Linda Sarsour

Linda Sarsour is a community organizer from Brooklyn, New York. She directed the Arab American Association of New York, co-founded the Muslim digital advocacy organisation MPower Change, and was one of four national co-chairs of the Women’s March on Washington held on 21 January 2017.

Self-Description

On her own site Sarsour describes herself as “a Palestinian Muslim American” and a “pure New Yorker, born and raised in Brooklyn,” and as an author, civil rights activist, community organizer and mother of three. The Library of Congress name-authority record for her, created when her 2020 memoir was catalogued, gives her birth year as 1980. The record itself traces that year to the English Wikipedia page it cites, not to the memoir’s copyright-in-publication data, which supplies only the name — so the year is recorded here as the Library’s cataloguing decision rather than as an independently documented fact.

Arab American Association of New York

A White House blog post she wrote on 19 December 2011 identifies her, contemporaneously, as Director of the Arab American Association of New York and as Advocacy and Civic Engagement Coordinator for the National Network for Arab American Communities, then a network of 22 Arab American organizations. She was recognised that month under the Obama administration’s Champions of Change programme, which described AAANY as a social service agency serving the Arab community in New York City.

The organisation’s IRS filings record its growth during her tenure. AAANY received its IRS ruling in September 2003. Its reported total revenue was $342,813 for tax year 2011,$581,412 for 2013, $523,535 for 2015 and$1,117,490 for 2016, the last full year before her Women’s March period. Her own site describes her as the organisation’s former executive director; the sources consulted here do not fix the date she left.

Her site lists campaign work including calls to end surveillance of New York’s Muslim communities and to end stop-and-frisk policing, the co-founding of Muslims for Ferguson, membership of Justice League NYC, co-chairing the March2Justice walk, and work with the Coalition for Muslim School Holidays on the New York City public school calendar. These are her own account of her record; no independent source is cited here for them.

MPower Change

MPower Change states on its own site that it “was co-founded by Linda Sarsour, Mark Crain, and Dustin Craun in 2016,” and that the founders had convened a national group of Muslim organizers and faith leaders in 2014 before launching. The organisation dates its launch to January 2016 and describes itself as “the largest Muslim digital advocacy organization in the U.S.” Its stated purpose is to translate American Muslims’ faith values into local, state and national policy, through grassroots organising, political education, voter mobilisation and campaigns; its listed campaigns include work on surveillance, immigration, elections and technology accountability.

Sarsour’s own biography calls MPower Change “the first Muslim online organizing platform.” The organisation’s own site does not make that claim, and this page does not assert it.

Women’s March

Fortune’s 2017 “World’s 50 Greatest Leaders” list placed Tamika Mallory, Linda Sarsour, Bob Bland and Carmen Perez at rank 34 under the title “National Cochairs” of The Women’s March on Washington. Fortune’s entry says the four coordinated the march in roughly two months; that an original estimate of 250,000 attendees was exceeded by a Washington crowd it describes as reaching nearly half a million; that with simultaneous marches in hundreds of cities the worldwide total approached five million; and that the co-chairs launched a follow-on effort called 10 Actions/100 Days. The same four were named to the 2017 TIME 100 in an entry written by Senator Kirsten Gillibrand.

On 16 September 2019 the Women’s March announced that Mallory, Bland and Sarsour would transition off its board, and named seventeen incoming board members, among them Carmen Perez-Jordan. In a statement to CNN the organisation said it “has not cut ties with the three departing board members; their terms have ended,” and called them “instrumental” to its accomplishments. CNN reported that the group’s leadership had faced criticism over association with Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan and allegations of anti-Semitism, which the founders deny.

Writing

Sarsour is the author of We Are Not Here to Be Bystanders: A Memoir of Love and Resistance, published in 2020 by 37 Ink, a Simon & Schuster imprint, with a foreword by Harry Belafonte. Her site also announces a subsequent book addressed to young people, We’re In This Together.

What Is Not Established Here

This page was reduced substantially. Removed for want of a source meeting this project’s standard:

The claim that AAANY’s budget grew “from $50,000 to$700,000 annually” under her, and that she became executive director at age 25. Neither figure nor the age appears in any record fetched. The IRS filing figures above are used instead, and they do not match the $700,000 endpoint.

The date range “2001–2015” for her Brooklyn organizing and “2017” as the end of her AAANY tenure. The only dated first-party record found places her in the director role in December 2011.

The statement that “the four original national co-chairs, including Sarsour, transitioned off the Women’s March board” in 2019. Three did; Carmen Perez-Jordan was named to the incoming board.

The description of MPower Change as “the first Muslim online organizing platform” as a fact of the project’s own. It is Sarsour’s own bio language and is attributed as such above.

Co-chairing of the 2017 Day Without a Woman action and of the 2019 Women’s March, for which no source beyond Wikipedia was found. The TIME essay on the Day Without a Woman strike is by Tamika Mallory, not Sarsour.

“Largest single-day protest in U.S. history” stated in the project’s voice; the crowd figures given are Fortune’s own, and the project’s timeline entry for the march records a three-to-five-million range from the Crowd Counting Consortium rather than a superlative.

Follower counts (“269K on Twitter/X, 307K on Instagram”). Neither platform could be read by any method available in this pass, and social counts drift; the frontmatter field was removed rather than left stale. The account links themselves come from her own site.

The former “Digital Political Impact” and “Organizing Strategy” sections, which asserted causal claims about her influence on digital politics — that she demonstrated how activists build national visibility, became “a central figure in online debates,” and built cross-community coalitions online — with no source measuring any of it. The Women’s March timeline entry on this site explicitly notes that no cited source measures how much digital coordination contributed to turnout.

The mainImage dimensions 3744x5616, which the Commons file does not have; it is a 293x359 crop.