Colin Kaepernick is one of the leaders in the movement for black lives. His role as an athlete and activist is not only motivating but inspiring.
— Patrisse Cullors
Through Black Lives Matter and social media, we've been able to have a really challenging discussion with America about police and how much it is investing in policing.
When I was younger, I had these romantic ideas about the Black Panther Party and what it meant to be a part of the civil rights movement. Then we're here, and it's dangerous. And it's dangerous to say, 'Black lives matter.'
I've been an activist since I was a teenager. I was always curious about what we would now call social justice. I remember just trying to navigate growing up poor in an overpoliced environment with a single mother and a father who was in and out of prison.
The movement for black lives isn't just about black people. Black liberation has never just been about black people. It's been about a fight for our humanity, for our dignity.
I think part of what we're seeing in the rise of white nationalism is their response to Black Lives Matter, is their response to an ever-increasing fight for equal rights, for civil rights, and for human rights.
In high school, I came out to my friends as queer. My entire world opened up; this was a monumental step toward unveiling my truest self. I had my first girlfriend when I was sixteen years old.
We should be developing spaces and places that are thinking about how we care for the group vs. asking the individual to take care of themselves.
I fight to prioritize black mothers and black children because we deserve to live in a world where our healing is centered and our lives are treated with dignity, respect, and care.
What we acknowledged as a nation during the one-and-a-half year trial of George Zimmerman is that the white majority's public imagination of black people was based on their fear of us, not the reality of who we are.
Black Lives Matter is our call to action. 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.
#BlackLivesMatter was born online but now lives in street actions, in conversations in our homes, and in the dignity swelling in our hearts. That is the power of the open Internet, and it is why we must do everything we can to protect black voices. Our lives depend on it.
With support from techies, designers, artists and thousands of activists across the country, Black Lives Matter is now an online-to-offline political movement, affirming the humanity and resilience of black communities.
So many stories have been told about Black Lives Matter. The beauty of building out a decentralized network, the beauty of building out something that's a hashtag, is that so many people can take it and run with it. The bad part about that is so many folks can take it and run with it - and misuse it and co-opt it.
With Black Lives Matter, we knew from the very beginning that it wasn't just going to live online. We were like, 'We're creating this thing and then it's also going to live with black folks on the street and protests and organizations.' It was very important for us to use the hashtag as a way to have a larger conversation and as an organizing tool.
Once upon a time, Bill Clinton was widely perceived as an ally and advocate for the needs of black people. However, it is the Clinton administration's Violent Crime and Law Enforcement Act that set the stage for the massive racial injustice we struggle with in law enforcement today.
When folks say 'identity politics' don't matter, it simply reinforces the norm of a white, middle-class, cis narrative and further marginalizes the rest of us who don't share that identity.
I think so much of my life had me growing up under extreme poverty and really challenging conditions, with having the police in my neighborhood and seeing the impact of over-incarceration. Having a father love up on me and remind of who I was, and my strength against those conditions, really shaped why I'm an organizer today.
I think what's so powerful about Black Lives Matter is we're the first movement able to take on law enforcement and make it a popular discussion.
Every community has crime and violence; it's a part of being human. This idea that black communities are more violent than others is just false. But black folks fight the hardest for our communities. Before governments do, before other people do, we're the first ones to show up. We are the first ones to fight for our lives.
We can feel sad, hurt, demoralized. But we can't give up.
I want to see Black Lives Matter be able to ultimately reduce law enforcement funding.
The first thing that Black Lives Matter had to do was remind people that racism existed in this country because when we had Obama, people thought we were post-racial. That was the debate. Is racism over? And very quickly, we understood that it was not over.
When I was growing up, my family was plagued by poverty. My mother, a single parent, worked around the clock to make sure her children - me, my five brothers, and three sisters - could eat and have a safe place to sleep. We hardly saw her.
I read everything and anything related to being queer. I found solace in reading authors like Audre Lorde and bell hooks, who would become my activist staples - their words helped me grow up and taught me how to be bold and courageous. By studying them, I came to understand that being young and queer and black would not be easy.
We need to fight for a new human rights movement that recognizes and values black life.
I think our work as movement leaders isn't just about our own visibility but rather how do we make the whole visible. How do we not just fight for our individual selves but fight for everybody?
The unfortunate reality is the alt-right has captured white people's imagination.
Because of network neutrality rules, activists can turn to the Internet to bypass the discrimination of mainstream cable, broadcast, and print outlets as we organize for change.
The story of Black Lives Matter starts before Black Lives Matter. The story of Black Lives Matter, for me, starts with my childhood.
I've been in movement work since I was 16 years old. Black Lives Matter becomes an important part of the story, but it's not the only part of the story.
My personal history, along with the history of many black people in this country, is rife with trauma born out of anti-black policies aided and facilitated by presidents and their administrations.
My morning rituals are typical. I wake up yearning for a few extra moments of rest. I express gratitude to a higher power for the breath in my body and the blessings in my life. I shower. I dress. I eat breakfast. I exchange laughter and words with my beloveds, embracing each other as we say our daily goodbyes.
For those looking outside-in, it's not fair - or accurate - to assign someone an identity based off the first thing that we see.
Black Lives Matter is one iteration of a much larger struggle to fight for black people's freedom.
Our decentralized, localized leadership structure has really allowed for Black Lives Matter structures in their own communities to take on the state and take on some of the most egregious acts against black people.
I have never felt the grips of patriarchy and its need to erase black women and our labor... so strongly until the creation of Black Lives Matter.
It was white people who got Trump into office.
Trump is literally the epitome of evil, all the evils of this country - be it racism, capitalism, sexism, homophobia.
I knew marriage was not the answer to changing the conditions for poor, black, queer folks. So I never felt compelled to get married - it just didn't seem important. But even if marriage wasn't right for me at the time, or a quick fix toward black empowerment, I found it repulsive that loving same-sex couples were refused the right.
We have to look at queerness as a means towards challenging normativity.
I am part of a legacy of queer black women who have fought for the freedom of black people across the globe.
Many of us believed that Black Lives Matter would move this country to not only reckon with white racism but to usher in new laws and practices that would curb vigilantism and law enforcement violence. But, instead, white nationalism was nurtured and began to take root among the American people.
I grew up in a neighborhood that was heavily policed. I witnessed my brothers and my siblings continuously stopped and frisked by law enforcement. I remember my home being raided. And one of my questions as a child was, why? Why us? Black Lives Matter offers answers to the why.
Black women voted against Roy Moore not because they necessarily wanted the other guy; they voted against Roy Moore because they knew that would be better for the people of Alabama and, to be frank, better for the rest of the country.
The Internet is the most democratic communication platform in history, largely because we've had network neutrality rules that make sure all web traffic is treated equally, and no voices are discriminated against.
When you grow up with a significant amount of trauma, you are realizing it as you get older, and you're realizing the ways you can recover from that trauma. The things that I have witnessed and that I have been through, it's going to take a lifetime to undo.
I think publicly declaring that mistakes are a part of how we grow and how we heal is absolutely necessary.
As a black millennial, I remember with horrid detail how Democratic policies ravaged my community and destroyed my family.
#BlackLivesMatter is about black pride and black power and standing up against a world that tries to annihilate us.
