# Patrisse Cullors

Patrisse Cullors (born June 20, 1983) is an American artist and activist. Cullors is an advocate for prison abolition in Los Angeles and a co-founder of the Black Lives Matter movement.

## Quotes

* For me, seeking spirituality had a lot to do with trying to seek understanding about my conditions—how these conditions shape me in my everyday life and how I understand them as part of a larger fight, a fight for my life.
** As quoted in The Role of Spirit in the #BlackLivesMatter Movement: A Conversation with Activist and Artist Patrisse Cullors (June 24, 2015) by Hebah H. Farrag, Religion Dispatches.
* Black Lives Matter is our call to action. It is a tool to reimagine a world where black people are free to exist, free to live. It is a tool for our allies to show up differently for us. I grew up in a neighborhood that was heavily policed. I witnessed my brothers and my siblings continuously stopped and frisked by law enforcement. I remember my home being raided. And one of my questions as a child was, why? Why us? Black Lives Matter offers answers to the why. It offers a new vision for young black girls around the world that we deserve to be fought for, that we deserve to call on local governments to show up for us.
** An Interview with the Founders of Black Lives Matter, Ted Talks, (October 2016)
* We have to invest in black leadership. That's what I've learned the most in the last few years... What we've seen is thousands of black people showing up for our lives with very little infrastructure and very little support. I think our work as movement leaders isn't just about our own visibility but rather how do we make the whole visible. How do we not just fight for our individual selves but fight for everybody? And I also think leadership looks like everybody in this audience showing up for black lives. It's not just about coming and watching people on a stage, right? It's about how do you become that leader -- whether it's in your workplace, whether it's in your home -- and believe that the movement for black lives isn't just for us, but it's for everybody.
** An Interview with the Founders of Black Lives Matter, Ted Talks, (October 2016)
* I am hopeful for black futures. And I say that because we live in a society that's so obsessed with black death. We have images of our death on the TV screen, on our Twitter timelines, on our Facebook timelines, but what if instead we imagine black life? We imagine black people living and thriving. And that -- that inspires me.
** An Interview with the Founders of Black Lives Matter, Ted Talks, (October 2016)
* That’s what you want; you want your radical demands to become popular...Then they become actionable, and then your elected officials won’t feel as scared to pass something like stopping a $3.5 billion jail because, hey, everybody else is saying the idea of caging thousands of human beings who have mental-health issues isn’t a good idea anymore.
** Quoted in How the movement that’s changing America was built and where it goes next, By Jamil Smith, Rolling Stone (16 June 2020)
* We are trained Marxists. We are super-versed on, sort of, ideological theories.
** See Black Lives Matter co-founder describes herself as ‘trained Marxist’, New York Post, June 25, 2020

## About

* After the shooting death of Michael Brown Jr. by officer Darren Wilson in 2014, a Freedom Ride to Ferguson, Missouri, came together. Cullors, writing with co-organizer Darnell L. Moore in The Guardian that September, described the bus ride with 40 others in the spirit of the Freedom Rides across the segregated South during the early 1960s as “a tangible example of self-determination in the face of anti-black violence on the part of Ferguson residents and those of us who traveled from across the country to join them.”
** How the movement that’s changing America was built and where it goes next, By Jamil Smith, Rolling Stone (16 June 2020)

## See also

* Black Lives Matter
* John Conyers
* Angela Davis
* Alicia Garza
* I Have a Dream (1963 MLK Speech)
* Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.
* H.R. 40 - Commission to Study and Develop Reparation Proposals for African-Americans Act
* Racism in the United States
* Reparations for slavery
* Slavery
* Opal Tometi

## External links

* Official website
* Aisha K. Staggers, "‘Dignity and Justice’: An Interview with Patrisse Khan-Cullors", New York Review of Books, January 18, 2018.
* Authority control: WorldCat search