Originally printed at: https://www.syracuse.com/news/2021/05/theres-a-space-that-can-never-be-filled-syracuse-mourns-loss-of-community-organizer.html
By Chris Libonati | clibonati@syracuse.com
In the last few days, Nikeeta Slade’s friends have recalled her speeches.
One friend remembered a seven-minute speech at the Jerry Rescue statue in Syracuse right after Donald Trump won the 2016 election. She’s played the video of it several times since Slade died.
“She was representing a sentiment, a collective rage,” said Fabiola Ortiz Valez.
Another friend, SeQuoia Kemp, remembers Slade having to be coaxed last summer up on the steps of City Hall to speak at a rally against police brutality. With 2,000 people staring back, she immediately started leading the crowd in a chant.
Yet another friend picked out one of Slade’s favorite words, “unequivocally.”
“Whenever she spoke,” Kemp said, “I just believed everything was going to be OK.”
Slade, 32, died unexpectedly Thursday; two friends said it is unclear at this time what caused her death.
Slade was uncompromising, brilliant and a force on a microphone, friends said this week. Slade was a community organizer who captured people’s attention at demonstrations and privately did all the work to back her talk.
Often, she was the glue that brought together members of the local Black Lives Matter movement or others pushing for such things as immigration reform and workers’ rights.
Slade, whose calling card was organizing, worked for two separate Green Party candidate Howie Hawkins campaigns, became a union millwright and was one of her friends’ most trusted companions.
“Every day she would say something that would point you in the direction of freedom,” said Montinique McEachern, a close friend.
Slade, who grew up in Killeen, Texas, came to Syracuse for her master’s degree in Africana studies at Syracuse University in the early 2010s and never left.
McEachern and Slade were introduced to each other one day in 2012 or 2013 by a woman who worked in the LGBTQ resource center. They spent hours talking on the street corner and walked home together.
“I’d never met a Black girl who could talk about the things she could talk about,” McEachern said.
Slade rattled off facts about the Russian Revolution, the Landless Workers’ Movement in Brazil and Palestinian nationalism.
It was often Slade’s expansive knowledge that drew others in. Ortiz Valdez met Slade in a class about Das Kapital, Karl Marx’s critique of capitalism. Slade was one of the few in the class who could make Marx’s theories relatable. When the two became friends, they talked about the Zapatista uprising, a revolt against NAFTA’s enactment in Mexico.
She impressed Hawkins, former Green Party gubernatorial and presidential candidate from Syracuse, with that same knowledge. Slade had read Robert L. Allen’s “Black Awakening in Capitalist America” and Mike Davis’ “Prisoners of the American Dream,” Hawkins recalled.
“I realized that I was having a deeper conversation with her than I was with activists two and three times her age that I know,” Hawkins said.
Slade parlayed those bonds over causes into friendships.
She and Ortiz Valdez later worked together at the Workers Center of Central New York, fighting for workers’ rights and driver licenses for all. Even after Slade left the center, she visited farms outside Onondaga County to help undocumented or immigrant workers.
Not long after Alton Sterling, Philando Castile and, locally, Terry Maddox were killed by police, Slade and Black Lives Matter organized rallies against police brutality. Kemp, a relative of Maddox’s, met Slade there and kept organizing with her.
Kemp became such good friends with Slade that they’ve lived next to each other in the same building in Syracuse. Occasionally, Kemp would hear the steps outside her apartment creak and she’d whip the door open, knowing Slade was walking up the steps.
Other times, Slade would text Kemp to come over for a few minutes. Then they’d sit and talk for hours.
The day Slade later died, it was McEachern who called Slade to talk.
McEachern, who used to live in Syracuse, last summer moved to Tacoma, Washington. Slade helped drive her to Washington and, at each hotel they stayed in, Slade would do a small dance in the room.
Oh, we’re fancy or Nothing’s too good for the working class, she’d say.
For the last year, even across the country from each other, the two recorded their podcast, QueerWOC (Queer women of color). Slade refused to ever edit it because she didn’t want to hear her own voice.
But on Thursday, when McEachern called, it was simply about dating. Slade cracked a joke and it helped ease her worry.
“She was so deeply loved,” McEachern said. “There’s a space that can never be filled.”
