Alicia Garza

Alicia Garza is an organizer and writer. In her own account, she created #BlackLivesMatter with Patrisse Cullors and Opal Tometi in 2013, as a response to the acquittal of George Zimmerman in the killing of Trayvon Martin.

Organizing Before 2013

Writing in 2014, Garza described herself as Special Projects Director of the National Domestic Workers Alliance. She had by then received the San Francisco Bay Guardian’s Local Hero award, the Jeanne Gauna Communicate Justice award in 2008, and two Bayard Rustin Community Activist awards from the Harvey Milk Democratic Club.

#BlackLivesMatter

Garza’s own statement of the origin is direct: “I created #BlackLivesMatter with Patrisse Cullors and Opal Tometi, two of my sisters, as a call to action for Black people after 17-year-old Trayvon Martin was post-humously placed on trial for his own murder and the killer, George Zimmerman, was not held accountable.” The three describe themselves as having built “the infrastructure for this movement project — moving the hashtag from social media to the streets.” Cullors led the Black Lives Matter freedom ride to Ferguson after the killing of Michael Brown.

Garza’s 2014 essay is also an argument about what the phrase was for. She framed it as “an ideological and political intervention” against anti-Black racism, extending beyond police killings to state violence against Black queer and trans people, undocumented immigrants, and disabled people, and objected in the same piece to the substitution of “All Lives Matter”.

Black Futures Lab

Garza is associated with the Black Futures Lab, which describes its work as building Black political power locally, statewide and nationally through year-round engagement, and which runs the Black Census Project. Its own about page does not state a founding date or a founder.

Writing

Garza published The Purpose of Power: How We Come Together When We Fall Apart in 2020.

Digital Political Impact

• One of #BlackLivesMatter’s three creators published a first-person account of its creation and intent within fifteen months of the phrase’s origin
• That account frames the hashtag as a deliberate political intervention rather than a spontaneous viral event, and treats the move “from social media to the streets” as the work
• The phrase became the reference case in later argument about whether hashtags constitute organizing

What Is Not Established Here

Removed in the citation audit: her birth year; a Twitter follower count; the claim that the original Facebook post was titled “A Love Letter to Black People” and that Cullors added the hashtag afterwards, which Garza’s own account does not describe in those terms; the founding year of the Black Futures Lab; the claim that the Black Census Project collected over 30,000 responses or was among the largest surveys of Black communities in the United States; and a characterization of the 2014-2016 period as chapter-building coordinated by Garza.