found a new family.
When Kahlila had first joined the student movement to defund school police, she, like many of her peers, had kept her camera off in her first Zoom meeting. But as activity ramped up to defund school police, she took on a greater role speaking at protests while also recruiting younger students at her school.
When she takes the mic or bullhorn, her voice booms and people listen. Abdullah says Kahlila is a natural organizer; she knows when to lead a crowd and when to pause, listen to what they are saying and follow their lead. She knows when to lower the bullhorn and dance.
At the end of each protest, she was back on the stage with other members of Youth Vanguard to end the action like they did every week – by repeating the words of activist Assata Shakur:
It is our duty to fight for freedom.
It is our duty to win.
We must love and support one another.
We have nothing to lose but our chains.
Victory at the polls
As the fall of 2020 took hold, a new milestone appeared on the activists’ calendar: the 3 November elections. Kahlila was still too young to vote.
“It sucks that I can’t vote because this is a really big election year, and I really wish I could,” Kahlila said at the time. “But at the same time, as much as I’ve been doing – trying to inform people about what propositions to vote for, who to and not to vote for – I feel like in a sense I am voting.”
She loved the victories. On 7 November 2020, the Saturday after election day, Kahlila was already scheduled to emcee a rally, and to march with a group of organizations, including local unions and BLMLA, to “defend democracy” and demand a fair vote count. But that morning, news organizations resoundingly projected Biden the winner of the 2020 presidential election. Earlier in the week, Jackie Lacey had conceded the race for district attorney, and a local measure, which would redirect a chunk of money in the city’s budget to alternatives to incarceration, also passed.
“We got Trump out of office,” she told the crowd at a rally that day, her voice shredded from all the shouting she’d been doing lately. “And now we have to organize to keep Biden accountable!”
A tough choice
Kahlila is now studying sociology and African American Studies at University of California, Los Angeles. She and her generation have worked to keep Biden accountable in his first presidential term – through educating themselves and their communities, through protests and disruption. Now, she says, she faces a difficult decision in her first presidential election.
“It leaves you in that lose-lose predicament of: do I vote for Joe Biden who has supported a genocide for the last several months and has multiple times been told to call for a ceasefire [in Gaza]? … Or do you vote for Donald Trump, who has caused an insurrection of the Capitol, who does not want to support in any way any undocumented individual, who wants to limit the rights of freedom of speech for protesters, especially given the recent encampments at colleges?”
Regardless of who wins the next presidential election, Kahlila’s commitment remains steadfast – to maintain accountability by “disrupting our ‘business as usual’ ideology” through her movement work.
“That’s the whole point of protesting. That’s the whole point of action. That’s the whole point of doing anything in society to make change,” Kahlila said. “So I truly stand on my firm beliefs of calling people out publicly – especially through action, especially through disruption, especially through protests – is a great way to hold people accountable to what they said.”
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This story was adapted from Don’t Wait: Three Girls Who Fought for Change and Won by Sonali Kohli (Beacon Press, 2024). Excerpted with permission from Beacon Press.