Photos by Nina Robinson
Angela Rose Myers
Angela Rose Myers ensures the future of local civil rights leadership will be bright.
A week after the presidential election, the Minneapolis branch of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People elected a new president of its own: Angela Rose Myers, the second consecutive 25-year-old president of the august civil rights organization’s local office.
“Young civil rights leaders is our brand,” Myers says. “I think it’s kind of cool.”
We’re sitting at a table in the front yard of her mother-in-law’s house in the Ericsson neighborhood of south Minneapolis, where Myers and her newlywed husband, Tyler Moroles, have been riding out the pandemic. It’s a crisp but balmy fall afternoon that only demands Myers wear a Pendleton pullover and leggings. The Breck alum briefly left the North to major in Africana studies and women’s, gender, and sexuality studies at Barnard College in New York City. And she’s not the first brainy academic in the family. Samuel L. Myers Jr., her dad, is a professor of economics at the University of Minnesota’s Hubert H. Humphrey School of Public Affairs, and Myers grew up in the middle of a Black intellectual scene that congregated in her parents’ home.
“I don’t know what it was about coming out to North Oaks,” she laughs. “But people loved my parents’ little dinner parties.”
Myers says she became familiar with the constellation of political power players in the Twin Cities through her parents’ intellectual scene, whether it was future leaders her dad mentored at the Humphrey School, like Minneapolis City Council member Alondra Cano, or St. Paul Mayor Melvin Carter. And she says it wasn’t too long ago that former NAACP president Nekima Levy Armstrong held a big mayoral campaign fundraiser at her parents’ house.
Myers sees herself as part of a new generation that “came into consciousness during the first Black Lives Matter protests over the deaths of Tamir Rice and Jamar Clark.” This generation marched in the streets, then off to college, where they studied critical race theory, which posits that racism is a systemic problem in America. She says the idea of race as a social construct used to oppress people of color can be traced all the way back to the thought leadership of the NAACP’s founding father, W. E. B. Du Bois. And after a summer filled with protest and strife, she says she’s heartened that so many white Minnesotans are finally coming into this same consciousness, taking responsibility for perpetuating racist systems and trying to do something about it, whether that’s putting Black Lives Matter signs in front of their homes, reading books about anti-racism, or marching with their fellow citizens.
“We’re trying to become an anti-racist society, but also a society that actively loves, acknowledges, and cares for one another,” she says. “And just acknowledging that our true history is one of pain means we can heal that.”
How was your 2020?
I’m going to say, personally, this year has been one of the hardest, but then also one of the most rewarding, years I’ve ever had. I got married in 2020, on Valentine’s Day.
Just before the whole world shut down. Where was the ceremony?
In Puerto Rico, outside of San Juan. It was, like, 40 people. But before I got married, I lost an aunt. It was a shock to my whole family. She is my dad’s sister. She was out in Maryland. She was actually the main caretaker for my grandfather, who turned 101 this year.
Angela Rose Myers laughing
Wow. Is he still with us?
I see this man every week, because he’s on Zoom. His nurses bring him a little iPad.
Does he love it?
He doesn’t. He’s an old stoic. He was a president of a historically Black college, Bowie, in Maryland. And he was the president of the National Association for Equal Opportunity in Higher Education. And during the Carter era, he fought to sustain the establishment of historically Black colleges by providing them with access to over a billion dollars.
What a 2020 for you.
And in November of last year, my husband was running for office. When COVID hit, he stopped his campaign, and his actual job took over. So, a lot happened. And particularly during the time of the uprising, I had to figure out what my actual goals in life are. I was very active in organizing for the NAACP during the George Floyd uprisings, but I was not on the ground. I’d be up all night on the phone trying to route supplies or help people with transportation. And I was so fearful, with a bat in my hand, because I was worried about the white supremacists. I was going out of my mind with fear.
Your mother-in-law’s house is really not far from 38th and Chicago at all.
I mean, I had to go knock on the neighbors’ door because I wanted to let them know that Black people lived on this block. Don’t be scared if you see me. And the fear that I had to deal with was more than anxiety. It was physically paralyzing at times. I’m someone who deals with mental health issues. I dropped out of college and went back to college because of my mental health issues, and I had to deal with, “How do I move forward in this place of fear?” The answer came from books. It came from Black feminist theory. It came from the Black women that were around me and were preaching this love, this hope. In her book All About Love: New Visions, bell hooks says we are conditioned to be in this place of fear because our fear is utilized. It benefits somebody when we’re in this fear.
The fear allows you to be controlled.
And when you move in a perfect love and this perfect love is not just for yourself or for a partner but for a community, you can’t be controlled. Because you disobeyed because you love. And that’s what I see with this righteous anger. The righteous anger that we saw when people were out in the streets trying to be heard because we love our community. We loved that man that was on that ground, who Derek Chauvin was kneeling on. We loved George Floyd, and so when I came to that moment it was a little bit like, “OK, Angela, what is it that you really love to do? What fulfills you, that pushes you and makes you go forward to a point where you’re not just helping yourself, you’re helping your community as well?”
And ultimately that led you to pursue the presidency of the Minneapolis NAACP. Do you have specific policy goals for 2021?
We’re constructing our policy agenda. After COVID and after George Floyd, we’re going to have different priorities and emphases. I’m going to tell you that my priority, particularly in Minneapolis, is going to be addressing our economic crisis and our housing crisis. Rising crime, for me, isn’t a symptom of fewer police officers or fewer powers of police. Crime is actually a symptom of the economic crisis and housing crisis that we’re currently in and the despair and the hopelessness that a lot of the people in our community are feeling. People don’t go into a quote, unquote, “life of crime” just ambivalently. When you have mass unemployment, when you have people who can’t find affordable, safe housing, crime will rise. But we’re focusing on the police in this situation and relations with them, right?
That seems to be what we hear most about.
Right now, we do have police officers. How do we get police officers to do their jobs and do their jobs fairly? To make sure that after every interaction everybody goes home safely?
Why do you think “defund the police” snowballed into so much misunderstanding and misinformation this summer?
The truth of the matter is that I’m not here to stop anybody from defunding the police. I’m here to speak for my community. My community definitely needs more time to ask, What does transforming public safety look like for us? I’m younger, so I’m just coming into it. But there are major police reforms that we could have that we’ve been pushing for the last two decades.
Like which?
One, which has a pilot program in Minneapolis, is having the social welfare folk next to police officers. Or people who are mental health professionals going out on 9-1-1 calls that are specific to mental health issues with police officers. That’s something that our community has been pushing for. Definitely things around use of force and legitimizing use of force, and then also accountability. From the conversations that I’m having—particularly with the people who are on the side of police reform and who are very against dismantling the police—what they really want going forward, which I think is what a lot of people want, what everybody wants, is the police to have transparency, accountability, and to actually protect and serve. How did we get to a place where people don’t even trust the police to protect and serve? They don’t trust the police to show up these days, even when there’s gunshots happening.
And, people forget, this is all with a fully funded police force.
Chief Arradondo really needs to get his own force on the same page. Because even during the uprisings, it seemed like there were multiple people giving commands. He needs to win back his own department. And how will they win back the trust of the community? They have power, but they don’t have any authority. What is power without authority? I think that if they really want to fight for their jobs, they need to start acting different.
Are you fearful of what could happen if the trials this spring don’t go the way most hope they will and we don’t see justice done?
Well, I have two responses to that. The first is mainly that what I’m seeing of this trial right now, I’m impressed. I’m so thankful for Keith Ellison right now. I’m thankful that he’s doing his job, and I’m thankful for the fact that Mike Freeman’s off the case. The second is the destruction of this city that happened during the uprising and whether it’s going to happen again. From the people who were charged this summer, it is ahistorical to say that we were ruining our own city.
You mean because of all the suburban and exurban people who were charged?
If this case doesn’t go the way that people hope it will, there will be protests. And I don’t disavow protests.
Do you disavow burning buildings?
Yes. I disavow burning buildings and arson. But the majority of the people charged with arson were white. And I think, also, the truth is that we were put in danger and demonized at the same time. So, at the NAACP we’re protecting Black businesses, and we’re right to protect Black businesses. When we were out there, there were white folk, white supremacists. I don’t know if they were card-carrying members of the KKK, but there were white supremacists that shot at NAACP volunteers. No one wants to recognize that there are white supremacists in Minnesota, but there are. Personally, I was amazed by how quickly they were able to organize, get down here, and start shit up.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
This article originally appeared in the January 2021 issue.
