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#BlackLivesMatter may be a recent coinage, but the sentiment has deep roots in African American culture, roots that Garza has inscribed in her skin.
Garza is a consummate organizer. That the words "Black Lives Matter" spread from her personal Facebook account to the front page of The New York Times and to the lips of the president of the United States is a testament to the relationships and skills she built over her decade of organizing in the Bay Area.
In 2014, Garza left POWER and joined the National Domestic Worker's Alliance as a special projects director, planning to kickstart the group's organizing of African American domestic workers, especially in the South.
Black Lives Matter was still a "political project" — not yet a formal organization, and not the social media phenomenon it would become — on Aug. 9, 2014, when the unarmed teenager Michael Brown was shot and killed by police officer Darren Wilson in Ferguson.
After Trayvon Martin's killing, protesters marched under the hashtag #MillionHoodies, a reference to the hooded sweatshirt that pundits like Geraldo Rivera suggested was to blame for Zimmerman's perception of the teenager as a threat. Protesters talking about Ferguson used the hashtags #HandsUpDontShoot or #MikeBrown. The police killing of Eric Garner in Staten Island produced #ICantBreathe.
#BlackLivesMatter became a means of unifying seemingly isolated incidents into a single, affirmative demand: that black life be treated as inherently valuable.
As the protests in Ferguson became an uprising, Garza worked with NDWA to draft a sign-on letter mobilizing feminist support called "Women for Women in Ferguson."
"Often, the way we talk about this is that black men are under attack, which is certainly true. But black women also bear the burden of unjust law enforcement policies," Garza told me a year ago, when we spoke for an interview published in In These Times.
NDWA agreed to send Garza to Ferguson, where she worked with local activists on the ground, with the goal of "building a movement from this moment." She spent two weeks getting to know some of the protesters and local activist organizations, building relationships and assessing the political landscape, before returning home to the Bay Area.
A few weeks later, she returned to Ferguson. Black Lives Matter had taken the next step in its transformation from a hashtag to an organization by mobilizing 600 black activists from around the country to embark on "freedom rides" to Ferguson for a weekend of protests called "Ferguson October."
Garza took on the role of de facto organizing director for a coalition of progressive community organizations adapting to the explosion of political energy. She also helped newly minted activists find their place in the movement, in some cases by forming their own organizations, such as Millennial Activists United.
"My work here is training young organizers to go out into St. Louis and talk with folks about joining the movement — get folks to commit to participating in the Weekend of Resistance as the first step in joining the movement, and figure out if we can build some infrastructure that can be sustained long after this weekend," she told me last year.
Even in the midst of nightly confrontations with the police, Garza was focused on the broader, leftist agenda of Black Lives Matter.
"There are tons and tons of black workers here in St. Louis who work for poverty wages, who live in communities that have been ravaged by poverty and racism," she said. "If we're only organizing people around class issues, we're missing a huge part of people's experiences. Those young people are making the connection between racism, poverty, police violence, and state violence."
Today, Black Lives Matter has grown into a network of 28 chapters, with members across the country meeting locally to organize, protest, and strategize toward a "Black liberation movement" under the banner of BLM. Garza and her co-founders don't direct the actions of local chapters, but they set the national agenda and provide ideological guidance.
In her role as a cofounder and spokesperson, Garza remains committed to ensuring that the ethos of Black Lives Matter doesn't get co-opted by the Democratic Party or by black activists who want to reform policing but balk at more radical action.
"There's a broader movement that is participating in this movement that has a range of politics," Garza says, diplomatically. "I think the one place where the broader movement is unified is around criminalization and anti-black racism."
Part of BLM's goal, then, is to "infuse" that broader movement "with more radical politics" — in part by continuing to put forward an unapologetically anti-capitalist message. Bringing those ideas forward, however, is a challenge that has dogged the left for decades. "If you do it in the way that some folks do it, you're going to lose people, because it seems and feels fringe," she says.
When Black Lives Matter protesters interrupted presidential candidates Bernie Sanders and Martin O'Malley at the Netroots Nation conference — and targeted Sanders again at a rally in Seattle — demanding actionable platforms for racial justice, BLM faced backlash from establishment Democrats who have always taken the black vote for granted, as well as from leftists who suspected the activists of secretly supporting Hillary Clinton.
But that's not the strategy Garza and BLM are pursuing. Sanders, despite his lefty credentials and history of supporting the Civil Rights Movement, isn't nearly as transformative as Garza would like.
When I suggested that Sanders had been talking about socialism on the campaign trail, Garza deadpanned, "Has he?"
"It sounds like he's been talking a lot about being a social democrat, which is still left of where the Democratic Party is, but it's not socialism. It's democratic capitalism," she explains. "There should be more voices saying, 'This is not actually socialism, and socialism is actually possible in our lifetime, and this is what that looks like. What you're talking about is a nicer, more gentle capitalism, and, you know, you still need some work on foreign policy.'"
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