Alicia Garza

Alicia Garza ( Schwartz; born January 4, 1981) is an American civil rights activist and writer known for co-founding the Black Lives Matter movement.

She is a recognized advocate for social and racial justice, with a particular focus on issues affecting marginalized communities, including Black women, LGBTQ+ people, and immigrants.

Garza is also a writer and public speaker.

She has written extensively on issues related to race, gender, and social justice, and her work has appeared in numerous publications.

Her editorial writing has been published by Time, Mic, Marie Claire, Elle, Essence, The Guardian, The Nation, The Feminist Wire, Rolling Stone, HuffPost, and Truthout.

Garza has worked with organizations such as the National Domestic Workers Alliance and the Black Futures Lab, which focuses on building political power for Black communities.

She has also engaged in community organizing efforts and initiatives aimed at creating systemic change and challenging inequality.

Garza has served as a board member of Forward Together's Oakland branch, Black Organizing for Leadership and Dignity, and Oakland's School of Unity and Liberation/SOUL.

Garza was born to a single mother in Oakland, California, on January 4, 1981.

Her first four years were spent in San Rafael, living with her African-American mother and her mother's twin brother.

After that she lived with her mother and her Jewish stepfather, and grew up as Alicia Schwartz in a mixed-race and mixed-religion household.

Garza identifies as Jewish.

The family lived first in San Rafael and then Tiburon, and ran an antiques business, assisted later by her brother Joey, eight years her junior.

When she was 12 years old, Alicia engaged in activism, promoting school sex education about birth control.

Enrolling in the University of California, San Diego (UCSD), she continued her activism by working at the student health center and joining the student association calling for higher pay for the university's janitors.

In her final year at college, she helped organize the first Women of Color Conference, a university-wide convocation held at UCSD in 2002.

She graduated in 2002 with a degree in anthropology and sociology.

In 2003 Garza returned to the Bay Area, where she began a training program in political education with the School of Unity and Liberation (SOUL) that taught young people of color how to organize, by placing them with local community based organizations in West Oakland.

Garza began working with Just Cause Oakland.

Completing her internship at SOUL, Garza joined a campaign that researched the relationship between increasing economic security for People Of Color, and increased community security.

Her initial project with PUEBLO was to gather community resistance in East Oakland against a proposed Walmart.

Despite the effort, the first Walmart in that area opened in 2005.

After leaving PUEBLO, Garza began working with the UC Student Association for a year promoting activism to university students.

In 2005 she joined People Organized to Win Employment Rights (POWER) in Bayview–Hunters Point.

POWER is a "multi-racial and multi-lingual grassroots organization of African Americans and Latinas committed to winning economic, environmental, racial, and gender justice. Rooted in issues-based campaigns, leadership development and movement building, POWER builds the collective strength of working-class families to control the destinies of their communities and workplaces."

She advocated for increasing funding for accessible public housing and maintenance, in order to assist homeowners in moving underground power lines.

This was a $7 billion task to transform 250 acres of land, including the contaminated area with radioactivity, toward the area of the Bayview least served by public transportation.

Free transit for young people was approved, and expanded to seniors and people with disabilities.

The same year, POWER organizers published a book analyzing how capitalism and imperialism threatened the livelihoods of San Francisco and the Bay Area's working-class communities of color.

In opposition to the changes they saw in their communities, POWER formed a coalition between other groups against the project's developer, Lennar.

With Gavin Newsom, much of the Democratic Party establishment and Lennar opposing them, POWER lost.

As a result, the respective ballot initiative, Proposition F lost, 37 percent to 63 percent.

Following a brief sabbatical, Garza joined the National Domestic Workers Alliance, creating a program focused on Black domestic workers.

Shortly before that, she founded Black Lives Matter with Patrisse Cullors and Opal Tometi.

With Opal Tometi and Patrisse Cullors, Garza birthed the Black Lives Matter hashtag.

She is credited with inspiring the slogan when, after the July 2013 acquittal of George Zimmerman of murder in the death of Trayvon Martin, she posted on Facebook: "I continue to be surprised at how little Black lives matter... Our lives matter."

Cullors shared this with the hashtag #BlackLivesMatter.

She was also struck by the similarities of Trayvon Martin to her younger brother, Joey, feeling that Joey could have been killed instead.

The organization Black Lives Matter was spurred on by the killings of Black people by police, racial disparities within the U.S. criminal legal system, mass incarceration, police militarization, and over-criminalization.

In particular, the movement was born and Garza's post became popularized after protests emerged in Ferguson, Missouri, following the death of Michael Brown.