She grew up in Los Angeles in the 1990s, raised by a single mother in Section 8 housing, along with her sister and two brothers - one of whom would later be diagnosed with schizoaffective disorder. As Cullors tells TIME, “This call, this need and this desire for a Black Lives Matter started when I was much younger.”Ĭullors was nine when she saw her 11- and 13-year-old brothers needlessly slammed into a wall by police.
Since then, the movement - with the help of its third co-founder, Opal Tometi - has become a national coalition for protesting violence and systemic racism against black people. Cullors first wrote the #BlackLivesMatter hashtag in a comment on a Facebook status of co-founder Alicia Garza, who was lamenting the acquittal of Martin’s killer, George Zimmerman. The movement took shape in the wake of the 2013 killing of Trayvon Martin, but for Cullors, its roots are centuries deep in American history, and a lifetime within herself. It’s a work in halves: “All the Bones We Could Find,” which recounts her adolescence, and “Black Lives Matter,” which demonstrates how tragic incidents of her youth propelled her to create one of the most influential - and polarizing - social justice groups today. Cullors, 34, recently published a memoir titled When They Call You a Terrorist. Patrisse Cullors is many things, but she is definitely not a terrorist.
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