Throughout her career as an organizer and movement leader, Nicole Carty has remained committed to the work of racial justice in New York and beyond. As a millennial, she hopes to connect to the previous generation of organizers to help today’s young people make change.
Carty is a co-founder and executive director of Get Free, a campaign created to address past harms of systemic racism, prevent ongoing attacks, and work toward reparations for slavery.
The group, created in 2020, is youth-led and made up of organizers from various backgrounds working to mobilize young people to highlight civic harm and discrimination against Black communities and other such groups across the U.S. These issues include voter suppression and the anti-DEI and affirmative action efforts by Republicans and the Supreme Court. There are chapters in other states.
Some of their successes include being one of the principal campaigns behind pushing Governor Kathy Hochul and the state legislature to enact the New York State Reparations Commission in 2023.
Carty first got involved with movements like Occupy Wall Street and the Movement for Black Lives after graduating from Brown University and moving to New York in 2011. In New York, she has helped to organize movements, including developing the Crown Heights Tenant Union in 2013, where she lived at the time, helping win the historic citywide rent freeze.
“I expected a lot more barriers,” Carty said about helping to organize the tenant union. “We probably [had about] 100 people to that meeting, and it made a difference for millions of New Yorkers. Things are really possible in the city.”
Born and raised in Atlanta, Carty comes from a background of civil rights activism. Her grandfather, Adolphus Carty, served as the minister of St. Paul’s Episcopoal Church in the early ’60s, not far from Ebenezer Baptist Church where Dr. Martin Luther King led his ministry. Both her grandfather and King worked together to lead their ministries during the Civil Rights Movement.
A child of the ’90s, Carty said she was always passionate about politics from a young age. “I was really political as a kid,” she said. “I was a staunch Democrat by the time I was 10.” As a teen, she noticed the shift toward “jingoistic nationalism” in the U.S. after 9/11.
While studying sociology at Brown, Carty found the way she was being taught topics was not a true study of policy nor the crux of societal issues — it was more academic and formulaic than the enlivening experience it should have been.
Carty was inspired to join the Occupy Wall Street movement, where she felt she found a community of the only ones talking about issues she was interested in, such as wealth and income inequality. She served as facilitator for the protests.
After studying under the Nashville civil rights leader and professor Rev. James Lawson, Carty began focusing on racial justice work with the Movement for Black Lives (MBL). She served as an advisor for other leaders organizing protests after the police killings of Eric Garner, Jamar Clark, Michael Brown, and George Floyd. In 2017, she and Sandy Nurse, now a New York City councilmember, whom she worked with during Occupy protests, helped support the Millions March.
It was around this time that Carty recognized the racist rhetoric and strategy of “Trumpism,” the same kind of environment that her parents and grandparents experienced during Jim Crow. “I recognized it immediately as not something new, but something that old and very deep in this country that needed to be reckoned with from the foundation,” Carty said.
After Trump’s first victory, Carty began to work with other young movement leaders from various organizing backgrounds to form Get Free. In May 2023, the overturning of affirmative action by SCOTUS served as a kickoff to their first major action, in which they led a group of 40 young protesters on Capitol Hill for a rally and sit-in against the decision, along with other verdicts from that session. They have worked with organizations such as the NAACP, Black Voters Matter, New Disabled South, Faith for Black Lives, and HBCU campuses.
Next week, the campaign will launch a fellowship program, gathering young people from campuses across the country, training them, and preparing for the first 100 days of the Trump administration. Students will be able to learn ways they can organize and put pressure on their campuses to hold the line and not bend the knee in protecting school programs such as African and gender studies, which Republicans have signaled they would target.
As a result of burnout from the pandemic, Carty said there is a lot of cynicism among young people, so they have been unable to focus on organizing. Much of the knowledge in protesting could not be passed down because many from her time have moved on. During the 2024 election cycle, Carty said there was a lack of messaging about the significant threats to civil rights protections posed by Trump and his administration, along with the structural issues contending with mis- and disinformation from the media outlets.
However, Carty believes more people will begin to see the reality of these threats and their harm, because millennials and Gen Z are not used to a legalized Jim Crow type of discrimination and segregation.
“This work might take a while to undo, but there’s always a backlash to the backlash, and it’s coming, and the most important thing to do is be ready so that we can use that moment to build power and propel us towards a better future that we deserve,” Carty said. “I think the challenge for us is just to make sure that we control how they make meaning of what they’re seeing in the next administration, so that we can get them into gear to do something about it.”