Melina Abdullah is a scholar-activist. She holds a PhD in Political Science from the University of Southern California and chairs the Department of Pan-African Studies at California State University, in Los Angeles. A womanist1, she has written numerous articles about black feminism, race relations, and political coalition building. She is also an original member and one of the main organizers of the Los Angeles chapter of Black Lives Matter, the famous network created in 2013 to organize black people and non-black allies in the fight against state-sanctioned violence overwhelmingly targeting black individuals. We reached out to her in order to know more about her perspective on the Obama administration’s record in terms of racial equality and racial justice, the rise of the Black Lives Matter movement both nationally and more specifically in Los Angeles, and the future of black mobilizations in the Trump era.