Patrisse Cullors

Patrisse Cullors is an organizer, artist and author. Alicia Garza’s 2014 account names Cullors as one of the three people who created #BlackLivesMatter in 2013, alongside Garza and Opal Tometi. Cullors founded the Los Angeles organization Dignity and Power Now, and served as executive director of the Black Lives Matter Global Network Foundation until May 2021.

The Library of Congress name authority file records her birth year as 1983 and her birthplace as Los Angeles, California; the biography cited in that record gives 20 June 1983, in Van Nuys.

Dignity and Power Now

Dignity and Power Now describes itself as founded in 2012 by Cullors, and states its mission as building “a movement rooted in community power to bring about a future where our people are truly free: free from cages, free from trauma, and free to thrive.” By its own account, the organization’s origin lies in Cullors reading an 86-page ACLU report on abuse inside the Los Angeles County jails in 2011, and creating the performance piece STAINED in response.

#BlackLivesMatter

Garza’s essay of 7 October 2014 is the earliest first-person account of the hashtag’s creation: “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 Sydney Peace Foundation’s account divides the work more specifically: Garza wrote the original Facebook post, Cullors made the phrase a hashtag, and Tometi built the website and social media presence.

Garza’s essay also credits Cullors with a specific piece of organizing after the killing of Michael Brown: “Our team grew through a very successful Black Lives Matter ride, led and designed by Patrisse Cullors and Darnell L. Moore.”

Sydney Peace Prize

The 2017 Sydney Peace Prize was awarded to the Black Lives Matter Global Network, not to any individual. The jury citation read: “For building a powerful movement for racial equality, courageously reigniting a global conversation around state violence and racism. And for harnessing the potential of new platforms and power of people to inspire a bold movement for change at a time when peace is threatened by growing inequality and injustice.” Cullors accepted it on the network’s behalf at Sydney Town Hall on 2 November 2017, together with Rodney Diverlus and Dawn Modkins.

The Foundation and Its Filings

The Black Lives Matter Global Network Foundation files with the IRS as Black Lives Matter Foundation, Inc. (EIN 82-4862489), and has been recognized as tax-exempt since December 2020. It is distinct from an unrelated organization of a similar name in Santa Clarita, California (EIN 47-4143254), which files its own, much smaller returns.

The foundation’s return for the fiscal year ending June 2021 — the year of Cullors’s full-time tenure — reports revenue of $79,644,823, of which$76,872,002 was contributions; expenses of $37,710,135; and net assets of$41,934,688 at year end. Its Key Employees and Officers table lists two names: Kailee Scales, former managing director, at $139,625, and Patrisse Cullors, “Founder & Executive Director,” with zero reported compensation, zero related compensation and zero other compensation. That return also answers yes to the questions on excess benefit transactions, first-class or charter travel, and conflict-of-interest transactions reportable on Schedule L. Cullors does not appear in the officer tables for the following three fiscal years.

Separately, the foundation told the Associated Press in February 2021 that it had taken in just over $90 million during 2020 and ended the year with more than$60 million on hand. In April 2021, responding to allegations that foundation money had funded personal property purchases, it stated that Cullors was a volunteer executive director who, prior to 2019, had “received a total of $120,000 since the organization’s inception in 2013, for duties such as serving as spokesperson and engaging in political education work,” and that as a 501(c)(3) it “cannot and did not commit any organizational resources toward the purchase of personal property by any employee or volunteer.”

Departure, May 2021

Cullors announced on 27 May 2021 that she was stepping down as executive director, with her last day the following day. She told the AP she was leaving to focus on her second book and a television development deal, and that the decision had been in preparation for more than a year: “I’ve created the infrastructure and the support, and the necessary bones and foundation, so that I can leave. It feels like the time is right.” Monifa Bandele and Makani Themba were named interim senior executives. In the same reporting, a group of organizers styling itself the #BLM10 was described as having publicly criticized the foundation over funding and transparency.

The AP account also records that the foundation spun its chapter network off as a separate collective, BLM Grassroots, in 2020, and that Melina Abdullah and Cullors co-founded the movement’s first official chapter, in Los Angeles.

Books and Television

When They Call You a Terrorist: A Black Lives Matter Memoir was published in 2018, credited on its title page to Patrisse Khan-Cullors and asha bandele. An Abolitionist’s Handbook followed from St. Martin’s Press, released on 5 October 2021.

In October 2020, Warner Bros. Television Group announced an exclusive multi-year overall deal with Cullors — her first with the studio and her first studio overall agreement — covering scripted drama and comedy, longform and event series, unscripted docuseries, animated programming and original digital content. Cullors said her work behind the camera “will be an extension of the work I’ve been doing for the last twenty years.”

Digital Political Impact

• The creation of #BlackLivesMatter is unusually well documented for a hashtag: one of the three creators published a first-person account of it within fifteen months, naming Cullors’s specific contribution
• The 2017 Sydney Peace Prize was awarded to a network rather than an individual, which is itself a marker of how the movement was structured and understood
• The FY2021 IRS return is a rare case of a hashtag-originated movement’s finances entering the public record at scale — roughly $80 million of revenue in a single year — and it is the document that the argument over the foundation’s money has been conducted around

What Is Not Established Here

Removed in the citation audit for want of a source meeting this project’s standard: the Instagram follower figure of “300,000+” (Instagram does not serve automated requests, so no current figure is obtainable, and a stale one is worse than none); the claim that Cullors became involved in community organizing as a teenager; that she “also worked on issues related to LGBTQ rights and prison abolition,” stated in that unsourced form; the assertion that she became executive director specifically in July 2020, which no source consulted here dates that precisely — the AP places it in 2020 and the FY2021 return covers July 2020 to June 2021; the claim that the three co-founders together “established the Black Lives Matter Network as a decentralized, grassroots organizing platform”; the general “Movement Growth (2014–2016)” narrative about chapters and Ferguson coordination, none of which was tied to Cullors by a source; the description of her as a performance artist involved in unspecified “multimedia art projects exploring themes of abolition, identity, and social justice”; and the list of generic claims about her “digital organizing approach” (cross-platform engagement, hashtags as unifying symbols, integration of digital tools with traditional organizing), which were assertions about method rather than documented facts.

Corrected: An Abolitionist’s Handbook was published in 2021, not 2022; When They Call You a Terrorist was co-authored with asha bandele, which the page omitted; and the 2017 Sydney Peace Prize went to the Black Lives Matter Global Network, which Cullors accepted with Rodney Diverlus and Dawn Modkins — it was not an individual award.

Not established either way: what the excess benefit transaction, charter travel and Schedule L conflict-of-interest answers on the FY2021 return refer to. ProPublica’s rendered-filing and XML endpoints refuse automated clients, so only the summary answers were readable. This page states the checkbox answers and nothing more; the widely circulated claims about Cullors’s personal finances are not adjudicated here, and the only figures given are the foundation’s own filed numbers and its own public statement.