Opal Tometi, one of three co-founders of Black Lives Matter, is taking me back to the birth of a movement that this summer inspired the largest anti-racism protests in half a century. The year was 2013 and, “like everybody else”, she was following the trial of George Zimmerman, who was ultimately acquitted of the murder of an African-American teenager, Trayvon Martin, in Florida. “Watching the case cold broke my heart,” says Tometi. “It hit me particularly hard because my youngest brother was 14 years old at the time.” She feared that something similar could happen to him one day.
“I bawled my eyes out?.?.?.?and then I went online and saw Alicia Garza [whom she had met as part of a leadership programme] had put a Facebook post up, ‘black people I love us, our lives matter’”. Patrisse Cullors, the third co-founder, “put a hashtag in the comments and it was #blacklivesmatter”. After contacting Garza, Tometi bought the domain name BlackLivesMatter.com. “I got us a Facebook page and Twitter and all that” and reached out to other black activists to say, “Why not use this as the umbrella?”
Seven years and one pandemic later, Black Lives Matter has grown into a cause that spans the globe. Does the 35-year-old activist see a connection between America’s experience of coronavirus and the scale of the protests that followed the killing of George Floyd in late May? “There was something really powerful about what the pandemic did for humanity — it created a real sensitivity to our own frailty,” she says. “It gave people an opportunity to reflect on their own vulnerabilities.”