Opal Tometi Quotes

Black Lives Matter has already demonstrated that it has the power to shift the societal landscape by bringing awareness to age-old issues that have plagued us as a people.

The reason why 'Black Lives Matter' is a chant is because a lot of people feel, myself included, that sometimes they don't matter.

You know I think with Black Lives Matter, it is extremely special and important. I definitely feel that.

With Black Lives Matter, we knew from the very beginning that it wasn't just going to live online. We were like, 'We're creating this thing and then it's also going to live with black folks on the street and protests and organizations.' It was very important for us to use the hashtag as a way to have a larger conversation and as an organizing tool.

When people of color and their allies say today that Black Lives Matter, the nation must hear and see it through the lens of all that has come before and understand that they speak truth.

I actually see a lot of the pain and destruction, like Black Lives Matter, in the long-term as positive because it shows that we're moving forward; we're evolving and moving and challenging the frontiers.

It's hard to wrap my head around the fact that there are people who can't or won't see what Black Lives Matter is trying to accomplish.

Black Lives Matter was born out of our unwavering love for black people and our undeniable rage over a system that has historically dehumanized black people.

Many of us believed that Black Lives Matter would move this country to not only reckon with white racism but to usher in new laws and practices that would curb vigilantism and law enforcement violence. But, instead, white nationalism was nurtured and began to take root among the American people.

Everybody remember, Black Lives Matter.

The Black Lives Matter movement has spawned all kinds of activism.

Black Lives Matter is really an affirmation for our people. It's a love note for our people, but it's also a demand. We know that the system was not designed for justice for us.

It is just not something we need to forget easily, to just bend the knee, to put on our t-shirts, Black Lives Matter, and one week after everyone forgets that.

The Black Lives Matter movement has to, by its very nature, be intersectional because of the complexities of who black people are in this country and throughout the world.

We actually know that all lives do matter. And we believe it is so much so that we had to create Black Lives Matter.

When Black Lives Matter started, it was polarizing.

Whether or not you call it Black Lives Matter, whether or not you put a hashtag in front of it, whether or not you call it the Movement for Black Lives, all of that is irrelevant. Because there was resistance before Black Lives Matter, and there will be resistance after Black Lives Matter.

With support from techies, designers, artists and thousands of activists across the country, Black Lives Matter is now an online-to-offline political movement, affirming the humanity and resilience of black communities.

I am for violence if non-violence means we continue postponing a solution to the American black man's problem just to avoid violence.

If the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.'s civil rights movement made demands that altered the course of American lives and backed up those demands with the willingness to give up your life in service of your civil rights, with Black Lives Matter, a more internalized change is being asked for: recognition.

Unlike earlier black-power movements that tried to fight or segregate for self-preservation, Black Lives Matter aligns with the dead, continues the mourning, and refuses the forgetting in front of all of us.

The Black Lives Matter movement can be read as an attempt to keep mourning an open dynamic in our culture because black lives exist in a state of precariousness. Mourning then bears both the vulnerability inherent in black lives and the instability regarding a future for those lives.

Black lives do matter, and our lives do hold value.

I think #BlackLivesMatter is a huge campaign that is important and integral to our advancement as a people.

I do think it's a real problem when we have 'Black Lives Matter' making statements that are really radical, that are absolutely false.