In 2019, we advanced the work of #SayHerName through advocacy & the arts

In the week leading up to the New Year, we'll be looking back at some of the work we've done in 2019. Today, we're highlighting AAPF’s work through the #SayHerName campaign.

Say Her Name Campaign

Earlier this month, we commemorated the 5th anniversary of the #SayHerName campaign. AAPF first marched under the banner of Black women killed by the police on December 14, 2014, at the NYC Millions March, an anti-police brutality demonstration fueled in part by grand jury decisions not to indict police officers for the deaths of Eric Garner and Michael Brown. Marching together with tens of thousands of protesters, we urged others to join us to “say her name” and politicize the stories of Black women, girls, and femmes who were killed by the police, and whose names often got excluded from dominant narratives around police violence. 

Since that day, #SayHerName has emerged as a rallying cry around the globe, demanding that violence against Black women is treated with the same urgency and awareness as violence against their brothers.

Arts Activism & Original Play

During our annual Her Dream Deferred: A Week on the Status of Black Women the last weekend of March in Los Angeles, AAPF debuted Say Her Name: The Lives that Should Have Been, a new play and multimedia performance  based on interviews with the mothers of Black women slain by police. The performance piece imagines the lives that mothers, daughters, and sisters may have led had they not been cut short by state-sanctioned violence. AAPF developed the project to celebrate the beauty, complexity and everyday normalcy of the victims’ lives, and to bear witness to and demand justice for Black women and girls. 

We have since held a 29-hour workshop to refine and revise the performance piece and incorporate new elements. Keep an eye for additional staged readings of Say Her Name: The Lives that Should have Been in 2020.

Mothers Weekend

The fourth annual #SayHerName Mothers Weekend took place at the end of January 2019 in New York City. The weekend brought the mothers together to reconnect, decompress and collaborate on ways to take the movement forward. The mothers were the special invited guests of Kerry Washington at the Broadway showing of her play, American Son, which deals with a mother reeling from anti-Black police violence. The mothers also had an opportunity to share their testimonies which would feed into the arts and activism components that have become a hallmark of AAPF’s holistic advocacy work. 

New York Times Op-Ed

In October, Executive Director Kimberlé Crenshaw published a New York Times op-ed reflecting on Atatiana Jefferson’s unjustified death, other Black women lost to state violence and the enduring urgency of the #SayHerName movement’s imperative to ensure that these women’s stories are not erased.

5th Anniversary Remembrance Ceremony

On the 5th Anniversary of the campaign, we held our #SayHerName Remembrance Ceremony ritualized some of what we at AAPF strive to do on a daily basis: honor the lives that should have been. These were lives that were taken by so many points of intersectional failure, and one truly tragic one. These were lives that were taken because our country has not confronted its past, nor properly built towards its future. These were beautiful lives, that are no more. With the ceremony, we were deliberate in creating a tulip planting ceremony where we took stock of what has been and till the soil in preparation for what is to come. At this moment in the movement’s history we want to be deliberate about the quality of that soil, and to ensure that whatever we plant, the memory and vitality of victims of state-sanctioned violence is never far from the surface.

In the following video, you get a glimpse of just how these jars were used to mark our ongoing allyship with these women and their loved ones:

While the remembrance ceremony is now complete, the tulip mementos still carry on. If you would be interested in acting as a caretaker to one of these wonderful tokens, please let us know below, and we will ship it to you.