In 2013, #BlackLivesMatter was founded by Opal Tometi, Patrisse Cullors, and Alicia Garza as a response to the acquittal of George Zimmerman (Trayvon Martin’s murderer). From the movement grew the organization Black Lives Matter Global Network Foundation, Inc., which is a “global organization in the US, UK, and Canada, whose mission is to eradicate white supremacy and build local power to intervene in violence inflicted on Black communities by the state and vigilantes.”
Author: developer
BYP100 (Black Youth Project 100)
Founded in 2013, BYP100 (Black Youth Project 100) is a member-based organization of Black youth activists creating justice and freedom for all Black people. BYP100 was, at one point, just a hashtag for the 2013 “Beyond November Movement Convening” developed through the vision and leadership of Cathy Cohen.
Charlene Carruthers
Charlene Carruthers is a Black queer feminist, activist, and organizer. She is passionate about building the capacity of young Black leaders so they are well equipped to fight for liberation. Carruthers’ career in movement work spans more than 15 years, and she has worked with such organizations as Center for Community Change, Color of Change, and Women’s Media Center. In 2013, she became the founding national director of Black Youth Project 100. In 2018, she released her groundbreaking text, Unapologetic: A Black, Queer, and Feminist Mandate for Radical Movements.
Alicia Garza
Alicia Garza is an innovator, strategist, organizer, and author. In 2013, she became the co-creator of #BlackLivesMatter and the Black Lives Matter Global Network. She is also the founder of Black Futures Lab and the Strategy and Partnerships Director for the National Domestic Workers Alliance.
CeCe McDonald’s Plea Bargain for Self-Defense
On June 5, 2011, CeCe McDonald, a 23-year-old Black transgender woman, was verbally and physically assaulted by a group of white people while out with her friends. As she tried to break away from the fight, a man named Dean Schmitz followed her. McDonald stabbed him in self-defense, and Schmitz passed away from the wound. McDonald initially refused to accept the plea deal of first-degree manslaughter. However, on May 2, 2012, after prosecutors sentenced her with second-degree intentional murder (which could result in a 40-year sentence), she was coerced into accepting the plea deal, which resulted in a 41-month prison sentence. An immediate outcry ensued from activists who stated that McDonald is “on trial for surviving a hate crime.”
The Violence Matrix
The Violence Matrix is a theory developed by Beth E. Richie in her 2012 book Arrested Justice: Black Women, Violence, and America’s Prison Nation. She describes the “‘male violence matrix’ as violence against women that has its roots in patriarchal arrangements, as well as by communities, institutions, and agencies organized around patriarchal power and male supremacy.”
Beth Richie
Beth E. Richie is Head of the Department of Criminology, Law and Justice and Professor of African American Studies at the University of Illinois at Chicago. The emphasis of her scholarly and activist work has been on the ways that race/ethnicity and social position affect women’s experience of violence and incarceration, focusing on the experiences of African American battered women and sexual-assault survivors. Dr. Richie is the author of Arrested Justice: Black Women, Violence and America’s Prison Nation (NYU Press, 2012), which chronicles the evolution of the contemporary anti-violence movement during the time of mass incarceration in the United States, and numerous articles concerning Black feminism and gender violence, race and criminal-justice policy, and the social dynamics around issues of sexuality, prison abolition, and grassroots organizations in African American communities. Dr. Richie is a board member of the Institute on Domestic Violence in the African Community, the National Network for Women in Prison, and A Call To Men; and a founding member of INCITE!: Women of Color Against Violence.
Indigenous and Feminist of Color Delegation to Palestine
“Between June 14 and June 23, 2011, a delegation of 11 scholars, activists, and artists visited occupied Palestine,” notes Jadaliyya Reports. The group comprised people who had lived “in the Jim Crow South, in apartheid South Africa, and on Indian reservations in the U.S.” Though they had been a part of several liberation struggles themselves, they were committed to going to Palestine to witness the situation on the ground and to spread awareness on the necessity of the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions Campaign.
Sister Citizen, by Melissa V. Harris-Perry
Published in 2011, Melissa V. Harris-Perry’s Sister Citizen: Shame, Stereotypes, and Black Women in America utilizes “multiple methods of inquiry, including literary analysis, political theory, focus groups, surveys, and experimental research, to understand more deeply Black women’s political and emotional responses to pervasive negative race and gender images. Not a traditional political-science work concerned with office-seeking, voting, or ideology, Sister Citizen instead explores how African American women understand themselves as citizens and what they expect from political organizing. Harris-Perry shows that the shared struggle to preserve an authentic self and secure recognition as a citizen links together Black women in America, from the anonymous survivors of Hurricane Katrina to the current First Lady of the United States.”
Nikky Finney
Nikky Finney is a poet and activist. Her poetry collections include Love Child’s Hotbed of Occasional Poetry (2020) and On Head Off & Split (2011), which won the National Book Award. She is a founding member of the Affrilachian Poets, a collective of Black Appalachian poets.