When United Teachers Los Angeles (UTLA) went on strike in January of 2019, Cecily Myart-Cruz was a vice president of the union. Now she’s been elected president, and will assume her post on July 1 — amid a global coronavurus pandemic and unprecedented social unrest catalyzed by the police murder of George Floyd. Myart-Cruz, who will be the first woman of color to lead the union in its fifty-year history, is determined to carry on the organization’s legacy of social movement unionism, connecting traditional bread-and-butter issues to the political advancement of the whole multiracial working class.

In the lead-up to the 2019 strike, Myart-Cruz and other UTLA leaders, who had begun an effort to reform the union several years earlier, stressed the importance of bargaining for the common good. In practice, what this meant is that instead of restricting their demands to teachers’ wages and benefits, they broadened them to include reforms that would directly improve the lives of students and the broader community. One of these demands was an end to random searches of students, which tended to criminalize young black and Latino students, acting as a valve into the school-to-prison pipeline.

Given this recent history, it’s no surprise that UTLA has responded to this most recent wave of Black Lives Matter protests by eagerly joining in. Earlier this month, the union published a statement titled “Imagine Police-Free Schools With the Supports Students Deserve.” It advanced a new central demand, appropriate for the gravity of the moment: to entirely disband the Los Angeles School Police, which is its own Department. The statement read: