On March 10, 2013, Dallas police officer Clark Staller was called to an apartment complex by a resident because Clinton Allen, 25, refused to leave the location. Though the facts of that night are disputed, it ended with Staller fatally shooting Allen because he claimed he “feared for his life.” After a grand jury refused to indict Staller, Allen’s mother, Collette Flanagan, filed a wrongful death lawsuit against the city of Dallas that was dismissed without prejudice in 2014.

While navigating this unjust system, Flanagan felt out of her depth, so she began reaching out to other families who have experienced police violence. Those conversations inspired her to found the protest group Mothers Against Police Brutality (MAPB). “I just felt compelled,” Flanagan says. “[I wanted to] start a group where moms [who have lost a child to police violence] could meet. I remember feeling so isolated. I just couldn’t break through that grief.” 

Now, more than a decade after Allen’s death, MAPB focuses on advocating for better policy around police brutality—like eliminating qualified immunity for police officers—and training mothers to advocate within their local communities. 

On May 14, 2014, Johnatha de Oliveira Lima, 19, left his house in Manguinhos, a community in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, to walk his girlfriend home and drop off dessert at his grandmother’s residence. While walking home, Lima encountered the police having a confrontation with residents of his community. Amid the chaos, policeman Alessandro Marcelino de Souza shot Lima in the back. By the time Lima’s mother, Ana Paula de Oliveira, arrived at the hospital, her son had died.

During Lima’s funeral, Oliveira met Fátima Pinho, whose son, Paulo Roberto, died in 2019 after being asphyxiated by a cop. During that conversation, Pinho invited Oliveira to fight for justice for both of their sons. “The only thing I was sure of was that I wanted to fight for my son’s memory and for the truth,” Oliveira says. “That’s how the Mães de Manguinhos movement emerged.”

That same year, Oliveira and Pinho founded Mães de Manguinhos (Mothers of Manguinhos), a collective that organizes protests against police brutality, helps mothers report their children’s state-sanctioned murders to the appropriate channels, and supports families in the aftermath of losing a relative to police violence.

“[Our] objective was to denounce police violence in Manguinhos, but we started moving away from Manguinhos [and] started meeting mothers from outside the community,” says Oliveira. “[That’s when] we noticed [many of] those families are also Black.”

Though they are separated by more than 5,000 miles, Oliveira and Flanagan are connected in myriad ways. They have both been left to pick up the pieces after the Black men they birthed were brutally murdered. Neither of them received support, monetary or otherwise, from their respective governments. And both have founded movements aimed at advocating for better policy around police brutality and teaching mothers who lost their children how to get justice.

Every year, law enforcement kills more than 600 people in the U.S., while Brazil registered more than 6,000 deaths due to police interventions in 2023 alone. In both countries, most of the victims are Black men and boys whose mothers are often forced to dispute the idea that their sons were disposable or responsible for their own deaths.

Both Mães de Manguinhos and MAPB aid mothers seeking accountability for the state’s violence against men and boys of color—a labor they are thrust into with little resources. After their children are murdered, these mothers can experience worsening mental health and economic hardship, and yet, these mothers still devote their lives to seeking justice for their children and others. But, as they fight for their children’s legacy, we must ask ourselves: Who takes care of these mothers?

Connected by Struggle

In Rio de Janeiro, the Mães de Manguinhos collective pressured the state to prosecute the officer who killed Lima. Oliveira gathered testimonies and evidence to prove her son wasn’t a drug trafficker, as the officer claimed. When the case went to trial in March 2024, Oliveira argued that her son was not a threat to police. Ultimately, the officer was convicted of manslaughter rather than murder, so Oliveira has appealed the verdict and requested a new trial. The second trial has not yet been scheduled.

“Most investigations into cases like this do not go anywhere because they are based on the character of the victim, investigating what the victim was doing at the time of the shooting,” explains Etyelle Pinheiro de Araujo, a sociologist at Unigranrio University in Rio de Janeiro who researches the narratives of mothers who lost their children to police violence. “When [these] mothers tell their stories in the public sphere, they are breaking with this narrative. They are combating these discourses and humanizing victims of police violence.”

Oliveira alchemized her grief into care for other mothers by providing them with a road map for pressuring authorities. “This project was born with the intention of denouncing police violence and the murders of our children,” Oliveira says. “But there’s also a need to welcome, embrace, and care for these mothers, to show them that we are also victims and that we won’t die despite the pain, that we manage to stay alive through the purpose of the struggle.” Finding similarity in their struggles, these mothers become stronger in numbers, even when they are separated by oceans. 

While fatal police violence is common in both countries, there are also no protections or aid—monetary or legal—for families who lose a loved one to state violence. 

That’s one of the reasons MAPB began running a two-year fellowship program in Dallas in 2021 where mothers who lost their children to police brutality are trained to be agents of change. Flanagan says the fellows learn how to organize for change; how to engage effectively with policymakers, district attorneys, law enforcement agencies, and media; and how to effectively collaborate with other organizations. 

Some of those fellows include Sheila Banks, whose son Corey Jones was fatally shot by Palm Beach Gardens police officer Nouman Raja in 2015. After a five-year battle, Raja was convicted of manslaughter by culpable negligence and attempted first-degree murder with a firearm in 2019 and sentenced to 25 years. Another MAPB fellow, Dalphine Robinson, founded Georgia Moms United, an organization that supports families affected by police brutality. 

“We have 20 powerful women who know who their representative is, who know legislation, and who know who their city officials are,” says Flanagan. “They are a force in their community, and I think that’s how we get the change collectively that we need.”

According to Flanagan, MAPB is also advocating for a change in policy in Texas that would make these families eligible for the state’s Victim’s Compensation Fund, which currently aids police officers involved in the killing and not the families of the victim. 

By leaning on each other and learning through their grief, these women have become change advocates. “Social movements teach the people that exist within them,” Pinheiro de Araujo says. “It’s the pedagogy of the streets. The mothers themselves say they become investigators, they go after evidence, [and] some of them go to law school. And they teach one another through solidarity.”

After a police operation in the community of Jacarezinho resulted in 28 deaths, a network of mothers in Rio who lost their children to police brutality, including Oliveira, created RAAVE. Since 2022, RAAVE has been providing mental health services to the families of victims and conducting research on the impacts of fatal police violence. This year, a partnership with the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro provided scholarships to mothers across the state to be trained as researchers and develop public policy proposals to combat police violence, including monetary aid to victims’ families and mental and physical health care for the mothers. 

The RAAVE project pays these mothers for their expertise and participation in the project to counteract the economic impact state violence has on families. Often, after the victim is killed, families experience a sudden loss of income either because the victim was the primary earner or the victim’s mother has to stop working due to grief. 

“Many of these mothers die without seeing justice for their kids’ murder, they die of depression or other illnesses,” says Pinheiro de Araujo. “There’s the financial question too. These women lose their jobs and end up in very vulnerable positions.”

As a result of this project, Oliviera will receive a degree in psychiatry while also influencing policy on how to care for families after the fact. Taking the project as instructive, Oliveira wants the state to provide general care and political education for the families of victims. “Our intention is that this project grows into other results and that our contributions become public policy,” Oliveira says. “We think it’s fundamental to care for the body and mind, but there’s also a need for political education.”

Demanding Care From the State

Since the right to raise children in a safe environment is a central tenet of reproductive justice, Oliveira argues that this also has to be addressed as a dimension of justice for police violence. The murder of Black boys and men by the police is the more extreme manifestation of this lack of rights, Oliveira said, but the state’s infringement on Black boys’ existence is everywhere, starting with low-quality education and lack of access to leisure. 

“We are denied access to many spaces like the cinema, the theater, which are spaces of culture, and we don’t see people having the right to these spaces [because of policing and racial profiling],” Oliveira says. 

While both Flanagan and Oliveira have dedicated their lives to filling a gap of care for other mothers, the question still remains: Who takes care of them? Oliveira says the women in Mães de Manguinhos take care of each other through companionship, cooking for each other, organizing and going to protests together, and helping each other find the right channels to get justice. If the state isn’t there for them, they are there for each other. 

Oliveira sees this work as a continuation of her care for her son, so the sacrifices feel worth it. “The struggle is a space where I can still care for my Johnatha,” Oliveira says. “Where I am still his mother. That’s something I agonized about. What’s it going to be like now? How will I speak about him? What will my relationship with my son be like?”

For Flanagan, who recently took a break from MAPB due to health issues, this question is more complicated. “I threw myself at the work, and the work just really helped me but also caused me a lot of health problems,” she says. “A lot of the moms in the movement have never been to therapy. You have to make it healthy for you at the same time, [while] honoring their space and pain.”

Across the world, grieving Black mothers have organized themselves to clamor for justice, to care for one another, and to advocate for their murdered children. Through their grief and pain, these mothers build support networks, help each other gather evidence, study legislation and advocate for better laws, and hold space for one another’s  loss—a model for how states around the world should approach the consequences of state violence with care, solidarity, and an integral concern for  those who survive.