Dream Defenders is the kind of organization that much of the progressive left—no pun intended—dreams of. They are led by Black and brown young people, located in the South, and have a clear ideology grounded in feminism, socialism, and abolitionism, found in their Freedom Papers. They’ve managed to survive for nearly fifteen years, longer than most early organizations of the millennial generation. And they’ve done so while maintaining a base through the ebbs and flows of upheaval and repression.
Dream Defenders began in Florida in 2012, in response to the murder of Trayvon Martin. They are currently organizing in 10 cities across the South and East Coast, working to expand the scale of their political education while training more and more young people on how to organize. This year, they’re fighting to elect four pro-Freedom Paper candidates in Florida, including the senate campaign of organizer Angie Nixon.
Nailah Summers-Polite is a co-executive director of Dream Defenders and one of its founding members. Our managing editor Akin Olla sat down with her for an interview about what it means to organize young people in Florida, a state that has long dealt with the impacts of a far right that controls all branches of the government.
Akin Olla: What kind of problems do you think young people are facing right now in Florida, and more broadly, nationally?
Nailah Summer-Polite: It’s very difficult in Florida. We have a FAMU (Florida A&M University) chapter that for the last year or so has gone through a lot of transitions because… people graduate. Which is normal, but we’re also seeing a lot of student organizers who are scared as hell of protests. I think it’s a larger sign of where we are right now. I think young people, but young Black people in particular, aren’t really finding their stride as far as protests and direct action.
In Florida particularly because of the anti-protest bills, and other things DeSantis has done. For example, at FAMU they basically appointed a Pro-Trump Black woman. Students who protest are getting expelled. There’s a chilling effect. Though there are still pockets of young people protesting. The west coast of Florida has the SEE (Social Equity through Education) Alliance, which is mostly young, white, queer kids that are organizing campaigns to hold school boards accountable. They’re making some good impact there.
But college campuses are not seeing the same level of protests in Florida as we did in 2020 and before that. There was a young woman that was arrested for talking about Netanyahu in a group chat at the same school where they discovered young Republicans talking about killing Black people.
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At FSU (Florida State University) an IDF [Israel Defense Forces] soldier came to speak and a student was expelled for protesting. So just the consequences of action and of protests and of dissent in Florida have gone up a lot in recent years.
I think largely nationally, especially post-encampments, I think more people are afraid. More young people on campuses are afraid.
Survival is so hard. The economy is so shit. Housing costs so fucking much that yeah, it’s harder to organize young people that aren’t on a college campus too.
There is still organizing going on, but young people need more support to overcome the reality of repression.
The Power of Young People
AO: What kind of power do you feel young people wield? Why have you continued to organize young people despite how hard it is?
NSP: We had a call last night of the core leaders of all the squads [what Dream Defenders calls chapters]. We have a call twice a month, and I was talking to them about the election and the coming election, and how, even with the Voting Rights Act being gutted, even with redistricting happening in all the southern states, the conditions and the parameters of what these candidates are talking about is shifting.
And in a large part because of young people and labor. Candidates are all talking about billionaires now, they’re talking about corporate power, and they’re talking about Gaza. They’re afraid of taking money from AIPAC [American Israel Public Affairs Committee], and that’s all because of young people. AIPAC is using shell organizations to donate now because they’re afraid of getting caught.
This in large part because of the movement against the genocide, because of young people talking about affordability and about the control billionaires have over our lives. Young people really have spearheaded and shaped the moment. They’re talking about being anti-tech, they’re booing commencement speakers for praising AI.
Young people got more conviction. They push the needle more than the rest of the movement, they’re more radical.
Young people hold an immense amount of power, and that’s part of why I keep doing it.
I think Dream Defenders has touched so many people and has created so many leaders that to me is fulfilling. The people who leave us are able to go set strategies and lead campaigns and be good rank and file union members. They also lead other organizations.
I think young people also adapt. Dream Defenders has adapted so many times because we’re always trying to get at the root of a thing, and we’re always willing to try new shit if we think that something isn’t working, and I think that kind of flexibility is something that other people just do not have.
At Dream Defenders, we’ve got some basic pillars of the things that we believe in. We’ve got the Freedom Papers, and we believe in organizing and direct action, and those are the things that have been a large part of our backbone, and those are the things that we maintain.
But we have a lot of flexibility in our approach and how we develop people under that.
And important movements have been led by young people, a Fred Hampton, a Sankara, like, all of our revolutionaries became involved or led revolutions relatively early in their lives.
Dream Defenders’ Uphill Battle
AO: Why do you think people were attracted to Dream Defenders in the early days?
NSP: We were very multiracial.
But the people out front, the people with visibility at that time were people like Phil Agnew, and Ciara Taylor, and Steven Pargett. And we had FAMU students and alumni with so much swag. They were speaking truth to power in an era when others weren’t.
We hadn’t seen what seemed to be young militant Black people on a national scale on the news. We hadn’t seen that in a really long time.
People at that point were looking for somewhere to land and something to do. And so Dream Defenders was a beacon, a diamond in the rough, a thing to look to and feel inspired by. The aesthetics and the time and the widespread hurt of Trayvon that I think made Dream Defenders in the beginning really undeniable.
AO: Despite how much I try to deny this… we’re getting old, Nailah. Has organizing young people changed at all since you began?
NSP: We’re fighting an uphill battle right now between the backlash against “woke” and the existence of the manosphere. And now even the 92% telling Black women that nothing happening is our fight.
A lot of these values always existed, but I do think there’s more fear. There’s less of a belief and a trust in organizations. I heard a young person say during a training, “Yeah, we absolutely don’t believe that things will change.”
They think the world’s gonna end, and that there’s no point in having children. So there’s just less hope right now. I think people are way more jaded. People still getting killed by the police, and it [barely] makes a dent. It’s not making national news, national protests aren’t happening.
And there’s obviously protest, like in Minneapolis. But ICE killed—has killed—so many people. The threshold is much higher now.
The things that drove… what is it? 26 million people into the streets in 2020, are barely a blip now. And the tactics that we’re using do not inspire a whole lot of hope.
The marches, the parades, No Kings. I’m glad people have a regularly scheduled outlet for their pain and hurt. But I think we’re a lot more cynical than I think we were a few years ago as a people.
Funders Abandon the Youth
AO: I’ve heard that funders have pulled money out of youth organizing. I am curious what your experience is of that. Is it true? Why? If so, are they reinvesting now?
NSP: We and many young people support Palestine, so Ford Foundation doesn’t support us anymore because of that.
I’ve experienced one funder that was supporting our youth work in Florida that was giving us money, but it’s gone under. They’re actually just not giving money anymore.
And then the other thing that I’ve experienced is a tightening of what youth means. The cutoff is 29 for some funders. They’re tightening where it used to be, like, 18 to 35 or whatever. So I’m seeing that kind of retraction where they’re getting really specific about what they think that they mean by young people.
But generally the big retractions have come from funders that were giving money to Black-led orgs in 2020 that are going a different direction and have re-strategized. And that, yeah, that has looked like youth power funding not happening. That’s looked like multi-year grants not getting renewed.
And then, just wholly there are funders that no longer support work in Florida. I think in 2024 we had to cut a lot of our staff for money reasons. We’re more stable now, but it’s because we have a smaller team.
AO: Why have the funding cuts in Florida happened?
NSP: We came really close in 2018 to electing a progressive candidate. Andrew Gillum. After that, we went from purple to red, and funders started leaving the state.
And when they do give money, they swoop in right before elections to drop a ton of money. For years there’s been a huge disinvestment in the state of Florida ’cause it’s hard to organize here, and we have such a repressive governor and state legislature that every little win that we have gets undone because of pre-emption and other tactics of the right.
And funders make their calculations about how much investment it would take, and they have retracted, and it’s affected a lot of what happens in the state of Florida, unfortunately.
AO: Feels like a bad long term strategy on the part of funders.
The Republicans have gutted the unions here. They just passed a domestic terrorism bill where the governor gets to decide with his little cronies who is a domestic terrorist.
So you know, that is a result of the fascists in power here, and also of our social movements and not having the kind of resources that we should have to have bigger bases and to reach more people.
And we need real support for that kind of thing, and it’s just not been happening.
And also, our dependence on funders sucks. But it’s a reality that they’ve pulled out.
Lessons for Organizing Under Fascism
AO: What lessons do you have for people that are trying to organize young people amid the rise of fascism?
NSP: I think they’re harder to reach, so you gotta work harder to reach them. Organizing is changing. People are on social media, blah, blah, blah. But you still gotta put in some elbow grease for young people right now.
AO: Does that look like social media, or does that look like other in-person stuff?
NSP: I think it looks like all of it. I think you absolutely need to be in their faces. You need to find out where they are. We’re thinking about house parties again. Right now young people are doing teen takeovers of parks, beaches, and stores. And local news stations are turning it into some big boogeyman, some new super predator shit.
But young people are self-organizing to go have a good time. That to me is an opportunity to offer space to young people to be. So many of the things that we took for granted when we were young don’t exist anymore. Because there are still young people that do have hope or do have revolutionary spirit.
I think the other thing that I’m learning right now is, I think this is a result of the nonprofit industrial complex and turning our work into careers, but as leaders of movement, we’ve got to make succession plans.
We have to have the next person, next few batch of people ready and lined up and taught how to run a thing.
There’s a huge gap in leadership of the movement right now. It’s all the same people from the last ten, fifteen years and not that many people coming up. And you gotta get these young people ready. And whether it’s to run your nonprofit organization or not, they still need the skills to gather the people and organize with the people and fight with the people.
Our actions have to get creative, and I think young people can help us revive what it looks like to have a flourishing movement right now. ‘Cause this shit is stale. We’re just, we’re not reaching the people like we ought to be. And so yeah, let young people, train ’em up and put ’em in the front.
This is why we’re doing direct action trainings right now, and teaching the young people tactical design. Then we’re just going to let them do actions for the rest of the year.
How to Support Florida
AO: What sort of support do you think Florida needs right now? What can the rest of the country learn from it to prepare for what’s coming next?
NSP: I think the gutting of the Voting Rights Act has really shown us that what happens in Florida and South will happen everywhere. Florida was ready for this and had a special lined up to gerrymander the map and erase Black and Latino voting power as soon as the Supreme Court decision came down.
And now we’re seeing Tennessee, Louisiana, like we’re seeing the rest of the Deep South follow suit. But Florida within 24 hours was prepared. So I think, for very many, so many years, we used to say, “So goes Florida, so goes the nation.”
You’re seeing fights against data centers everywhere, but there’s a large concentration in the South. Tennessee is fighting Elon Musk while trying to get rid of their only congressional district that has Black representation in the state. Louisiana is trying to cancel an active election to redraw their maps to get rid of Black representation.
We have all this Black representation that’s about to be taken away, and the Black representation wasn’t representing us in the first place.
No. These are the people that are taking money from AIPAC, that are fighting against billionaire taxes. Boy, the Congressional Black Caucus, right? We just need a robust movement. Funders need to put their coins back deliberately in the places in the South that they don’t support.
Everybody’s got their own battles to fight, but organizations that can send organizers—do that. Give us trainings. Come help us scale. Come help us train our people. I’m not saying come save us or anything.
Our members have spent the last two years surveying their community members and researching, and in five locations in the South they’ll be launching local campaigns to take on billionaire control of our cities and to get resources and investment poured into their neighborhoods, while fighting against electeds and candidates that stand against the future we deserve.
We’re gonna figure it out. Black people in the South have always done that.
People need to be ready to throw down for Angie Nixon, and I think people need to be including her in their lists of all the cool people running for office this year—she’s left out of a lot of conversations. I don’t know if it’s name recognition or, they don’t know what her politics are, but I’m glad that y’all interviewed her. But yeah, we need support for Angie.
AO: Why Angie?
NSP: Angie is us, is of us. She’s like the best of us. Honestly, somebody who has done what the movement has asked of her, from like, being a union organizer to directly serving her community.
She got asked to run—this is not somebody with some deep ingrained desire to run for office because it does something for her ego. She was like, “Oh, okay. If I run a campaign, the infrastructure for that will help us build our organizations,” and “Okay, if I go to Senate, then, there are things that I can tangibly deliver for my state.”
And so yeah she is just… she is the best case scenario for our movement.
If you believe in things like the Jackson-Kush plan and engaging with the state, you have to have people like Angie. People who are principled and know where home is.
