December 14th, 2024 marks 10 years since the African American Policy Forum (AAPF) and the Center for Intersectionality and Social Policy Studies (CISPS) launched the #SayHerName campaign!

 

After the police killings of Eric Garner and Michael Brown in 2014, thousands gathered to protest anti-Black police brutality that December. We joined the march under a banner with the names of Black women killed by police. While Garner’s and Brown’s deaths justifiably sparked a wave of nationwide protest over lethal police killings, the public silence around Black women demonstrated that the killings of Michelle Cusseaux had yet to be memorialized in widespread activation and denunciation. So, we began chanting “Say! Her! Name!” and the #SayHerName campaign was born to cut through this disturbing reality and resist the invisibility of Black women, girls, and femmes by telling their stories of police violence.

 

The following year, the #SayHerName Mothers Network — a community of mothers and family members of Black women, girls and femmes killed by police violence—was created and brought together to attend the first ever #SayHerName vigil in Union Square. The Mothers Network emerged from the campaign as a recognition of the isolation and “loss of the loss” experienced by the family members. There was an urgent need to redefine a communal care ethic to support family members in the aftermath of police violence, as well as public failure to acknowledge the police killings of their daughters and siblings. 

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Over the course of ten years, this campaign has grown to provide an analytical framework to understand the ways in which Black women, girls, and femmes lives are not only taken by state-sanctioned violence, but then further erased by public silence. In the fight for racial and gender justice, the campaign has created a space built on the tenets of community-informed advocacy, policy change, artivism, and remembrance.   

 

As Black women continue to be vulnerable to police violence, our frameworks to understand this disturbing reality are simultaneously under attack: from the attacks on critical race theory and intersectionality, to the appropriation of #SayHerName by Marjorie Taylor Greene. 

 

Now more than ever, it is important that we not only #SayHerName, we must #TellHerStory and build a community of advocates who will bear witness, educate, amplify, and activate their communities so that we may demand justice in the face of erasure. 

 

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NOTES FROM THE MOVEMENT: PAVING THE ROAD AHEAD 

“Since the creation of the #SayHerName movement we have worked to uncover the neglected stories, give names, faces, and personal histories to disrupt the long-standing pattern of malign neglect in real time and to expand our racial justice movement to hold those impacted by state violence. As we reflect on the past ten years and look to the future, #SayHerName must continue to be a rallying call to action for Black women, girls, and femmes — and racial justice overall. In the face of fascist attempts to dismantle our civil rights infrastructure and erase our histories, #SayHerName remains a critical site of intervention that affirms our mutual obligation to one another, and our unwillingness to accept the minimalization of Black life and the failures of the state to grant justice.”  - Kimberlé Crenshaw