By Emma Lacey-Bordeaux — (CNN) — Students around the country are again taking to the streets. It’s the latest mass action since the shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School that claimed seventeen lives and galvanized young people to act in the long-stalled debate over guns. Some activists are heartened by the attention being paid to the issue but they raise questions about how these students get viewed versus the treatment of…
Maurice Mitchell wants the WFP to be a political home for working-class people of every race. By Collier Meyerson — The Working Families Party, a progressive political political party that is active in 19 states, just announced that its longtime national director, Dan Cantor, has been succeeded in the role by Maurice Mitchell. The first black person to hold the post, Mitchell has two decades of experience in political and…
By Tanvi Misra — This will “give us a better sense of who black people are, where we are, and what we hope and dream for,” says Alicia Garza, the…
His fate has sent a collective shudder of horror through the city’s African-American community. By Sasha Abramsky — After the white hearse, trailed by a van from the funeral company that repaired Stephon Clark’s broken body, pulled into the Boss Bayside church in South Sacramento, dozens of mourners began filing in to view the dead man. It was 1 pm on March 28, a hot, cloudless day, more than a…
By Sonali Kolhatkar — Any discussions of gun violence and the regulations needed to curb it are incomplete unless they include an analysis of how racism plays a role. Government data show that “black Americans are, on average, eight times more likely to be killed by firearms than those who are white.” Gun violence by police against ordinary Americans also disproportionately affects people of color—a fact that the Black Lives Matter movement has…
The co-founder of the Black Lives Matter movement talked to The Nation about her initiative to engage skeptics and build political power among black communities. By Collier Meyerson — In 2015, I profiled activist and organizer Alicia Garza as part of Glamour’s “Women of the Year” issue. Garza, along with Patrisse Cullors and Opal Tometi, is credited with coining the phrase #BlackLivesMatter, popularizing the hashtag and for its quick ascendance…
By ELLE — The Founders of Black Lives Matter and the #MeToo Movement on Making Change. Patrisse Cullors and Tarana Burke are recognizable, but their work is perhaps even more so. #BlackLivesMatter and #MeToo became the shorthand for the agitation and labor these activists lent to their causes, and the hashtags spread the word about police violence against black people and sexual harassment, respectively.
As Black Lives Matter and other social justice campaigns focus more on economic inequality, unions see an opportunity. By Mike Elk, The Guardian — After decades of decline unions have found a new champion in efforts to organize workers: the Black Lives Matter movement. Unions have suffered as manufacturing has moved south away from their old strongholds in the north of the US. Membership rates were 10.7% in 2016, down from 20.1% in 1983, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. At the same time the shift from manufacturing to service industry jobs has hurt them too.
By Kandia Johnson — As co-founder of Black Lives Matter, Patrisse Cullors is a modern-day revolutionary igniting change and turning messages into movements about law enforcement accountability and race in America. But beyond activist and co-founder…
“The Black Lives Matter at School movement is about dismantling the school-to-prison-pipeline and creating a school-to-justice-pipeline.” By Jesse Hagopian — Educators in America know all too well that the school-to-prison…
By Natasha S. Alford, theGrio — Patrisse Khan-Cullors says she co-founded the “Black Lives Matter” movement out of love. But in a country plagued by longtime tension between law enforcement officers…
By Elena Sheppard, Yahoo Lifestyle — It was a lifetime of oppression and violence that led activist Patrisse Khan-Cullors to cofound the Black Lives Matter movement, but the catalyst was one particular instant: The moment when George Zimmerman was acquitted in the killing of Trayvon Martin. Scouring Facebook after the decision was announced, Khan-Cullors came upon a post by her friend Alicia Garza (who went on to cofound the movement…