Alicia Garza, Patrisse Cullors, and Opal Tometi: Learning from the founders of Black Lives Matter
Alicia Garza, Patrisse Cullors, and Opal Tometi: Learning from the founders of Black Lives Matter
How three influencers kicked off a movement that continues the legacy of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
Alicia Garza, Patrisse Cullors, and Opal Tometi are the founders of the international Black Lives Matter movement.
They acted to promote the #BlackLivesMatter hashtag in 2013 after the murder of Trayvon Martin, and they pushed to open a national network of more than 30 local chapters of Black Lives Matter between 2014 and 2016. The movement remains at the forefront of conversations about race today.
The lives of Garza, Cullors, and Tometi are worth studying and following; their experiences are lessons on the topic of influence.
Born to a single mother in Oakland, California, Garza engaged in activism starting as a teenager. Garza first posted the phrase “Black lives matter” in a Facebook message on July 13, 2013.
Cullors, a Los Angeles community organizer and friend of Garza, lived in a heavily policed neighborhood as a child. She read Garza’s Facebook post and replied with the first instance of the hashtag.
“Black Lives Matter is our call to action,” Cullors said in a 2016 interview. “It is a tool to reimagine a world where Black people are free to exist, free to live. It is a tool for our allies to show up differently for us.”
Tometi, who grew up in Phoenix, Arizona, was a former case manager for survivors of domestic violence. She helped establish communication for the movement, and together the three built a network of community organizers at the grassroots level.
“Anti-Black racism is not only happening in the United States,” Tometi said in the 2016 interview. “It’s actually happening all across the globe, and what we need now more than ever is a human rights movement that challenges systemic racism in every single context.”
Black Lives Matter has become a worldwide rallying cry for justice and equality. The movement is now a global organization with a mission to “eradicate white supremacy and build local power to intervene in violence inflicted on Black communities by the state and vigilantes.”
“We have to address problems at the root, and when you deal with what’s happening in Black communities, it creates an effervescence, a bubble up rather than a trickle down,” Garza said.
As the world witnessed the killings of Michael Brown, Eric Garner, Tamir Rice, Walter Scott, Alton Sterling, Philando Castile, Stephon Clark, Jacob Blake, Breonna Taylor, and George Floyd, among others, the movement has continued to gain support. Fifty-five percent of U.S. adults said they supported the movement in September 2020.
Even so, support for Black Lives Matter dropped by 12 percentage points from June to September 2020, according the same Pew Research Center poll.
White American support for Black Lives Matter was 45 percent in September 2020, whereas Black American support was 87 percent.
Garza, Cullors, and Tometi continue to act as spokespeople for the movement. They were named to the Time 100 list in 2020. Penguin Random House published Garza's first book, The Purpose of Power: How We Come Together When We Fall Apart, in October 2020.
“We are ordinary people attempting to do extraordinary things,” Garza said.
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To learn more about the history of Black Lives Matter, you can watch these videos:
An interview with the founders of Black Lives Matter | Alicia Garza, Patrisse Cullors, Opal Tometi
BLM Founders | Time 100 2020
History of the Black Lives Matter Movement