Opal Tometi

Opal Tometi, who since 2021 has gone by Ayọ Tometi, is an organizer and writer. Alicia Garza’s 2014 account of the movement’s origin names Tometi and Patrisse Cullors as the two people with whom she created #BlackLivesMatter in 2013. Tometi was also the executive director of the Black Alliance for Just Immigration, an organization her alma mater describes as the first national immigrant rights organization in the United States for people of African descent.

Education and Early Background

Tometi grew up in Phoenix, the daughter of Nigerian immigrants. She was a history major at the University of Arizona and graduated in 2005; the university’s alumni association records the degree as a Bachelor of Arts in history. In 2016 the university’s College of Social and Behavioral Sciences named her its Alumna of the Year and invited her to give the December convocation address. She states on her own site that she holds a Master of Arts in communication studies, without naming the institution or the year.

Black Alliance for Just Immigration

The Black Alliance for Just Immigration (BAJI) is a Brooklyn-based 501(c)(3) recognized by the IRS in April 2010. BAJI’s Form 990 filings list Opal Tometi as its executive director on the returns for the fiscal years ending December 2014 through December 2018, with reported compensation rising from $60,000 for FY2014 to$82,600 for FY2017 and recorded as $0 for FY2018. Nana Gyamfi appears in the FY2018 return as a paid board member and from FY2019 onward as executive director, which dates the transition.

Tometi’s own biography describes the role differently, as “eight years as Executive Director,” a post she says she took at the age of 27 as BAJI’s first woman director. The digitized filings cannot corroborate the years before FY2014. She describes her work there as including family reunification after the 2010 Haiti earthquake and challenging deportations, and says she has spoken on behalf of immigrants at the United Nations, at congressional briefings and on the TED stage.

Founding of #BlackLivesMatter

The most direct first-party account of the movement’s origin is Alicia Garza’s essay “A Herstory of the #BlackLivesMatter Movement,” published in The Feminist Wire on 7 October 2014. Garza opens it: “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 for the crime he committed.” She describes the work that followed collectively: “Opal, Patrisse, and I created the infrastructure for this movement project—moving the hashtag from social media to the streets.”

Tometi describes her own contribution as the online side of that infrastructure: her biography states that “in the wake of the devastating acquittal of Trayvon Martin’s killer, Ayọ initiated the Black Lives Matter online infrastructure in 2013.” The .com registry’s record for blacklivesmatter.com dates the domain’s registration to 17 July 2013; the registry entry carries no registrant name.

Garza’s essay also settles a point this page previously got wrong. The Black Lives Matter ride organized after Michael Brown was killed by Ferguson police officer Darren Wilson was, in Garza’s words, “led and designed by Patrisse Cullors and Darnell L. Moore.” Garza does not attribute it to Tometi.

Later Work and Name

On 1 October 2021, Nigerian Independence Day, Tometi announced that she was changing her name from Opal to Ayọ, a derivative of her middle name that means joy in Yoruba. She has since worked through Diaspora Rising, a media and advocacy platform she founded that focuses on issues affecting Black communities globally.

Recognition

TIME named Cullors, Garza and Tometi to its 100 Most Influential People of 2020, in an entry written by Sybrina Fulton, founder of the Trayvon Martin Foundation. TIME’s “100 Women of the Year” project, published in March 2020, assigned the three of them the year 2013. The University of Arizona’s alumni magazine records an honorary doctorate from Clarkson University, a Glamour Woman of the Year designation in 2016, inclusion with her BLM partners on a Fortune list of top world leaders, and her being featured in the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture.

The 2017 Sydney Peace Prize was awarded to the Black Lives Matter Global Network as an organization; the Sydney Peace Foundation’s record shows it was accepted at Sydney Town Hall on 2 November 2017 by Patrisse Cullors together with Rodney Diverlus and Dawn Modkins. Tometi’s own site lists the prize among her recognitions, but she was not among those who accepted it.

What Is Not Established Here

This audit removed a substantial amount of the previous page.

The specific mechanics of the “digital infrastructure” claim came off. No source reached in this pass establishes that Tometi personally registered blacklivesmatter.com, or that she created the movement’s Facebook, Tumblr and Twitter accounts. The registry record fixes the domain’s creation date but not its registrant; Garza’s essay credits the infrastructure work to all three co-founders; and Tometi’s own site claims only that she “initiated the Black Lives Matter online infrastructure.” The former connections entries asserting that she “created the original Black Lives Matter Twitter account” and “established the Black Lives Matter Facebook presence” were deleted for the same reason.

The Freedom Ride passage was factually wrong and is gone. The page said Tometi organized it and mobilized “approximately 500 community activists.” Garza’s contemporaneous account names Cullors and Darnell L. Moore as the ride’s leaders and designers, and no source found here supports the 500 figure.

Two whole sections were cut as unsupported editorializing rather than fact: the “Digital Organizing Strategy” section, which asserted a deliberate platform-by-platform division of labour (Twitter for rapid response, Facebook for community building, Tumblr for stories) and claimed subsequent movements adopted it, and the closing “Digital Political Impact” list, which restated the same unsourced claims as conclusions.

The December 2015 Venezuela election observation section was removed. The trip is widely asserted online, but everything this audit could reach on it was either advocacy writing or partisan commentary; no first-party record — no Venezuelan electoral-council accreditation list, no statement from Tometi or from the delegation — was obtainable. Because this concerns a living person and a politically charged episode, the claim is omitted rather than sourced to weak material. It is a genuine gap, not a judgement that the trip did not happen.

Details corrected rather than removed: the degree is a Bachelor of Arts in history, not “History and Communications”; the master’s degree is real by her own account but the Arizona State University attribution and the 2010 date had no source and are gone; “over nine years” at BAJI is replaced by what the IRS filings actually show plus her own “eight years” claim, flagged as unreconciled; and the Sydney Peace Prize is correctly attributed to the BLM Global Network rather than to her.

Also removed: the followerCount field (“139,000+ on Instagram”), because Instagram serves nothing to automated clients and a stale figure is worse than none; the assertion that she “has supported organizations including the Pan African Network in Defense of Migrant Rights and the Black Immigration Network,” for which no source was found; and the claim of a 2021 Nobel Peace Prize nomination, which appears on her own awards list — Nobel nominations are sealed for fifty years, so no confirming record exists.

The birth year 1984 is retained but weakly held: the only record located is the Library of Congress name-authority file, which itself cites Wikipedia for the date.