#SayHerName Movement!

#SayHerName is a gender-inclusive racial justice movement that campaigns against police brutality and anti-Black violence against black women in the United States. The movement aims to highlight the gender-specific ways in which police brutality and anti-Black violence disproportionately affect black women, especially black queer women and black trans women. In the hopes of accumulating a large social media presence alongside other racial justice campaigns, including #BlackLivesMatter and #BlackGirlsMatter, the African American Policy Forum (AAPF) coined the #SayHerName hashtag in February 2015.

The #SayHerName hashtag gained traction in May last year, but was much more widely used following Sandra Bland's death. Talkwater found that the demographic breakdown of #SayHerName has been 58.3 percent female, 41.7 percent male.

Here are some of the most influential people tweeting #SayHerName:

The #BlackLivesMatter movement was launched by Alicia Garcia Garza and Patrisse Cullors following the trial of George Zimmerman, who shot and killed 17-year-old Trayvon Martin in 2013. When the not-guilty verdict was announced, Garza posted a passionate message on Facebook which she closed with, “Black people. I love you. I love us. Our lives matter.”

In May 2015, the AAPF released a report entitled "Say Her Name: Resisting Police Brutality against Black Women," which outlines the goals and objectives of the #SayHerName movement. Following Bland's fatal encounter with police in July 2015, the AAPF, in conjunction with the Center for Intersectionality and Social Policy Studies at Columbia Law School and Soros Justice Fellow, Andrea Ritchie, issued an updated version of the original report. The updated version includes a description of the circumstances surrounding Bland's death as well as several accounts detailing recent incidents of police-instigated violence against such black women as Tanisha Anderson and Rekia Boyd. In addition to these accounts, the report provides an analytical framework for understanding black women's susceptibility to police brutality and state-sanctioned violence as well as offers suggestions as how to best mobilize communities into racial justice advocacy.

Drawing from the AAPF report, the #SayHerName movement strives to address the invisibilization of black women within mainstream media and the #BlackLivesMatter movement. Of its many agendas, one includes commemorating the women who lost their lives due to police brutality and anti-Black violence. To advance this agenda, the AAPF, along with twenty local sponsors and the Center for Intersectionality and Social Policy Studies at Columbia Law School, organized a vigil on May 20, 2015, in New York City, where dozens gathered to demand that the public no longer ignore black women's struggles against gendered, racialized violence.

The #SayHerName movement arose as a response to both the media's and the Black Lives Matter movement's tendencies to sideline the experiences of black women in the context of police brutality and anti-Black violence. For example, police killings of black men as Trayvon Martin and Michael Brown have tended to garner a much higher degree of public outcry than the killings of black women such as Rekia Boyd and Shelly Frey.