{"id":81,"date":"2016-10-26T14:38:21","date_gmt":"2016-10-26T12:38:21","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blackamerica.tagesspiegel.de\/?page_id=81"},"modified":"2016-11-20T22:26:21","modified_gmt":"2016-11-20T21:26:21","slug":"patrissecullorsblacklivesmatter","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"http:\/\/blackamerica.tagesspiegel.de\/en\/patrissecullorsblacklivesmatter\/","title":{"rendered":"2. Patrisse Cullors, Co-Founder of Black Lives Matter – Out There for Her Brother"},"content":{"rendered":"

On the evening of July 13th<\/sup>, 2013, Patrisse Cullors sat on her couch alone, glued to the television, and yet she was connected to thousands all over the country, watching the news in disbelief.<\/p>\n

The jury of Seminole County Court, Florida, had found George Zimmerman not guilty. Zimmerman, a neighborhood watch volunteer in a gated community in Sanford, Florida, had shot and killed Trayvon Martin in February 2012. Trayvon Martin was a black high-school-student. He was 17. The night of his death, he was returning to his father’s new fianc\u00e9e\u2019s house after having stopped by a convenience store to buy Skittles. Zimmerman said he followed the kid because there had been several burglaries in the area and he thought the young man, who was wearing a hoody, looked suspicious.<\/p>\n

The night of George Zimmerman\u2019s acquittal, her Twitter account exploded, Patrisse Cullors recounts. She was tweeting back and forth with two of her friends, Alicia Garza and Opal Tometi. Alica had just seen a movie, and Opal was at a bar. \u201cThe verdict came out, and our phones just blew up. Alicia wrote a post saying, black lives matter, and I used the phrase as a hash tag\u201d, Patrisse Cullors recalls. The hash-tag went viral. A year later, she and others first took the hashtag to the streets, helping to organize protests in Ferguson, Missouri, where a white police officer had shot and killed black man Michael Brown in August 2014.<\/p>\n

During Obama\u2019s second term, protests and riots sparked by the killings of black Americans by mostly white police officers were frequent. According to a Washington Post data-base, 732 white and 381 black people were shot and killed by police officers from the beginning of 2015 until July 2016. Black men are 2.5 times more likely to be shot by police officers than white people.<\/p>\n

Patrisse Cullors is in her early thirties. Her hair is half shaved, half braided. We sit at a corner table of a deserted Asian restaurant in downtown Oakland, California. Outside, trucks rattle by. Cullors lives in Los Angeles, a six hour drive from here. She\u2019s in town because Oakland\u2019s Ella Baker Center for Human Rights, a civil rights organization she works for, will celebrate its 20th anniversary tonight. I visited Oakland to meet her.<\/p>\n