#SAYHERNAME CAMPAIGN

Fill The Void. Lift Your Voice. 

Say Her Name.

Launched in December 2014 by the African American Policy Forum (AAPF) and Center for Intersectionality and Social Policy Studies (CISPS), the #SayHerName campaign brings awareness to the often invisible names and stories of Black women and girls who have been victimized by racist police violence, and provides support to their families.

Black women and girls as young as 7 and as old as 93 have been killed by the police, though we rarely hear their names. Knowing their names is a necessary but not a sufficient condition for lifting up their stories which in turn provides a much clearer view of the wide-ranging circumstances that make Black women’s bodies disproportionately subject to police violence. To lift up their stories, and illuminate police violence against Black women, we need to know who they are, how they lived, and why they suffered at the hands of police.

On May 20th, 2015, at Union Square in New York City, AAPF hosted #SayHerName: A Vigil in Memory of Black Women and Girls Killed by the Police. For the first time, family members of Black women killed by police came together from across the country for a powerful vigil designed to draw attention to their loved ones' stories. The family members of Alberta Spruill, Rekia Boyd, Shantel Davis, Shelly Frey, Kayla Moore, Kyam Livingston, Miriam Carey, Michelle Cusseaux, and Tanisha Anderson were present and supported by hundreds of attendees, activists, and stakeholders.

That same week, AAPF and CISPS, in partnership with Andrea Ritchie, released a report entitled Say Her Name: Resisting Police Brutality Against Black Women, which outlined the goals and objectives of the #SayHerName movement. The report provides an intersectional framework for understanding black women's susceptibility to police brutality and state-sanctioned violence and offers suggestions on how to effectively mobilize various communities and empower them to advocate for racial justice.

Over the past five years, the #SayHerName campaign has expanded and increased its focus on direct advocacy. Since 2015, AAPF has hosted its annual #SayHerName Mothers Weekend in New York City, bringing together a group of mothers who have lost their daughters to police violence. The weekends served as a chance to learn more about the specific needs of the family members of Black women who are victims of racist state violence, and provide a space where these mothers can begin to construct a community of support and a network for activism.

Including Black women and girls in police violence and gender violence discourses sends the powerful message that indeed all Black lives matter. If our collective outrage around cases of police violence is meant to serve as a warning to the state that its agents cannot kill without consequence, our silence around the cases of Black women and girls sends the message that certain deaths do not merit repercussions. Please join us in our efforts to advance a gender-inclusive narrative in the movement for Black lives.

ON MOTHERS NETWORK

The first #SayHerName Mothers Network was officially convened by AAPF in November 2016, a year and a half after many of the mothers joined us to launch the Say Her Name Report and attend the first-ever #SayHerName Vigil in New York’s Union Square. Since then, the #SayHerName Mothers Network has joined together on a number of occasions, marching at the Women’s March on Washington, and lobbying for police reform on Capitol Hill. They have come together for several focus groups and planning sessions to strategize around the initiative and to assess the needs of new family members who’ve lost their daughters to police violence. AAPF and the #SayHerName Mothers Network have also helped to organize vigils for women such as Charleena Lyles, a Black mother of four who was shot and killed by the police in her Seattle home in 2017, and Vicky Coles-McAdory, Aunty-mama of India Beaty and one of the original members of the #SayHerName Family Network, who tragically died of a stroke in September 2017. In May of 2020, the #SayHerName Mothers Network released a video to the mother of Breonna Taylor.

If you are the family member of a Black woman killed by the police and are interested in joining the Network, please email us at info@aapf.org. 

#SAYHERNAME: THE LIVES THAT SHOULD HAVE BEEN

From the minds of premier public intellectual and progenitor of intersectional theory Kimberlé Crenshaw, Julia Sharpe-Levine and G’Ra Asim comes Say Her Name: The Lives That Should Have Been, a new play based on interviews with the mothers of Black women slain by police. The play emerges from the #SayHerName campaign, a movement that AAPF founded in 2014 to amplify and politicize the names and stories of Black women, girls and femmes lost to state violence. 

With years of experience in organizing and advancing the movement, the creative team chose performance and storytelling as a medium to illuminate the obstacles that make Black women’s vulnerability to police violence a critical social problem. This creative form of activism brought to the stage substantive depictions of the women affected. The performance addressed the relationship between assumptions that protect male-centric ideas of police brutality from critique and those that diminish and erase women’s agency.

In preparation for drafting the script, Crenshaw and the African American Policy Forum compiled hours of interview and focus group research with family members of Black women killed by police. A component of this research was an exercise in which family members were asked to project how the lives of their lost loved ones might have played out if they’d been spared from violence. The resulting script bears the imprint of asymptotic recovery, a process of real-life data collection that spans the chasm between the reality of Black women’s experiences and the dominant narratives that circumscribe their lives.

Answering the call that Ntozake Shange’s For Colored Girls sounded by pleading for “somebody/anybody” to “sing a black girl’s song,” Say Her Name: The Lives That Should Have Been, is an intersectional counter-history written to pave largely untrodden narrative terrain. 

The plot entangles the stories of six women, victims of police violence and their mothers, to weave a tapestry of intergenerational loss, grief, resistance and rebirth. The mothers, women who have lost their worlds to a scourge that often lurks unnamed, find solace with one another. Just beyond Zora’s wall, the daughters carry on in a world their mothers know is possible and yearn to deliver into being. Audiences will be tantalized by the opportunity to feel such a world at their fingertips, and may perhaps nudge us all closer to its realization by watching.