Black women and girls as young as 7 and as old as 93 have been killed by the police, but with the recent exception of Breonna Taylor—their names are rarely heard.
The #SayHerName campaign was launched in December 2014 by the African American Policy Forum (AAPF) and Center for Intersectionality and Social Policy Studies (CISPS), to bring awareness to the names and stories of Black women and girls who have been victimized by racist police violence, and to provide support to their families.
Actress Kerry Washington is one of those working closely with the AAPF on the campaign “to educate people on a lot of the women who haven’t been mentioned—the Sandra Blands, the Breonna Taylors—getting people to focus on the ways that these injustice impacts families across the board, male and female.”
For the first time, family members of Black women killed by police came together in May of 2015 from across the country for a powerful vigil designed to draw attention to their loved ones’ stories.
That same week, AAPF and CISPS, in partnership with Andrea Ritchie, released a report entitled Say Her Name: Resisting Police Brutality Against Black Women, providing an analytical framework for understanding black women’s susceptibility to police brutality and state-sanctioned violence, and it also offers some suggestions on how to effectively mobilize various communities and empower them to advocate for racial justice.
