“Black lives matter — I get it now,” my aunt declared in 2020. “You’ve been saying it for years.” Yes, I told her. I have.
It shouldn’t have taken the video-recorded police murder of an innocent Minneapolis man for my relatives to realize Black lives matter, too. But, ironically, for many Americans, watching Derek Chauvin kneel on the neck of George Floyd, suffocating him to death, was an awakening. It wasn’t the first time in recent years a Black man had begged for life, squeezing “I can’t breathe” out of his closing airways. It wasn’t the first time a Black man had been killed on screen, either. But it was the first time in my adult life that blocs of war veterans, white moms and masked anti-fascists marched alongside and protected the Black organizers and protesters for whom the Floyd murder was nothing new.
Black Lives Matter was not founded in response to the three to six-plus people cops killed per day in 2020 or 2019. Nor was it created to coordinate protests in honor of Floyd. Or, for that matter, to collect donations to use for nefarious purposes.
Black Lives Matter, the organization, was launched by a small group of dedicated Black women activists nearly a decade before Floyd made national news — on July 13, 2013, the day we all heard the not-guilty verdict for George Zimmerman, who killed teenager Travyon Martin in cold blood the previous year.
“There was an intuitive uprising that took place all around the country, with thousands and thousands of us in the streets,” said Dr. Melina Abdullah, who co-founded BLM-LA, BLM Grassroots, and the original national Black Lives Matter organization. “Here, we shut down LA. It was the first freeway shutdown!”
When George Floyd was murdered, BLM had already been organizing for seven years across the United States.
“Trayvon Martin was a 17-year-old boy doing exactly what a 17-year-old boy should be doing, going to the store to pick up snacks so he and his dad could watch a basketball game, right,” asked Dr. Abdullah. “He was simply walking home. He was stalked, he was targeted, and he was ultimately attacked and murdered by someone who identified as white, who was a wannabe cop and neighborhood watchman.”
Indeed, “outside of his own mind,” Zimmerman “was neither of those things.” Yet, he felt empowered to ‘take the law into his own hands;’ the jury felt free to let him off; and white supremacists everywhere celebrated what they thought his freedom meant for them: they could all play Punisher with impunity. (Ahmaud Arbery would later become a victim of this type of ‘vigilante justice.’)
Among the Dream Defenders, HBCU student activists and other Black organizers who tirelessly fought for even the arrest of George Zimmerman, there was hope that in this instance there might be “some semblance of justice.” As Dr. Abdullah told me, “A lot of us had been involved in the movements for justice for Oscar Grant, Sean Bell, Amadou Diallo, and others, and thought the Zimmerman case would be different.”
Unlike the killers of Grant, Bell and Diallo, Zimmerman wasn’t actually a cop — and, while he may be “white in his own mind, his mama is Peruvian, and he’s a little too brown to get all the privileges of whiteness,” said Dr. Abdullah. So, when the Hispanic/Latino civilian was found not guilty of killing a teenage Black boy, it became perhaps more clear than ever before: “Black life means nothing in this country.”
Hence the name, Black Lives Matter.
“I was in the streets with my students and my children, and on the third day of protest I was reached out to by a sister that I had organized with,” explained Dr. Abdullah. “Patrisse Cullors initiated a text message that said to meet that night at the Black artist community where she was living.”
Meanwhile, Alicia Garza, an organizer for domestic workers in Oakland, CA, had begun sharing “A Love Letter to Black People” across posts on Facebook; in her final post in the series she wrote, “Black people. I love you. I Love us. Our lives matter.” Cullors, an artist and activist from Los Angeles, CA, responded to Garza’s post with “#BlackLivesMatter.” From here, BLM was born. And, with BLM, so too was this generation’s first “sustainable movement designed to end state-sanctioned violence against Black people.”
As Dr. Abdullah put it, “this was the first time we would not simply organize uprisings in others’ names but all come together to ask, ‘What does this movement look like?’”
Although the hashtag would take some time to catch on (in the second half of 2013, the hashtag appeared on Twitter 5,106 times), the movement behind it already had. BLM-LA was formed as the first local chapter, with a Bay Area chapter following close behind. Within a year, the organization had 26 chapters across the country. And when 18-year-old Mike Brown was killed by white police officer Darren Wilson in Ferguson, MO, on August 4, 2014, and left for dead in the streets for four hours, BLM was prepared.
The event had been documented by bystanders with mobile phones, and the news spread quickly across social media. Local organizers were already out in force, and activists nationwide were arriving in droves. So, with the goal of further “moving the hashtag from social media to the streets,” the founding members of BLM organized the Black Lives Matter Freedom Ride to St. Louis — “in the spirit of the early 1960s interstate Freedom Riders in the racially segregated south.”
Of course, like Zimmerman, Wilson wouldn’t face consequences, in spite of all the protests. The jury’s decision not to charge the cop with the young man’s murder did, however, expand the reach of Black Lives Matter. The hashtag, and the organization.
In the three weeks following the jury decision not to indict Wilson, the #BlackLivesMatter hashtag was used 1.7 million times. Donations to the organization also took off.
Fast-forward to 2020, “when the world cracked open” and “we saw Derek Chauvin grind his knee into George Floyd’s neck, and couldn’t take our eyes away.” As Dr. Abdullah told me, one of the reasons this sparked “a massive uprising” was because “we’d been building by then for seven years, and there was already a movement to meet that moment.”
Indeed, by 2020, BLM had grown to 40 chapters in and outside the United States, bound by a shared mission and guiding principles — but not by any legal corporate or nonprofit structure.
Dr. Abdullah, one of the founders responsible for coordinating the chapters, is a single mother and public educator, a professor who “barely” earns a living wage; in the early years, she and her cohorts funded BLM on their own, “digging into our own pockets.” In our recent conversation, Dr. Abdullah recounted being able to pay for $1 burritos for their meetings, and benefiting at large demonstrations from a white ally who’d bring big pots of beans so activists could eat.
“We paid for the movement, the movement did not pay us,” Dr. Abdullah told me. “We had our first Movement for Black Lives convening, so I called my girl, who was the head of SEIU, and I asked, ‘Can y’all pay for a bus,’ and they paid for a bus; I went to grad school with a bunch of football players, and I hit up one of the football players, and that’s how we got lunches on the bus. That’s how we did stuff. Nobody had money. There were no grants, there was no nothing.”
Nevertheless, BLM pushed on.
In 2016, the organization hired its first staff, using donations from Tidal and The Weeknd. This is when the monetary disagreements began. According to Dr. Abdullah, some wanted more arts in the movement, others recommended social workers and therapists, and still others sought increased investments in on-the-ground, street-level activism.
“We had many long conversations, and every chapter was founded with the same guiding principles and mission,” said Dr. Abdullah, “but each chapter had its own autonomy.”
From the ongoing conversations about the organization’s direction, it was decided that Ms. Cullors, one of the original founders, would continue to manage the institution that she’d incorporated, Black Lives Matter Global Network Foundation, while Dr. Abdullah would “usher the chapters through Black Lives Matter-Grassroots.”
BLM-Grassroots was focused on the work on the ground. Likewise for the chapter Dr. Abdullah founded, BLM in Los Angeles, or BLM-LA.
Yet, there remained a single website for the organization, and Dr. Abdullah continued to find time to manage the social media accounts and send email blasts, pro-bono, in between protests and other events. Until Ms. Cullors brought in her consultant.
“At the same time that Patrisse [Cullors] did that, you have to remember we’re out doing this incredible work,” said Dr. Abdullah. “It’s blowing up, and we never imagined that millions would now be chanting ‘defund the police’ and ‘Black lives matter!”
Certain BLM founders weren’t prepared for the response from the opposition, either. “The right wing, the police, and white people, by and large, hated that shit,” Dr. Abdullah recalled. And so began “the full-scale attack” on her and Ms. Cullors, who, as Dr. Abdullah put it, “bore the brunt of it.”
White supremacists blocked Dr. Abdullah’s driveway with their mobile homes. Her house was swatted, leaving her and her three children surrounded by police three separate times. She was attacked in parking lots, and threatened with a gun by the spouse of a public figure. And Dr. Abdullah, a Gen-Xer, a member of the Hip Hop generation from East Oakland, “didn’t like it,” but she’d been through it before.
Ms. Cullors, a Millennial, on the other hand, didn’t know how to overcome the public, racist, violent onslaught. It affected her mental health, and Dr. Abdullah was calling her every morning “just to make sure she was breathing.” Until finally Ms. Cullors decided she had to “step back.”
Ms. Cullors sent an email suggesting BLM leadership “transition all of the resources over to Black Lives Matter-Grassroots to fund the work on the ground,” Dr. Abdullah told me. “That’s how we were moving, and what we thought would happen until March 2022, when I got a call from the consultant.”
The consultant, Shalomyah Bowers, told her, “I intend to keep Black Lives Matter, indefinitely, and I’m not going to give you anything.”
Born Christman Bowers, he is the founder and director of Bowers Consulting Firm, a for-profit consulting group. And he lived up to his word. Bowers had spoken of building a board of people “he could trust,” and indeed hired two inexperienced consultants, Cicley Gay and D’Zhane Parker, whom “he calls ‘the board.’”
These consultants, like Bowers, were never fit for the role, according to Dr. Abdullah. Not only weren’t they prepared for the scope or gravity of the work, their views never aligned with those of the founding members.
“We have pictures of her wearing T-shirts that say, ‘I’m billing you for this conversation,” Dr. Abdullah said about Ms. Gay. “Is that the right kind of person for the job!?”
And yet the threesome remains solely responsible for the now-billions of dollars donated to Black Lives Matter since its founding. “The three of them wrestled away all the money. They are making all the decisions for the organization. They signed us out of all the social media accounts. And they have our good name. They stole it from us,” Dr. Abdullah said.
They helped the white supremacists change the narrative.
Before all the right-wing and mainstream media exposés and hit pieces on the organization’s finances, nobody, well-intentioned, questioned the integrity of the Black Lives Matter movement. And rightfully so. The original organizers “were principled, and fought for Black people,” and while “you might not have liked [their] tactics,” they were not “going to buy plastic surgery, on the people.”
It was the new board that did that. And the original BLM leaders “went to [Cicley Gay’s] house to demand she return the money.”
She didn’t. They sued. And lost.
“Since they basically have all the money in the world, they’re able to buy people off, buy organizations off, and hand out checks,” said Dr. Abdullah. Meanwhile, “if you look at their social media, Cicley Gay is having what she called a ‘soft girl summer.’ They’re vacationing on Martha’s Vineyard, buying mansions, and getting VIP tickets for InvestFest. Shalomyah Bowers is vacationing in Israel… So, this is what they’re doing with our resources.”
Resources derived not only from celebrity gifts but from millions of small donations, many from people directly impacted by police violence, like Dr. Abdullah’s mom.
“My mother, a retired elementary school teacher, a single mom who never had a whole lot of money, is one of the people who donated the few dollars that she had to build the movement,” Dr. Abdullah told me. “And they stole it. They stole it from her. They stole it from me, from you, and they stole it in our names.”
This is why 10 local BLM chapters publicly split from the national organization in 2020, and the dozens of BLM chapters today act separately from the Bowers-led organization and in coordination with Black Lives Matter-Grassroots, the on-the-ground organizing group led by Dr. Abdullah.
As of this writing, there are 39 local chapters, four state chapters, and two prison chapters, representing every region of the country, all under the BLM-Grassroots umbrella, with 22 more chapters currently onboarding.
“We want our money back, we want our platforms back, we want our name back,” said Dr. Abdullah. “But none of that is going to slow us down in the fight for Black lives, freedom, and liberation.”
