blk.JPG
Opal Tometi, left, Alicia Garza talk about the creation of #BlackLivesMatter at Hampshire College Monday. The two along with Patrisse Cullors founded the movement.
(Diane Lederman/The Republican)
AMHERST - The three women who created the #BlackLivesMatter movement have long histories in inspiring change and were moved to create the movement because of sadness and frustration following the Trayvon Martin verdict.
Patrisse Cullors, Alicia Garza, and Opal Tometi spoke for more than an hour before more than 1,000 at Hampshire College Monday afternoon in the annual Eqbal Ahmad Lecture. Students, faculty, community people attended.
The women questions from each other and a moderator.
The three talked about their years of work prior to the movement and how it came to be. Garza and Cullors had known each other for about 15 years, Garza said and Garza knew Tometi.
Cullors, founder of Dignity and Power Now dedicated to protecting incarcerated people, got involved in the prison and sheriff's department in Los Angeles after her brother was beaten and left in a pool of his own blood. Her parents couldn't locate him in the system.
Garza, the daughter and granddaughter of domestic workers, talked about how domestic work "was really black women's work rooted in legacy of slavery."
The special projects director for the National Domestic Workers Alliance said neither domestic nor agricultural workers are protected by federal labor laws but four states have adopted their own protections including Massachusetts.
Tometi, a Nigerian-American and the daughter of undocumented Nigerian parents, is the executive director of the Black Alliance for Just Immigration.
She said there is "a blind spot in the immigration movement" when it comes to black people. She said the "forces of global capitalism it's forcing them to migrate.
From our standpoint, it's important for us to see the way the West is complicit in migration (and to) understand the role of white supremacy in creating type of caste system."
So within the context of their work, Garza said she was trying to understand what happened with the Trayvon Martin case after George Zimmerman was found not guilty using the stand your ground defense.
"On the one hand a child was murdered, and the family was grappling with that and the freedom of his killer. The system doesn't work for us," she said, meaning black people.
The traditional litany is "that's why we need to vote. That's why we need to have our kids pull their pants up."
But she said it doesn't matter how many degrees a black person has or "if you pull your pants up or not. Ultimately black lives don't matter in this country."
She said following the verdict she said black people couldn't look at each other and she say a "hyper vulnerability."
She started writing a love note to black people. "We didn't create these conditions." Black people shouldn't feel shame. "Our lives matter and black lives matter."
Cullors came up with the hash tag idea and with Tometi created a "platform where people can engage."
Tometi had just seen the film "Fruitvale Station" based on the true story of Oscar Grant who was shot and killed by Bay Area Rapid Transit police in 2008.
She said she and her friend, also an organizer, had all kinds of messages following the verdict as they were leaving the theater.
She heard the phrase "black lives matter."
And as "a rhetorician by trade" she understood that "this is our new ideology. We need to articulate to society... We need to name anti-black racism that's happening.
"We need to build up the infrastructure that people across the country can engage (in.) "We need to provide more avenues for people to get plugged in."
Garza said that people have said to that all lives matter not just black lives. And she agrees but said, "We're not talking about a utopia." And she said when black lives matter all lives will matter. "We're going to fight like hell for black lives."