While District-based organizer Afeni Evans counts Octavia Butler, Malcolm X, and Kwame Ture among her greatest inspirations, she also has lived experiences that fuel her abhorrence for the U.S. military industrial complex.
Nearly a decade after getting booted from Fort Meade in Maryland, Evans, as is the case for other D.C. residents, often sees members of the National Guard who, unlike her, completed a process that obligates them to serve the United States government at any time and anywhere.
“I feel for that experience…of being severely underpaid and doing things because you’re being brainwashed and indoctrinated into the values of the Army….and you’re also under threat of incarceration if you don’t follow whatever they see as lawful orders,” Evans told The Informer. “I don’t necessarily feel bad for them to the point where I have loads and loads of empathy, but as somebody who has experienced…being enlisted in the military, I can’t help but be like, ‘Well damn, like there’s probably a part of you [that] miss your holidays and families.’”
Evans, 29, was an early member of Harriet’s Wildest Dreams, a Black-led abolitionist community defense hub that formed in 2021 to protect all Black people against state-sanctioned violence. She’s since gone on to serve as a community organizer at Fair Budget Coalition and a national trainer at Mass Liberation Network, an entity that helps returning citizens address the trauma of mass incarceration.
However, as Evans, a so-called “military brat,” would admit, her current work is a far cry from the path that she thought she would take as an adult adolescent.
“I’ve always been leaning more progressive,” Evans told The Informer, “but I think there was a point in time where I did believe that America could live up to the dream that we’re all promised that this land is. But I never supported the killing of innocent people.”
During the summer of 2017, Evans, then 20 years old and estranged from her family, enlisted in the U.S. Army to escape homelessness. As she recalled however, a series of events confirmed that she didn’t belong in uniform. Within three months of a four-month training, the U.S. Army let her go— but not before higher-ups told her and her comrades the truth.
“I’ll never f***ing forget,” Evans said, “[A sergeant] was standing in front of our brigade and she was basically saying, ‘There are three places in America that you get like fully institutionalized: the prison system, mental institutions, and the military’ and everybody was nodding and agreeing.”
That moment, Evans said, infuriated her to no end.
“I’m looking around like, ‘Did you not just hear what the f**k she just said?’” Evans told The Informer. “We’re being asked to put our bodies on the line to de-center our own values and our own ideas for the ideas of the military, and really for the parts of U.S. imperialism.”
It didn’t stop there. As Evans recounted, she and members of her brigade took part in exercises much like what military personnel, and even Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), are carrying out in cities across the U.S.
“We had started doing house-clearing drills,” Evans said, “and it’s like when would you need to clear homes? Why is that the specific thing that we’re training on? There [were] a lot of things that I didn’t learn until years and years later that really clarified my position and [the] feeling in my gut.”
Last August, just days after President Donald J. Trump took over the District’s public safety ecosystem via Section 740 of the D.C. Home Rule Act and, in collaboration with red-state governors, deployed National Guard troops into the District, Evans counted among those on the frontlines ensuring that Black youth made it home without crossing paths with federal officers.
However, a heavily publicized encounter with D.C. Metro Transit Police landed Evans in jail. More than 15 hours later, Evans, donning a white jumpsuit and sneakers without shoestrings, busted out the doors of D.C. Superior Court and jumped into the arms of an attorney, comrades, and supporters who fought for her release.
Months after that harrowing experience, Evans said it’s not lost on her how many other activists, and everyday Washingtonians for that matter, have had similar experiences throughout the years — all without the resources that freed her from the bowels of D.C. Central Cell Block.
“We’re all under threat of this escalation and we have to prepare ourselves at any time for the trajectory of our lives to change because America is a uniquely brutal country,” Evans said. “The Trump administration is not this unprecedented thing in America. It’s an America that is returning back to herself.”
An Inside Look: The 18 Hours That Had the World on Pause
As documented in footage that circulated on social media platforms, D.C. Metro Transit Police violently arrested Evans at Navy Yard-Ballpark Metro Station in Southeast on the night of Aug. 15. The arrest took place days after Trump evoked Section 740 during an emergency juvenile curfew that D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser proposed and the D.C. Council approved.
Frankie Seabron, a local organizer, was on the scene that night to, as she told The Informer, check on her kidnapped comrade and control the narrative.
“I opened my phone to record and I go, ‘Afeni, what do you want everybody to know?’ and she says, ‘This isn’t about me, it’s about the kids,’” said Seabron, program manager at Harriet’s Wildest Dreams. “We were there to do that, right? We were there to surveil the state, to see how they were interacting with our people. Afeni put her body on the line for the youth.”
Overnight, and well into the morning, as the footage circulated on social media, plans gelled together for a mass protest outside of D.C. Superior Court on Indiana Avenue in Northwest. Seabron counted among those who led protesters in chants over a bullhorn. Even as Harriet’s Wildest Dreams’ attorney Andrew Clarke laid the groundwork for Evans release, and dismissal of her fare evasion charge, Seabron said that the stress of the moment weighed on her.
“I didn’t sleep,” she told The Informer. “I was up nonstop for about 18 hours, making phone calls, contacting the lawyers, doing wellness checks, gathering people for court support, sending the signal out to all of our comrades across the country— everything that you should do in that moment.”
Seabron, a fixture in D.C. Streets and D.C. Council hearings, first met Evans in 2020, while the young activist earned her chops as a constant presence in Black Lives Matter Plaza.
“We would call them the Plaza Kids because they will always be on Black Lives Matter Plaza showing up consistently every day,” Seabron told The Informer. “You really have to be called to do this work. There’s a fire that compels you, and I think Afeni has that fire. She loves her people. I know when she says ‘liberation,’ she means it.”
However, as Seabron noted, the work is not all on Afeni, or the relatively small number of radicals who’ve been on the front lines against Trump, and those who laid the foundation for his extreme actions.
“If there were more of us doing this work, more of us skilled up, more of us consistently taking care of one another and making everybody else’s business, it wouldn’t have had to happen that way in the first place,” Seabron said. “We wouldn’t have had to maneuver and navigate the complexities of the carceral system. We wouldn’t have to hone this skill set, but thank God that we have it so that when our people are taken, we know how to get them back.”
A Journey to Radical Love and Sense of Community
Niciah Mujahid said she can attest to Evans’ growth, telling The Informer that the best is yet to come for the young abolitionist.
“I met her as an activist who [had a] clear and candid analysis,” said Mujahid, executive director of the Fair Budget Coalition, where Evans has worked as an organizer for nearly two years. “Being able to witness her transition from activist to organizer has been beautiful… and I’m looking forward to [seeing] her continuing to grow with her influence and her impact in the District and nationally.”
Though Mujahid first met Evans during the pandemic through political education work, the executive director said she’s been able to see Evans shine at the Fair Budget Coalition. That’s where the young organizer currently facilitates a constituent leadership program aimed at helping community members develop their advocacy and budget policy expertise.
“Her ability to translate how power is working, how different pieces of the political game in D.C. are working for folks has been instrumental,” Mujahid said about Evans. “[She has an] ability to connect people, build durable networks, and see where people’s skills, strengths, and niches may interact. It’s how people cross multiple spaces.”
Nearly six years ago, in the aftermath of George Floyd’s police-involved murder, and toward the end of the first Trump presidency, Evans, who had just moved to the District, protested for more than 200 days at what would temporarily become Black Lives Matter Plaza.
During that time, Evans joined Freedom Fighters DC, a Black-led grassroots organization centered on Black liberation, mutual aid, and political education.
“They made me sit down and read these books,” Evans said. “They made sure that I was listening to Kwame Ture speeches and Malcolm X speeches. I watched a roundtable that was done sometime in the 1970s about the fate of Black America with Kwame Ture, Angela Davis and a couple other people.”
That information, she said, laid the foundation for her current work as an organizer and capacity builder.
“Just being able to hear clearly articulated ideologies from all forms of Black politics,” Evans said, “from a Talented 10th, to a more establishment Black politic, to radical communists just continued to push me and stretch me.”
Well before joining Black Lives Matter D.C., and then Harriet’s Wildest Dreams, Evans participated in a fellowship program conducted by Movement for Black Lives and served as a community organizer with the Working Families Party, a multiracial coalition that organizes outside of the two-party system via supporting and training local and state-level candidates.
She said that her work with the Working Families Party anchored her in the science of organizing.
“That’s when I started to understand the more structural and political side of abolition and how we can…start to push for some of our ideologies,” Evans told The Informer, “not only through the systems that currently exist, but also building power outside of it.”
As a national trainer with Mass Liberation Network, Evans has spent nearly four years guiding the formerly incarcerated along a path to healing through trips to Ghana and the somatic arc of transformation, the latter of which helps them adopt behaviors informed by their new values and beliefs, not their past experiences.
In speaking about her work, Evans said that much of Black population needs to embark on a similar journey to understand their worldview, scrutinize their relationship with one another, and eventually break free from an oppressive system.
“If we believe that abolition is possible on a societal level,… we have to believe that it’s possible within ourselves,” Evans told The Informer. “So much of how I’ve come to my political ideology is through the unpacking and unlearning of white supremacy. We are living these systems out every day, with people doing these things, living out these systems and believing in these ideas and keeping them going.”
Nine years after her economic situation pushed her into the U.S. Army, Evans continues to advocate for a paradigm shift so great that people place the collective above the individual. Such a mindset, she says, will dismantle longstanding systems that have pit Black people against one another.
“Capitalism is a cult, and we have to…pull each other out of that and call each other into a culture that actually centers humanity and the health of our planet,” Evans said. “That centers the respect of indigenous ways of land stewardship and…ways of relating to other human beings. Not a world without accountability, but a world that has accountability and compassion at the same time.”