Black Women Organize #BlackLivesMatter

Background: In 2013, prison abolition organizer Patrisse Khan-Cullors used social media to closely follow the Florida trial of George Zimmerman, the man who fatally shot seventeen-year-old Trayvon Martin. Khan-Cullors relied on Facebook to stay updated on the trial unfolding in Florida. When she learned of Zimmerman’s acquittal, she engaged with others processing the news on their Facebook posts. Khan-Cullors, Alicia Garza, and Opal Tometi used social media as a tool to develop grassroots engagement with the Black Lives Matter movement.

I start seeing the timelines update. The killer is acquitted of the first charge. And then he is acquitted of all of them. Every. Single. One. Of. Them. I go into shock. I lose my breath. My heart drops into my stomach. I am stunned and for a moment I cannot move. When I begin to move I go into denial.

No! This is impossible. Wait a minute. Hold on. This doesn’t make sense.

But as soon as I deny it I know that it is true, and I am overcome with embarrassment and shame. How could this have happened? Why couldn’t we make this not happen? And then I start crying. And I feel wrong about crying. My tears make me want to hide. I feel like I have to be the particular kind of strong Black people are always asked to be.
___

And then my friend Alicia writes a Facebook post. Alicia, who I’d known for seven years at this point, who I’d met at a political gathering in Rhode Island where at the end of the day our goal was to dance until we couldn't dance any more. She and I danced with one another all night long and began a friendship that holds us together to this very day. But she writes these words in the wake of the acquittal:

Btw stop saying that we are not surprised. That’s a damn shame in itself. I continue to be surprised at how little Black lives matter. And I will continue that, stop giving up on black life, black people, I will NEVER give up on us. NEVER.

And then I respond. I wrote back with a hashtag: #BlackLivesMatter

Alicia and I brainstorm over the course of the next few days. We know we want to develop something. We know we want whatever we create to have global reach. Alicia reaches out to her friend Opal Tometi, a dedicated organizer who is running Black Alliance for Just Immigration, based in Brooklyn, New York. Opal is a master communicator and develops all the initial digital components we need to even get people to feel comfortable saying the words Black Lives Matter, for even among those closest to us, there are many who feel the words will be viewed as separatist, that they will isolate us. Opal pulls together the architecture for our first website and Twitter accounts, our Facebook and Tumblr. We are determined to take public this basic concept: That our lives mean something. That Black Lives Matter. 

Source: Patrisse Khan-Cullors. When They Call You a Terrorist: A Black Lives Matter Memoir. New York: Macmillan Publishing, 2018.