Patrisse Cullors

Patrisse Marie Khan-Cullors Brignac (née Cullors-Brignac; born June 20, 1983) is an American activist, co-founder of the Black Lives Matter movement, artist and writer.

Her brother, Monte was arrested in 1999 after stealing his mother's car.

Later he was diagnosed with schizoaffective disorder and bipolar disorder.

Cullors recalled that in a fight with prison officers, he was allegedly choked, beaten up brutally, and was forced to drink toilet water.

She has cited this as one of the reasons for her activism.

Cullors grew up in a Section 8 apartment in Van Nuys, a poor and largely Mexican-American neighborhood in the San Fernando Valley.

Her step-father Alton eventually left his family, leaving Cherice to raise her kids on her own.

Cullors said that she witnessed her 11 and 13-year-old brothers being needlessly slammed into a wall by police when she was 9 years old.

At the age of 12, she was arrested for smoking marijuana.

At this time, she was a student at Millikan Middle School, an affluent school in Sherman Oaks which had a large white student body and a population of gifted students.

Cullors describes that she felt ashamed going there with her mother in a car.

She also states that it was the white girls at the school who introduced her to weed.

However, when she was arrested, she was attending the Van Nuys Middle School, a school consisting mostly of children of working-class families and non-whites, as part of summer school, due to her poor grades.

For her, the transition was a shock, as the school had a metal detector and was guarded by police unlike her other school.

Cullors became an activist early in life, joining the Bus Riders Union (BRU) under the leadership of Eric Mann as a teenager during which time she attended a year-long organizing program led by the Labor Community Strategy Center (which organized the BRU).

She learned about revolutionaries, critical theory and social movements from around the world, while practicing activism.

Cullors also enrolled at Grover Cleveland High School (now Cleveland Humanities Magnet) in Reseda and was admitted into its social justice magnet program.

She went onto acquire a degree in religion and philosophy at UCLA, as well as a MFA from the Roski School of Art and Design at the University of Southern California.

Cullors recalled being forced from her home at sixteen when she revealed her queer identity to her parents.

Raised as a Jehovah's Witness, but due to her mother's teenage pregnancy, Cullors' immediate family was shunned by both the church and their extended family members; she remained committed to the faith for years, even in exile, but later grew disillusioned with the church.

She developed an interest in the Nigerian religious tradition of Ifá, incorporating its rituals into political protest events.

Gabriel was a repeat offender who was jailed many times on drugs-related charges and died in 2009 in a homeless shelter.

Cullors described him as having a constant and caring presence in her life.

Cullors created the hashtag in 2013 and has written and spoken widely about the movement.

Other topics on which Cullors advocates include prison abolition in Los Angeles and LGBTQ rights.

Cullors integrates ideas from critical theory, as well as from social movements around the world, in her activism.

Cullors has had two books published.

Cullors was born in Los Angeles, California.

Her mother Cherice Foley is a Jehovah's Witness.

Her biological father was Gabriel Brignac, whom she did not meet until she was eleven years old.

She was raised in the home of Alton Cullors, who used to work at a General Motors plant in Van Nuys before it was shut down, forcing him to work in low-paying jobs.

She has three siblings — two brothers named Paul and Monte, and a sister named Jasmine.

Cullors created the hashtag in 2013 to corroborate Garza's use of the phrase in making a Facebook post about the Martin case.

Cullors further described her impetus for pushing for African-American rights stemming from her 19-year-old brother's brutalization during imprisonment in Los Angeles County jails.

She told an interviewer in 2015 that "seeking spirituality had a lot to do with trying to seek understanding about my conditions—how these conditions shape me in my everyday life and how I understand them as part of a larger fight, a fight for my life."

Cullors teaches at Otis College of Art and Design in the Public Practice Program.

She also teaches in the Master's Arts in Social Justice and Community Organizing at Prescott College.

Along with community organizers and friends Alicia Garza and Opal Tometi, Cullors founded Black Lives Matter.

The three started the movement out of frustration over George Zimmerman's acquittal in the killing of Trayvon Martin.

Cullors and her BLM co-founders, Garza and Tometi, set out to build a decentralized movement governed by consensus of a members' collective and in 2015, a network of chapters was formed.