Alicia Garza

Learn about Alicia Garza (born January 4, 1981), American civil rights activist and co-founder of Black Lives Matter. Explore her early years, organizing journey, key projects, philosophy, and memorable quotes.

Introduction

Alicia Garza (née Alicia Schwartz) is a prominent American civil rights activist, writer, and organizer. Black Lives Matter movement in 2013, which has grown into a global network advocating racial justice, equity, and systemic reform.

Over the years, Garza has worked on issues spanning police violence, economic justice, workers’ rights, gender, LGBTQ+ justice, and grassroots political power-building. Her writing and speeches are widely cited in social justice movements, making her both a public intellectual and an on-the-ground organizer.

Early Life and Education

Alicia Garza was born on January 4, 1981 in Oakland, California.

From a young age, Garza was drawn to activism. At around age 12, she engaged in efforts at her school to promote sex education and birth control access. University of California, San Diego (UCSD), she studied anthropology and sociology, and participated in organizing for better wages for university janitors and working on student health issues.

In her final year at UCSD, she helped organize the first Women of Color Conference on campus.

She also interned with the Oakland-based School of Unity and Liberation (SOUL), where she deepened her skills in political education and grassroots organizing.

Organizing Career & Key Projects

Early Organizing & Labor / Community Work

After college, Garza served in several community and labor organizations. She became executive director of POWER (People Organized to Win Employment Rights) in the San Francisco Bay Area, working on issues like immigration, labor rights, and gentrification.

In 2011, she was elected board chair for the Right to the City Alliance (RTTC), an organization focused on resisting displacement (gentrification), housing justice, and police accountability.

From these foundations, she sharpened her perspective on how race, class, housing, policing, and economic structures intersect.

Co-founding Black Lives Matter

In 2013, following the acquittal of George Zimmerman in the killing of Trayvon Martin, Garza penned a Facebook post titled “A Love Letter to Black People,” concluding with:

“Black people. I love you. I love us. Our lives matter.”

That phrase—Black Lives Matter—became a rallying cry and then a coalescing banner for resistance to anti-Black violence and systemic racism. Garza, along with Opal Tometi and Patrisse Cullors, formalized the movement into the Black Lives Matter Global Network.

Black Lives Matter is structured as a network rather than a central authority, emphasizing local autonomy and distributed leadership.

Recent Initiatives & Political Power Work

Garza also helped establish Supermajority in 2019, along with Cecile Richards and Ai-jen Poo. The goal: arrange political training and mobilization for women across the U.S. to elevate issues like voting rights, paid leave, and economic justice.

Another project is Black Futures Lab, which aims to harness data, policy, and organizing to strengthen political power in Black communities—especially via the Black Census Project to better document needs and build responsive power.

She also held a role as Director of Special Projects at the National Domestic Workers Alliance, integrating labor justice and racial justice perspectives.

Through all these efforts, Garza continues to center marginalized voices—Black women, queer and trans people of color, low-income communities—in movement strategy.

Philosophy, Impact & Legacy

Garza’s activism is grounded in intersectionality, recognizing that race, gender, sexuality, class, immigration status, and other axes of identity cannot be separated in struggles for justice.

She emphasizes love, dignity, and re-humanization as foundational to social movements: for Garza, saying “Black lives matter” is not just protest, but restoration of humanity.

Garza’s work has helped shift the public discourse on policing, race, and structural inequality, inspiring local campaigns, legislative reforms, and global solidarity with anti-racist struggles.

Her role as both organizer and writer allows her to bridge grassroots practice and theoretical framing. She often critiques how movements can replicate the same power dynamics they seek to dismantle unless reflexivity is sustained.

Her impact is reflected in the global spread of Black Lives Matter, and the many initiatives and leaders who credit it as an entry point for activism.

Famous Quotes by Alicia Garza

Here are some notable quotes that capture her vision and approach:

“For us, #BlackLivesMatter is really a re-humanization project. It’s a way for us to love each other again, to love ourselves, and to project that love into the world so that we can transform it.”

“Change does not occur without backlash — at least any change worth having — and that backlash is an indicator that the change is so powerful that the opposing forces resist that change with everything they have.”

“If we perpetuate the same dynamics that we aim to disrupt in our movements for change, we are not interrupting power, and we are not creating change — we are merely rebranding the same set of practices and the same dysfunctions.”

“We are clear that all lives matter, but we live in a world where that’s not actually happening in practice. So if we want to get to the place where all lives matter, then we have to make sure that Black lives matter, too.”

“Solidarity can never be expressed by hearing someone’s pain and then turning the conversation back to yourself.”

Lessons from Alicia Garza’s Life & Work

1. Start from communities, not distant abstraction
   Garza’s organizing began with local causes (labor, housing, university workers), grounding her in practice before national prominence.

2. Intersectionality must be intentional
   Movements that aim for justice must name and account for the full range of identities and oppressions people carry.

3. Leadership requires vulnerability
   Garza speaks openly about burnout, doubt, and the emotional toll of activism—yet shows how resilience and collective support are essential.

4. Data + organizing = power
   Initiatives like the Black Census show that movements need both relational power and informational infrastructure to influence policy.

5. Love is a radical political act
   Framing struggle in terms of dignity, love, and belonging helps reframe protest as life-affirming, not antagonistic.

Conclusion

Alicia Garza is one of the formative voices shaping 21st-century social justice movements. From her early activism in Oakland to her role in birthing Black Lives Matter and advancing political power for marginalized communities, her path is a powerful study in strategy, ethics, and collective imagination.

Her life reminds us that building justice is long work, that transformation demands both vision and discipline, and that even the simplest statement—“Black lives matter”—can carry the weight of generations when spoken with conviction.