![]() “The emergence of the activist-as-celebrity trend matters. Movements are the story of how we come together when we’ve come apart.” Only organizing sustains movements, and anyone who cannot tell you a story of the organizing that led to a movement is not an organizer and likely didn’t have much to do with the project in the first place. ![]() “You cannot start a movement from a hashtag. We recommit to them over and over again even when they break our hearts, because they are essential to our survival.” Waves ebb and flow, but they are perpetual, their starting point unknown, their ending point undetermined, their direction dependent upon the conditions that surround them and the barriers that obstruct them. Movements are much more like waves than they are like light switches. Movements do not have official moments when they start and end, and there is never just one person who initiates them. Hashtags do not start movements-people do. You cannot start a movement from a hashtag. Though I know the question generally comes from an earnest place, I still cringe every time I am asked it. “I’ve been asked many times over the years what an ordinary person can do to build a movement from a hashtag. Being catapulted from a local organizer who worked in national coalitions to the international spotlight was unexpected.” ![]() “Even though I’d been an organizer for more than ten years when Black Lives Matter began, it was the first time I’d been part of something that garnered so much attention. On Black Lives Matter and Movement Building The following are Excerpts from Alicia Garza’s book The Purpose of Power, with a thematic description of the text above it. ![]() The Purpose of Power: How We Come Together When We Fall Apart by Alicia Garza provides an autobiographical accounting of one the founders of Black Lives Matter. ![]()
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