In his own words, Terrel Duval Harper aka: Relly Rebel
Interviewed by Kazembe Batts
IG: @kazbatts
Tell us a little about yourself.
I used to be a comedian, just living in the neighborhood. I’m from New Jersey. Before I came and started doing activism I’ve been locked up over 100 times and worked three jobs before I came to NYC in 2020. I came for my kids. They wanted me to get a dog to protect myself during the uprising of George Floyd and I been here ever since.
I wanted my activism to be protesting and also to practice what I preach and that is why I started doing mutual aid, I didn’t want to just be outside protesting cops and I wanted to also do more and try and create the system we want to see.
Tell us about your organization.
“We the People NYC” org started towards the end of 2020. It was an idea in November 2020 and I put the idea into motion in January 2021. We started doing mutual aid before protesting, It just started off with us buying food. We just wanted to produce food so the houseless people could get a good meal, a good hot meal without it being a bagged lunch.
We wanted houseless people to eat good. It expanded from there with me connecting with another comrade. and all our ideas coming together to be a support system for our neighborhoods and provide everything we need for each other.
How did you come to set up at Nostrand & Fulton?
We started as a coat drive. The coat drive was supposed to go and touch every borough, but I live in Bed-Stuy. My first stop was Nostrand and Fulton cause there is a high level of people there, and we figured its right down the block from me. We started there as a coat drive. We saw so many people, so we bought over $600 worth of items, coats and blankets. Everything left in a half hour, we didn’t even make it to the other boroughs, so based on that we decided to come back out next week and bring our food.
How do you get the food? Is the organization self-sufficient, has key partners, or get government grants?
We started distributing food with myself. I took $200 and just cooked some food with my own money. Once we posted the pictures on social media, we posted flyers for the next week people saw what we were doing and donated money and we kept going from there, then we got large sums of money ands now not to get caught up with the government and taxes and all that, we partnered up with Pact Collective which is a grassroots org out here.
They are a fiscal host for groups that do mutual aid. They take care of all the paperwork. Our money gets donated to Pact Collective and to receive the money we have to show receipts. We don’t get government grants. We are not a 501c-3. We want to see if we can make this sustainable off people power without going to the government, see if we could do it through the community, we been going on five years now. So its been sustainable. We have been able to start a new distro in Harlem.
Who are your key teammates and what new plans do you have?
Some of my key teammates are Che, Krispy, Rudy, Sarah, Koren, Marissa, so many more are heavy organizers and key players in the organization, but we try to make everyone an organizer. We have a mobile distro coming. We’re stationery in Bed-Stuy and Harlem but now we are putting the mobile distro into effect in the afternoon, possibly calling for bikers or using the trains, giving people a opportunity to help us out, hitting different areas weekly. The mobile distro should start in April
Incidents have happened with the police. What is the relationship on the street?
We had a couple of run-ins with law enforcement. I feel they do it at least once a year. Sometimes it’s new cops and they don’t know so we have to break them in and they panic and call for backup, so backup cops would pull up and let them know who we are. You don’t have to have a permit to give out free food and stuff. One day cops got physical and tried to take stuff off our table and locked up two comrades. The most powerful thing is we never stopped the line.
We had people handle that situation and deal with the cops when they come but the line keeps going. They ended up locking up eleven people all together but we say that is the fight to show them that we coming back out next week. We showed that we gonna do for our community no matter how they feel about it. We’re trying to strengthen our community, and we don’t need permits to do that. Our eleven people have heavy lawsuits on hand.
Photos by Kazembe Batts