Fighting the good fight: Nekima Levy Armstrong on justice and unity

There are moments that define who we are. Moments when we must decide whether to look away or face injustice with conviction. For civil rights attorney and activist Nekima Levy Armstrong, that choice has always been clear. She meets the moment head-on.

Armstrong’s journey is a reminder that unity is work. It is often uncomfortable. It demands accountability. And it requires a fierce love for one’s community. Her understanding did not come from textbooks but from the realities of her upbringing.

Born in Jackson, Mississippi, Armstrong grew up in a close-knit Black community where families worked tirelessly yet still struggled to make ends meet. In nearby Terry, Mississippi, she saw something different: Black families with land, stability and a sense of autonomy.

Her first experiences with racism came early. In third grade, a white teacher would “pop me on the hand with a ruler for no reason,” she said. The experience left her shocked and confused, and it planted an early awareness of racialized power.

When her family moved to South Central Los Angeles during the early years of the War on Drugs, she saw systemic injustice up close: young Black men cycling through the courts and families suffering under poverty, over-policing and criminalization. By 9 years old, she knew she wanted to become a lawyer because she believed advocacy could change lives.

Recognizing her talent, teachers encouraged her public speaking and recommended her for A Better Chance, a program connecting high-achieving students of color with elite prep schools. She earned a full scholarship to Brooks School in Massachusetts. Brooks was a world apart, filled with resource-rich surroundings and classmates whose generational wealth sometimes dated back to slavery.

In that environment, Armstrong began to sharpen her voice. “Whenever we had the opportunity to write a paper about any subject, I would choose race relations and Black history,” she said. A project on Harriet Tubman reshaped her understanding of slavery; after seeing the film “Malcolm X,” she helped lead campus dialogue; and she confronted Confederate symbols that had long gone unchallenged. She learned that speaking up could shift culture. A lesson that would anchor her life’s work.

A call to act

Armstrong’s commitment to activism crystallized at the University of Southern California. The reopening of the African American studies program became a turning point, giving her space to study Black history, its triumphs, its trauma, and the laws that shaped Black life. She stepped into leadership early, organizing events and hosting cultural figures like Chuck D of Public Enemy.

And she spoke out when campus traditions clashed with the lived realities of Black students. During a pep rally, USC students set a giant UCLA teddy bear on fire. Armstrong and others pushed back. “As Black students, it made us think about Black bodies burning,” she said. Their advocacy ended the practice.

In law school at the University of Illinois, she found community within a diverse student body and worked directly with low-income Black clients through the civil litigation clinic. She later became a student supervisor, an experience that opened the door for her to begin teaching law immediately after graduating.

Her most pivotal shift came at 27, when she moved to Minnesota to teach at the University of St. Thomas School of Law. While directing a family-law clinic centered on domestic violence and child advocacy, she began reading the Minnesota Spokesman-Recorder and other Black newspapers. What she found stunned her. The Minnesota she had been told was progressive looked, in her words, like “the Jim Crow North.”

Stories of police violence, racial disparities and systemic discrimination forced a reckoning. “Once I had that wake-up call,” she said, “I knew I needed to shift from family law to civil rights.”

Unity as accountability

By the time Armstrong became president of the Minneapolis NAACP in 2015, she was already, as she put it, “knee-deep” in the work. She was advocating in courtrooms, marching in the streets and navigating the fallout of cases that would define a generation.

Her leadership was tested immediately, from the charges she faced after the 2014 Mall of America protest to the national uprisings following Ferguson. Just days after Judge Peter Cahill dismissed the charges against her, Jamar Clark was killed in Minneapolis, plunging the city into another wave of grief and mobilization.

She speaks openly about the emotional toll of the work. “I allow those emotions to surface when they need to,” she said, describing how faith, prayer and grounding practices help her move through doubt, grief and exhaustion. Empathy, she emphasized, is not enough. Unity must confront harm directly, even when doing so invites backlash.

For Armstrong, unity is revealed in collective action: neighbors who opened their homes after Clark was killed; witnesses who shared what they saw; and the people who brought food, tents and firewood to sustain the 18-day Fourth Precinct occupation. That, she believes, is unity rooted in responsibility, not performance.
“There were consequences,” she said. “But it was necessary.”

Armstrong is clear about what sustains her through work that can feel heavy and unending. Advocacy, she said, is not about recognition, it is a calling. She draws strength from the resilience of generations before her, people who survived horrors far worse yet passed down stories, strategies and faith. Their endurance reminds her that when Black communities take on a fight and win, “it’s going to benefit everyone.”

That legacy is her compass. And like the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., she sees today’s struggles as part of a long continuum; a consistent resistance to leaders and systems that misuse their power. King’s final speech, “I’ve Been to the Mountaintop,” still resonates for her, with its call to persevere even when the path is steep.

Today’s struggles, she said, are not new, but part of that same continuum. One in which unity becomes a shield, a catalyst and the collective will to keep climbing together.’

Alaysia Lane is a multimedia journalist and commerce writer based in Minneapolis