“I cannot think of a better time in our nation’s history for the brave names of Alicia Garza, Patrisse Cullors, and Opal Tometi to be recognized. The courage heard in their voices mirrors some of history’s greatest giants, with sharp echoes of Rosa Parks. Black Lives Matter is working to heal our country’s age-long sickness. For when one is sick, so too are we all sick. Only when all is healed might we all one day be well.” —Uzo Aduba, actress (Read Uzo Aduba’s comments in full at the end of this piece.)
They were always worried about their brothers.
Patrisse Cullors was 13 when she watched Los Angeles police handcuff and haul away her older brother without knowing why it was happening.
Growing up in a Phoenix suburb, Opal Tometi, the daughter of Nigerian immigrants, was alarmed when her youngest brother started preschool and began to raise questions about his hair and skin color—questions she knew were triggered by societal messages about race.
And Alicia Garza worried about her brother’s safety every day—but never so much as after July 13, 2013, when George Zimmerman, a neighborhood watch volunteer in Florida, was found not guilty in the shooting death of 17-year-old Trayvon Martin. “My brother is six feet tall and has a huge Afro,” Garza says, “and I thought, That could have been my family.”
The night of the acquittal, all three women were devastated. But as they mourned, they turned their sorrow and outrage into action, creating a powerful civil rights movement that, in just three years, has transformed the way Americans think and talk about race. Garza and Cullors had met at a conference for activists nearly a decade earlier. (“We just fell in love instantly,” recalls Garza. “We call each other ‘Twin.’”) The night of the verdict, they texted, sharing their grief. “When I woke up in the morning,” says Garza, 35, who is the special projects director of the National Domestic Workers Alliance in Oakland, California, “I wrote a love letter to black people.” Her now-famous Facebook posts are a lament, an exhortation, and a praise song. “I continue to be surprised at how little black lives matter,” she wrote. She ended with, “Black people. I love you. I love us. Our lives matter.”
Cullors, 33, a Los Angeles–based organizer and artist, shared the posts on Facebook, spontaneously finishing her own post with #BlackLivesMatter. Tometi, 32, the executive director of the Black Alliance for Just Immigration in New York City, saw the hashtag and reached out to Garza, whom she knew from the activist community, and volunteered to build a digital platform.
“I felt a sense of urgency about the next steps we could take together to change the story,” Tometi says.
Adds Garza: “We wanted to connect people who were already buzzing about all this stuff and get them to do something, not just retweet or like or share. We thought, How do we get folks together and take that energy and create something awesome?”
With that, #BlackLivesMatter—a rallying cry for a new generation—was born.
Given the facts of American history, it was all too predictable that Martin’s would not be the last widely reported killing of an unarmed black person. And when a new case hit the headlines—the August 2014 death of Michael Brown, 18, in Ferguson, Missouri, at the hands of a white police officer—Black Lives Matter roared into action to create a “freedom ride,” so protesters from around the country could get to Ferguson. The three women also made a key decision: To keep their group decentralized. Today the Black Lives Matter Global Network is a coalition of 42 autonomous chapters, each doing its own work. The Chicago chapter, for example, helped oust the police superintendent after video footage of an officer shooting a black teenager was withheld for more than a year. In addition to protesting racism and unlawful killings, Black Lives Matter groups have taken on inequality, sexism, homophobia, and transphobia.
“We gave tongue to something that we all knew was happening,” Tometi says. “We were courageous enough to call it what it was. But more than that, to offer an alternative. An aspirational message: Black lives matter.”
Those local efforts have seeped into the national consciousness: Lady Gaga, Kerry Washington, and Jesse Williams all voiced support for the movement; in an essay for Wired, tennis great Serena Williams wrote, “To those of you involved in equality movements like Black Lives Matter, I say this: Keep it up.”
In February, Beyoncé brought Black Lives Matter’s issues into the nation’s living rooms with her Super Bowl halftime performance. And in July, at the ESPY Awards, basketball stars LeBron James, Carmelo Anthony, Dwyane Wade, and Chris Paul together movingly called for an end to racial violence.
There have been critics, of course, who have responded with #AllLivesMatter and #BlueLivesMatter hashtags. But powerful voices have helped explain the issue: “When people say ‘Black Lives Matter,’ that doesn’t mean blue lives don’t matter. It just means all lives matter,” President Obama said last summer. “But right now the big concern is the fact that the data shows black folks are more vulnerable to these kinds of incidents.… To be concerned about these issues is not political correctness. It’s just being an American, and wanting to live up to our best and highest ideals.”
The CEO of AT&T lent support; so did Ben & Jerry’s with a letter to customers: “All lives do matter. But all lives will not matter until Black lives matter.… We’ll be working hard on that, and ask you to as well.”
Garza, Cullors, and Tometi are earning their place in history—notable, since too many black women have been little more than a footnote in civil rights textbooks. “They’ve brought the necessary ‘street heat’ to drive change and hold elected officials accountable,” says Congresswoman Barbara Lee (D–Calif.). “This movement, largely driven by young people, is really the civil and human rights struggle of our time.”
And while creating a movement is never easy—they’ve sacrificed family outings and weddings and relationships—all three say they find strength in one another.
“From my youngest brother to immigrant women to black queer folks, those are the people who keep me going,” says Tometi. “When I think about their various acts of courage, it reminds me that I am not alone and that we can do even more and we deserve more, so we have to keep going.… We have built a sisterhood, a community. Friends and people who’d look out for you, who have your back, who inspire you but also challenge you. And you can rise together.”
Collier Meyerson is a justice reporter at Fusion.
Uzo Aduba on the founders of The Black Lives Matter Movement:
I cannot think of a better time in our nation's history for the brave names of Alicia Garza, Patrice Cullors, and Opal Tometi, also understood as the founders of The Black Lives Matter Movement, to be known and recognized than during this year's Glamour Women of The Year. So often during a living history, a call to action is thought too monstrous an undertaking for its time, thought too great a cost on the lives of those called. These fears do not reside in the spirits of these women.
The courage heard in their voices mirrors the size of some of history's greatest giants; the sharp echoes of Rosa Parks, the custodian of dignity, and the impassioned Jo Ann Robinson's insistent assembly of voices with the Montgomery Bus Boycott in her 1955 circular. The power of this lady-led legacy continue to ripple through today's Black Lives Matter Movement in the form of a simple cry breathing out: Enough is enough.
These are the champions of our great nation. This movement does the hard work of advancing culture, challenging the underpinnings of our imperfect society's hardest truths, with the hope of conquering injustices where fit, sacrificing so much for the collective good of an all too often forgotten people, so that we might, indeed, one day form a more perfect union.
Black Lives Matter matters.
It is working to heal our country's age-long sickness. For when one is sick, so too are we all sick. Only when all is healed, might we all one day be well. And for that valiant attempt at healing, Alicia, Patrisse, and Opal must be recognized. What a time.
