News about the 2016 Leading Edge fellows.
Between 2011 and 2013, Nicole Pittman, now director of Impact Justice’s Center on Youth Registration Reform, traveled from state to state interviewing more than 500 youth sex offenders. At the time a fellow at Human Rights Watch, she published Raised on the Registry, a 116-page report that details the impact of trying to live against the backdrop of registration and public notification.
Patrisse Cullors and Tarana Burke are recognizable, but their work is perhaps even more so. #BlackLivesMatter and #MeToo became the shorthand for the agitation and labor these activists lent to their causes, and the hashtags spread the word about police violence against black people and sexual harassment, respectively.
Here, two of the women behind the internet age’s most influential and far-reaching movements spoke to each other about turning a hashtag into a movement, the role of anger in activism, the power of making mistakes, and how to fight the status quo.
Patrisse Cullors is many things, but she is definitely not a terrorist. She is a catalyst. She is a crusader. And she helped found Black Lives Matter.
As Black Lives Matters moves into its fifth year as the defining civil rights organization in America, Khan-Cullors talks about #MeToo, the politics of personal responsibility, and the new urgency her work has taken on in the wake of the 2016 election.