Gerald Lenoir, the author of United States of Struggle: Police Murder in America and Amandla! Poems of Love and Struggle is an activist-writer-poet. As an activist, he has been involved in many of the major progressive social movements and campaigns in the past five decades—the 1960s Black student and anti-Vietnam war movements; the antiapartheid movement from the 1970s through the 1990s; campaigns against police brutality, racist violence and gentrification and for affirmative action in the 1970s and 1980s; the Rainbow Coalition and the Jesse Jackson for President campaigns in the 1980s; the HIV/AIDS response in the 1980s and 1990s; and the immigrant rights, Palestine solidarity, peace and Black Lives Matter movements in the 2000s and 2010s. He is now a Strategy Analyst at the Othering and Belonging Institute, UC Berkeley, partnering with community organizing groups to develop narrative strategies.

 

As a writer, Gerald has authored articles and opinion pieces on the antiapartheid movement, immigration, racial justice, environmental justice, electoral politics, HIV/AIDS and other issues that have been published by Time.com, Black Scholar Magazine, the Oakland Tribune, the Seattle Times, New America Media, the San Francisco Bay Guardian, commondreams.org, the New Bayview, organizingupgrade.com, the LA Sentinel and other publications.

 

As a poet, Gerald has written poems and poetic prose since the 1980s.  In his first book of poetry, Amandla! Poems of Love and Struggle, published in 2017, he assembles his verses written with heart, head and hand over a 37-year period.  Its publication was inspired by Prison Poetry, his son Jamana (“Jae Noirel”) Lenoir’s first book of poetry published in 2017. Gerald's second book of poetry, United States of Struggle: Police Murder in America published in 2020, was inspired by the police murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis. It contains riveting poems about police murder of Black people and the Black Lives Matter Global Network.