_By the time he left Miami, Phillip Agnew had already decided he was going to take over the Florida State Capitol. For two days there had been marches in Tallahassee, since the Saturday George Zimmerman was acquitted of murder in the killing of Trayvon Martin, and Agnew, who was living then in Miami Lakes, thought an escalation was in order. He shared his idea on social media and in group texts, though not everyone involved in the protest caught wind of the plan. “I thought I was going for a one-day rally,” said Jonel Edwards, who had just graduated from the University of Florida and picked up some demonstrators in Gainesville on her way to Tallahassee.

The rally was held on Tuesday, July 16, 2013, three days after the Zimmerman verdict was announced. Some speeches were made, “and then,” Agnew recalled, “we marched into the capitol and said we weren’t leaving.”

_Agnew and Edwards, at the time, were members of the Dream Defenders: a group of Black and Brown activists, most in their late teens or early twenties, who had come together to organize against police brutality and the criminalization of Florida’s Black and Latino youth. The protest at the capitol was not their first experiment in confrontational nonviolence. More than a year earlier, many of them had walked from Daytona to Sanford, Florida, in the weeks after Martin was killed there. It took three days to traverse the forty miles, and when they arrived at city hall in Sanford they called for the arrest of Zimmerman and the resignation of Sanford’s chief of police. “We all decided this could not be a one-time thing,” said Agnew, and the organization was officially chartered, the Dream Defenders invoking with their name the dream that was explicated for all the world on August 28, 1963, at the March on Washington.

It wasn’t until they were in the hallway outside the governor’s office, off one side of the capitol rotunda, that the reality of a long siege set in. There was no food, no chairs, nor any kind of bedding. How the protesters would pressure lawmakers into accepting their demands, or even what those demands might be, was not entirely clear. “We were kind of building the plane while we were flying it,” Agnew admitted. But they would not make a hasty exit. They would stay, camped on the floor of the hallway, until more of them arrived, bringing tents and sleeping bags. The action would consume the attention of the state and play a pivotal role in the evolution of the Black Lives Matter movement. For the next thirty-one days and thirty nights, the Dream Defenders would call the Florida capitol home.

_Earlier this year I caught up with Agnew and Edwards and some of the others who went into the capitol that day. I wanted to see how they remembered the protest in light of all that has transpired over the past ten years. In 2013, Black Lives Matter was just a hashtag. Eric Garner was still alive. So were Breonna Taylor, George Floyd, and this year’s and next year’s victims of police homicide. Pundits were talking about Florida turning blue. No one seemed capable of imagining that the state would swing to the right of others in the Deep South, or that, less than a decade after the Dream Defenders’ Tallahassee occupation, an army of rioters would attempt a capitol takeover of their own in Washington, D.C., in the hopes of restoring an ally of white nationalism to the presidency.

In retrospect, then, the Dream Defenders’ occupation takes on an outsized and prophetic power, like an Elizabethan prologue that contains the seeds of the drama we are about to witness. For that reason, I thought, it was worth revisiting. And there was also this: We often forget that activists can have second acts or second lives. We lose track of them as they get older. Many who achieve a certain fame or notoriety when young become instantly historicized, trapped in a moment in time. How many of us know what happened to Cesar Chavez after the Delano Grape Strike, or Abbie Hoffman after the trial of the Chicago Eight, Yvonne Flowers after Stonewall? In the culture’s memory, eternal youth can be the price for staging the dramatic and cathartic action.

So, while I understood the tendency to keep them there, in Tallahassee in the summer of 2013, I wanted myself not to fall prey to it, and see what some of the Dream Defenders had been up to in the time since they left the capitol.

_In 2012, Edwards, then NAACP student president at the University of Florida, founded the Gainesville chapter of the Dream Defenders with another University of Florida student, Nailah Summers-Polite. Today, they are co-directors of the organization. Edwards’s daughter Izzy, who recently turned two, is a regular presence at meetings and on calls. Edwards will sometimes bring her on marches, even to Tallahassee—though it is now illegal to demonstrate at Florida’s capitol. Summers-Polite is also a mother. “Lots of babies,” she said when I asked her to summarize how Dream Defenders has evolved as an organization since the time the protesters were students.

Summers-Polite was one of the Dream Defenders summoned on the third day of the occupation to meet with Florida governor Rick Scott. Over the first two days, discussion among the protesters had centered on questions of strategy. Agnew can remember thinking as he drove to Tallahassee that it was important “to have a more substantive reason than just to be angry at the verdict” for going into the capitol, and looking back, the demand the protesters seized on seems surprisingly modest. They wanted a special session of the legislature called to review Stand Your Ground, Florida’s vague and dubious self-defense law that, when considered by the jury during deliberations in the Zimmerman trial, helped steer the verdict toward acquittal.

“They weren’t the most radical demands,” Agnew said. “We were calling for a genuine discussion about a law that was horribly written and disproportionately applied and resulted in many of the jury instructions that allowed for somebody to get off for killing a kid.”

Many differences can be discerned between the Dream Defenders’ occupation and the one now indelibly associated with the words “capitol protest.” Unlike what happened on January 6, 2021, the demonstration in Tallahassee was wholly lawful, and it was peaceful. None of the Dream Defenders carried weapons or wire cables. They didn’t plan on hanging anyone, and they weren’t dressed in camo gear, Viking helmets, or any of the other strange paraphernalia that attend white paramilitary activity. Yet by far the most critical difference is that, instead of aiming to thwart or circumvent basic constitutional structures, the Dream Defenders appealed to them. Florida’s procedure allows for three ways to trigger a special session of the legislature. The fastest, and ostensibly the easiest, is to have the governor call for it.

Scott, who is currently a U.S. senator, was then serving the first of two terms as Florida’s governor and was away on summer recess when the occupation began. After flying back to Tallahassee, he initially proposed holding a conference in secret. But by that point, said Agnew, the Dream Defenders “had created so much of a crisis by staying in that building” that Scott had no choice but to inform the public that he would be meeting with the protesters.

On Thursday, July 18, a group of six Dream Defenders were led into his office. They sat in a circle and awkwardly traded small talk. At one point, according to three of the Dream Defenders present, Scott raised the cuff of his trousers and pointed at the decoration on his boots. Woven into the leather, as a token of the various colonial powers that have claimed dominion over the state of Florida, were small Spanish, British, French, American, and Confederate flags. (Multiple requests were sent to Scott’s office asking if he would be interviewed for this piece. None of the requests were answered.)

When they finally got around to discussing the protesters’ demands, Scott said he would not grant a special session of the legislature but would be instituting a statewide day of prayer instead. And in response to that, the Dream Defenders said they would not be leaving the capitol.

_Ten years later, Summers-Polite can still remember, with a laugh, something else Scott said in the meeting. “We were going around the room,” she told me, “and I just remember Curtis”—Curtis Hierro, field director for the Dream Defenders at the time—“saying, ‘I’m from Hialeah, my mom and I spent some time homeless there.’ And Scott’s like, ‘Oh yeah, I know Hialeah, I used to own hospitals there.’”

“He by no means had any incentive to listen to us,” said Edwards, adding that today the Dream Defenders might have taken a different tack and attempted to contact or even organize demonstrations against “Scott’s corporate supporters and those who have leverage over him.”

In recent years, the Dream Defenders have done just this, staging actions against the GEO Group, a private contractor of prisons that has made large contributions to the campaigns of both Scott and current Florida governor Ron DeSantis.

Yet it would be a mistake to suggest that the Dream Defenders are solely or even primarily a protest group. Civil disobedience, said Edwards, is only a means of supporting or amplifying their organizing. One of the projects they have been focused on since the time of the occupation is the coordination of a Healing and Justice Center in Miami. The idea took shape in 2015, with a simple questionnaire that asked people to identify what made them feel safe. Answers were collected from hundreds of residents of Florida's cities, and virtually none of the respondents, according to Edwards, wrote that the police made them feel safe. But at the same time, they could think of no alternative. “People didn’t know what to do if an act of violence occurred,” she said. The Dream Defenders, in response, began thinking about how they might establish what they call “free zones,” designated places in a community where restorative justice can be practiced in lieu of a 911 call, and where counseling and trauma recovery services are available. Then, in 2019, they founded the Healing and Justice Center, which operates in partnership with three other organizations in Miami-Dade County.

“In a moment when somebody has been murdered,” said Rachel Gilmer, the director of the center and a former co-executive director of the Dream Defenders, “the police, all they do is come and extract information. They’re not providing any sort of support.” Located in the same building as the Dream Defenders’ office in Liberty City, a historically Black neighborhood in Miami, the Healing and Justice Center offers therapy, urgent care, and training for volunteers who can help prevent retaliatory violence in cases where a gun crime has been committed. In 2022, the center reported nine instances of successful intervention in conflicts where the likely outcome would have been homicide or someone being incarcerated. The center also staffs a mobile crisis unit, and through its afterschool programs and summer camp engages with schoolchildren, teaching these youth methods of trauma response and giving them access to grief counseling and a wellness coach.

Officially, the Dream Defenders maintain no sort of partnership or liaison with the Miami Police Department. Yet Gilmer told me, “I haven’t run into a police officer who’s not been supportive of what we’re trying to do” and noted that law enforcement personnel will sometimes ask her for copies of a flyer urging those who are struggling with or witnessing a mental health crisis to contact the center’s hotline, 1-866-SAFEMIA. “Police see that flyer and say: thank you,” Gilmer said. “It’s not recognized that they’re not trained and don’t want to be taking those calls.”

In 2017, when the Dream Defenders drafted their manifesto, the Freedom Papers, “freedom from police and prisons” was the first call-to-action listed on the platform, and the Healing and Justice Center marks an attempt to show that freedom is more than just an ideal or an abstraction. “We think it’s a proof-of-concept of what the defund movement has been fighting for,” said Edwards. “We can say: ‘Look at this right here. This is what you should be investing in, not policing.’”

_After the meeting with Scott, there were still two possible ways of triggering the special session. One was to poll the legislators. Merely to get this poll taken represented a significant feat of organizing, as the Dream Defenders had to leverage more than thirty of Florida’s legislators to submit a request for the poll in writing. Yet by law, three-fifths of both the House and Senate would have to vote in favor of the special session, and the tallies were grim: Three-fifths of the combined chamber meant ninety-six votes, and even with the support of all fifty-eight Democrats, which was not assured, the Dream Defenders would also need thirty-eight Republicans to vote for the special session. That was not going to happen, and so only one option was left: The House Speaker and Senate president would have to jointly call for the hearing.

The Defenders stayed in the capitol while negotiations with the offices of these leaders continued, and as the occupation stretched into its second and third weeks, it slowly took on the forms of habit. People slept in the same spots each night, in the corridor outside Scott’s office or on the floor or in the chapel on the other side of the rotunda. Pallets were found, and as more demonstrators arrived from other organizations and all regions of the country, they brought tents and foam mattresses. On some nights there were fifty or more sleeping in the capitol. By agreement with the authorities, in order for the building to remain open, the rotunda would have to be cleared by seven each morning. Supplies were stored in closets, in the offices of friendly legislators. Most days Agnew would be up before dawn, and he would stroll around the ground floor, rousing people with “Eye of the Tiger” by Survivor, Harold Melvin & the Blue Notes, John Legend and the Roots’ version of “Wake Up Everybody.” A little after seven, breakfast would be delivered, and then some of the Dream Defenders would leave to attend class or go to their jobs, while those who stayed behind held strategy sessions, called legislators and their staff, and visited with the media, though, as Agnew pointed out, it is not always easy to discuss the mechanics of an occupation in the place being occupied. “Our movements were restricted there,” he recalled, “and our conversations had to be washed over and were surveilled.”

Sometime during the occupation, Edwards met the man who would become Izzy’s father. Another time, a birthday party was held for Steven Pargett, a Dream Defender who turned twenty-four that August. Once, everyone lined up to have their hair braided in the hallway outside Scott’s office. And at night, under the vaulted ceiling of the capitol dome and amid the marble columns and balustrades of the rotunda, the Dream Defenders sang and improvised chants, and held workshops in political activism until the early hours of the morning.

“Honestly,” Summers-Polite said, “it was fun. We had a good time.” Agnew also recalled the singing and the laughter of those nights. Though in general he found the occupation stressful, he said, “My body, my mind, my spirit responded to that moment with a crazy amount of adrenaline and clarity and focus.” In particular, he remembered one night when he had to travel away from Tallahassee and speak to raise support for the occupation. Alone in his hotel room, in spite of all the comforts—the quiet, the room service that was just a phone call away—Agnew couldn’t sleep. He missed the capitol too much.

_Agnew left the Dream Defenders in 2018. He was not sure, when he did, what he would do next. He thought he might pursue writing—he likes to draft poetry in his spare time—or possibly singing. “I’m a performing artist,” he told me. He grew up singing in church choirs and was trained in classical music from the age of four. But then, in 2019, not long after he joined the Bernie Sanders campaign for president, Agnew began holding meetings to talk about the declining rate of Black male participation in political and activist forums.

“The movement for Black lives, BLM, is part of it,” he said to me, “but whether it be labor unions, educational institutions, we say that Black men are vanishing from all of those spaces. If Black men have high unemployment, it’s kind of obvious they’re not in unions. They’re not a part of student organizations because they’re not in schools. They’re not in the streets because they have to go to work if they do have a job, or they’re on parole and don’t want to be doing direct action when they know they can be arrested and go to jail for longer than anyone else.”

So even though it wasn’t his intention upon leaving the Dream Defenders to start another organization, once the Sanders campaign ended, Agnew helped found Black Men Build. Each of the group’s chapters—there are currently eight of them, in cities such as Memphis, Columbus, and Los Angeles—hosts regular men’s circles, roundtables of twenty or more that encourage men to break through what Agnew called the “John Wayne façade of masculinity.” Irrespective of its other merits, this type of therapy, he said, is a crucial step in a political education—men can’t become engaged unless they first learn they don’t have to “silence themselves.”

_Agnew will soon turn forty, and I told him that when he talked about music and about writing poetry, it made me think of everything an activist is forced to give up, and I wondered if his creative ambitions were now a source of regret. He thought about it for a moment, then said, “I can’t put that on the movement,” and went on to tell me that he had made a choice years ago, when he was a student at Florida A&M, to major not in music but in business, which led to a brief career in sales for a pharmaceutical company. It was this career, and Agnew’s rejection of it, of a life of healthcare capitalism, that made him decide to devote himself fully to the sort of work he is doing now, the implications of this story being the question in reverse: If he had become a musician, then he probably wouldn’t have been an activist. And I think I understand what he was telling me. After a certain point, life’s equation can no longer be neatly balanced. There’s loss in it no matter which way you draw it up.

_One night Agnew called me from Highlander, the retreat for organizers in the mountains of Tennessee. It’s a place labor union and civil rights activists have been gathering in for close to a century, and where, in the late 1950s, Diane Nash, James Bevel, John Lewis, and others came to prepare for the great militant season of the sit-ins.

“We absolutely had them in our sights when we were doing what we were doing,” Agnew said, and described how the Dream Defenders’ first major action, the walk from Daytona to Sanford in 2012, was modeled on the 1965 march from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama. As was the capitol occupation—for while the Selma march was undertaken on behalf of voting rights, its genesis can actually be traced to the murder of Black youth. In 1963, after four girls were killed by a bomb Klansmen had planted in the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Nash and Bevel were so outraged that they could think of nothing to do except walk to the State Capitol of Alabama and nonviolently seize it. The idea was eventually put on hold, but in February of 1965 Bevel started talking about it again, this time after twenty-six year-old Jimmie Lee Jackson was shot by a state trooper in Marion, Alabama. For Bevel, the time had come to confront the governor about the value of Black life. Preaching Jackson’s eulogy, he began to shout, “I’m going to see the king!”

_By the third week of the occupation, the Dream Defenders had acquired a sort of celebrity. They were feted by the networks, praised by such personalities as Jesse Jackson, Harry Belafonte, and Talib Kweli. Busloads of supporters arrived daily from Baltimore and New York.

But in the end, one of the major lessons of the occupation, and one that would also be borne out in the coming decade following demonstrations at Standing Rock, Parkland, and elsewhere, is that visibility does not always equate to power. “We were on MSNBC,” Summers-Polite told me, “we were on CNN, we were on all the news stations, but we didn’t have the power to get the special session called, we didn’t have the power to repeal Stand Your Ground.” Over the preceding weeks, the Dream Defenders had won the endorsement of Perry Thurston, House minority leader, and for a time it seemed as if the Speaker of the House and Senate president could be pressured into calling for the special session; yet by the twenty-ninth day of the occupation, the Dream Defenders had learned, definitively, that neither one could be moved. Will Weatherford, the Republican House Speaker, did promise to form a subcommittee to review Stand Your Ground, but Matt Gaetz, a state representative at the time and the person tasked with chairing this probe, was already on record as saying he did not intend to alter “one damn comma” of the text of the law.

Some of the Defenders wanted the occupation to go on, but strategically, no options were left. Many were exhausted, and even the symbolic ramifications of the protest seemed played out. On August 15 they packed up their books and sleeping bags and held a brief news conference in the rotunda. On hand to lead them out of the doors to the capitol was civil rights leader Julian Bond, who announced before the assembled press, “I say to the young people here, you’re ending a protest because you’re starting a movement.”

For Agnew, leaving the capitol was bittersweet. “I felt like we had lost the battle but not the war,” he said recently. “We had attracted national attention to the cause, put politicians on notice. I didn’t feel a level of failure at all.”

Summers-Polite said failing to trigger the special session “made us pay attention to what it would have taken for our demands to be met.” When I asked what it would have taken, she said, “More people,” an answer Agnew repeated almost to the letter. “Even after thirty-one days we still weren’t powerful enough,” he said. “In order to get to that place we need more people.”

In this refrain of “more people,” the Dream Defenders seemed to suggest that the working of our country is still a numbers game, a question of votes, blocs, coalitions, majorities. It’s a premise about which some of us might voice our doubts, given the growing distance between policy changes and public opinion, but you have to admire their lack of cynicism, the faith evinced that the reforms they are striving for are still within reach. Ten years on, they are still motivated by this fundamental democratic precept, that if you summon the people, their will might be done.

Of course, when someone says “more people,” there is an immediate and obvious corollary: How many more? As many as it takes, said Agnew, for such a demonstration never to have to occur again. “It wasn’t anything somebody should want or have to do.”

_During our last conversation, I asked Edwards what she would tell Izzy once her daughter was old enough to learn about the occupation. She told me she didn’t know. It was not something she was looking forward to, she said, since inevitably the place she would have to begin would be “Trayvon Martin and the realities of being a Black child.” Still, she allowed that the story would also touch on those who are fighting against such realities, and that Izzy would be aware of this fight from the moment she asked how her parents met. All of us at some point will have to answer for what we did or did not do in response to the erasure of Black lives, and not everyone, I reflected, can say this to their children—that in the days after the killer walked free, your mom went and saw the king.