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Patrisse Marie Khan-Cullors Brignac (née Cullors-Brignac; born June 20, 1983) is an American activist, artist, and writer who co-founded the Black Lives Matter movement. Cullors created the hashtag in 2013 and has written and spoken widely about the movement.
Other topics on which Cullors advocates include prison abolition in Los Angeles and LGBTQ rights. Cullors integrates ideas from critical theory in her activism. She has been the subject of criticism for her personal spending and handling of Black Lives Matter funding.
Her brother, Monte was arrested in 1999 after stealing his mother's car. Later he was diagnosed with schizoaffective disorder and bipolar disorder. Cullors recalled that in a fight with prison officers, he was allegedly choked, beaten up brutally, and was forced to drink toilet water. She has cited this as one of the reasons for her activism.
Cullors grew up in a Section 8 apartment in Van Nuys, a poor and largely Mexican-American neighborhood in the San Fernando Valley. Her step-father Alton eventually left his family, leaving Cherice to raise her kids on her own. Cullors said that she witnessed her 11 and 13-year-old brothers being needlessly slammed into a wall by police when she was 9 years old. At the age of 12, she was arrested for smoking marijuana. At this time, she was a student at Millikan Middle School, an affluent school in Sherman Oaks which had a large white student body and a population of gifted students. Cullors describes that she felt ashamed going there with her mother in a car. She also states that it was the white girls at the school who introduced her to weed. However, when she was arrested, she was attending the Van Nuys Middle School, a school consisting mostly of children of working-class families and non-whites, as part of summer school, due to her poor grades. For her, the transition was a shock, as the school had a metal detector and was guarded by police unlike her other school.
Cullors became an activist early in life, joining the Bus Riders Union (BRU) under the leadership of Eric Mann as a teenager during which time she attended a year-long organizing program led by the Labor Community Strategy Center (which organized the BRU). She learned about revolutionaries, critical theory and from around the world, while practicing activism. Cullors also enrolled at Grover Cleveland High School (now Cleveland Humanities Magnet) in Reseda and was admitted into its social justice Magnet school. She went onto acquire a degree in religion and philosophy at UCLA, as well as a MFA from the Roski School of Art and Design at the University of Southern California.
Cullors recalled being forced from her home at sixteen when she revealed her queer identity to her parents. Raised as a Jehovah's Witness, but due to her mother's teenage pregnancy, Cullors' immediate family was shunned by both the church and their extended family members; she remained committed to the faith for years, even in exile, but later grew disillusioned with the church. She developed an interest in the Nigerian religious tradition of Ifá, incorporating its rituals into political protest events. She told an interviewer in 2015 that "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."Farrag, Hebah H. (June 24, 2015). "The Role of Spirit in the #BlackLivesMatter Movement: A Conversation with Activist and Artist Patrisse Cullors". religiondispatches.org.
Cullors and her BLM co-founders, Garza and Tometi, set out to build a decentralized movement governed by consensus of a members' collective and in 2015, a network of chapters was formed. Cullors has been the most publicly visible of the co-founders, especially after Garza and Tometi stepped back from regular involvement in the organization. She credits social media being instrumental in revealing violence against African Americans, saying: "On a daily basis, every moment, black folks are being bombarded with images of our death ... It's literally saying, 'Black people, you might be next. You will be next, but in hindsight it will be better for our nation, the less of our kind, the more safe it will be."
In 2017, she said that the movement would not meet with United States president Donald Trump just as it would not have met with Adolf Hitler, as Trump "is literally the epitome of evil, all the evils of this country, be it racism, capitalism, sexism, homophobia."
In May 2021 (after holding the position for six years which included setting up the organization's infrastructure) Cullors resigned from her formal role as executive director of the Black Lives Matter Global Network Foundation, to focus on her second book and a multi-year TV deal with Warner Bros. She said that her resignation had nothing to do with alleged attempts to discredit her and that it had been planned for over a year. Cullors said "I think I will probably be less visible, because I won't be at the helm of one of the largest, most controversial organizations right now in the history of our movement...But no movement is one leader."
Cullors co-founded the prison activist organization Dignity and Power Now, which succeeded in advocating for a civilian oversight board.Hing, Julianne, "In L.A., Civilians Will Have Power Over Sheriff's Department" , colorlines.com, December 15, 2014.
She is also a board member of the Ella Baker Center for Human Rights, having led a think tank on state and vigilante violence for the 2014 Without Borders Conference. "Staff and Board" . Ella Baker Center. In October 2020, she launched a production company with a deal with Warner Bros. Television.
She cites the activist and formerly incarcerated Weather Underground member Eric Mann, as her mentor during her early activist years at the Bus Riders Union of Los Angeles. She draws on various ideological inspirations. One is Black feminism such as Audre Lorde and her "Black, queer, feminist lens", as well as bell hooks : both "helped her understand her identity". She cites Angela Davis for her "political theories and reflections on anticapitalist movements around the world", her work towards "a broader antiracist and antiwar movement", and her fight against white supremacy in the United States. Frantz Fanon is another inspiration, his "work on colonial violence in Algeria and across the Third World making timely connections" for the understanding of the context in which Black people live across the world. She also cites Karl Marx, Vladimir Lenin and Mao Zedong, as "providing a new understanding around what our economies could look like". In a 2015 interview that resurfaced in 2020, Cullors stated that she and co-founder Garza were "trained Marxists".
Asked whether she believed in violence as a method of protest, she has said that she believes in "direct action, but nonviolent direct action," and that this was also the belief of the Black Lives Matter movement.
In February 2020, Cullors co-endorsed Senators Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders in the 2020 Democratic Party presidential primaries.
Her second book was released by St Martin's Press on 25 January 2022, titled An Abolitionist's Handbook: 12 Steps to Change Yourself and the World. Cullors describes it as a guide for activists on how to take care of each other and resolve internal conflicts while campaigning.
She subsequently produced the YouTube Originals series Resist, which premiered November 18, 2020. The 12-part series followed Cullors and other activists in episodes 6-11-minutes in length. The series aired free on Cullors' YouTube channel, and she described it as well-received, telling IndieWire that "Folks were moved, and also I think surprised at how not boring the series is."
In October 2020, Cullors signed a multi-year deal with Warner Brothers to develop original programming focused on amplifying Black Lives Matter and Black perspectives, but the contract was later canceled in 2022 after she reportedly produced no content.
Her other brother Paul, a graffiti artist and founder of Cullors Protection LLC, received $840,000 from BLMGNF for security and consulting. Cullors defended hiring her brother, saying registered security firms which hired former police officers could not be trusted.
Some BLM activists accused her of "monopolizing and capitalizing our fight." Ten local chapters of the Foundation claimed that Cullors became its executive director “against the will of most chapters and without their knowledge,” that chapter organizers were prevented from influencing the group's direction, and that the national organization provided little to no financial support for local chapters since its inception in 2013. Cullors resigned from leadership of the Foundation in May 2021, and later revealed psychological exhaustion from the controversy, stating that she was receiving treatment for post-traumatic stress disorder.
In 2022, Cullors denied allegations of misusing donations given to the Black Lives Matter Global Network Foundation, but admitted to hosting two parties at a mansion the BLM Foundation purchased for $6 million.
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