Tamika Mallory

Tamika Danielle Mallory (born September 4, 1980 ) is an American activist.

Her son's father, Jason Ryans, was murdered in 2001.

Mallory explains that her experience with NAN taught her to react to this tragedy with activism.

Her son is a member of NAN.

Mallory became a staff member of NAN when she was 15 years old and later was named its executive director in 2009.

Mallory is a single mother to her son Tarique.

Mallory went on to become the youngest Executive Director at NAN in 2011.

After working at NAN for 14 years, Mallory stepped down from her position as executive director in 2013 to follow her own activism goals, but still takes part in NAN's work, attending rallies and recruiting members.

In 2014, Mallory was selected to serve on the transition committee of New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio.

During that time, she helped create the NYC Crisis Management System, an official gun violence prevention program that awards $20 million annually to gun violence prevention organizations.

She also served as the co-chair for a new initiative through the Crisis Management System, Gun Violence Awareness Month.

Mallory is the president of Mallory Consulting, a strategic planning and event management firm in New York City.

She is on the board of directors for Gathering for Justice, an organization aimed at ending child incarceration and working to eliminate policies that produce mass incarceration.

She was one of the leading organizers of the 2017 Women's March, for which she and her three other co-chairs were recognized in the TIME 100 that year.

Mallory, Bob Bland, Carmen Perez, and Linda Sarsour organized the 2017 Women's March, a worldwide protest on January 21, 2017.

The march was a protest against the inauguration of U.S. President Donald Trump, and also advocated women's rights, immigration reform, LGBTQIA rights, health-care reform, environmental reform, racial justice, and racial equality.

The leaders of the Women's March mobilized in Washington, D.C., and sister marches occurred worldwide.

An estimated 500,000 people attended the Washington, D.C., march.

The Women's March website said that total worldwide participation was nearly five million.

According to The Independent, the march may have been the largest single-day protest in U.S. history.

Sarsour, Mallory, Bland, and Perez were recognized in the TIME 100 of 2017.

The Women's March idea formed after Trump's election.

A grandmother in Hawaii, Teresa Shook, created a Facebook event for a march in Washington, D.C., following the inauguration.

Meanwhile, Bob Bland, a mother living in New York City, also created an event.

Within a single day hundreds of thousands of individuals were "attending" the march's Facebook event.

The surge of interest catalyzed the organizing that led to the 2017 Women's March.

Bland's and Shook's events were merged.

She received the Coretta Scott King Legacy Award from the Coretta Scott King Center for Cultural and Intellectual Freedom in 2018.

Mallory is a proponent of gun control, feminism, and the Black Lives Matter movement.

Mallory was born in Harlem, a neighborhood of New York City's Manhattan borough, to Stanley and Voncile Mallory.

She grew up in the Manhattanville Houses in Manhattan and moved to Co-op City in the Bronx when she was 14.

Her parents were activists and founding members of Reverend Al Sharpton's National Action Network (NAN), a leading civil rights organization throughout the United States.

Their work in NAN influenced Mallory and her interests in social justice and civil rights.

In 2018, Mallory drew criticism for her attendance at an event with, and past praise for, controversial Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan, which prompted calls for her resignation from the 2019 Women's March.

In 2018, Mallory criticized Starbucks for including the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), an organization whose stated mission is to "fight anti-Semitism and all forms of hate", in a company-wide racial bias training after the arrest of two black men at a Starbucks in Philadelphia.

In a tweet, she accused the ADL of "attack[ing] black and brown people" and wrote, "ADL sends US police to Israel to learn their military practices. This is deeply troubling. Let’s not even talk abt their attacks against .@blacklivesmatter."

Starbucks subsequently dropped the ADL from its anti-bias training, a decision Liel Leibovitz of Tablet said was "giving in to bigotry."

Following later allegations of antisemitism, Mallory left the organization in September 2019.

At age 11, Mallory became a member of NAN to learn more about the Civil Rights Movement.

By the time Mallory turned 15, she was a volunteer staff member at NAN.