Alicia Garza

Alicia Garza (née Schwartz; born January 4, 1981) is an American civil rights activist and writer known for co-founding the Black Lives Matter movement. She is a recognized advocate for social and racial justice, with a particular focus on issues affecting marginalized communities, including Black women, LGBTQ+ people, and immigrants. Garza is also a writer and public speaker. She has written extensively on issues related to race, gender, and social justice, and her work has appeared in numerous publications. Her editorial writing has been published by Time, Mic, Marie Claire, Elle, Essence, The Guardian, The Nation, The Feminist Wire, Rolling Stone, HuffPost, and Truthout.

Garza has worked with organizations such as the National Domestic Workers Alliance and the Black Futures Lab, which focuses on building political power for Black communities. She has also engaged in community organizing efforts and initiatives aimed at creating systemic change and challenging inequality.

Garza has served as a board member of Forward Together's Oakland branch, Black Organizing for Leadership and Dignity, and Oakland's School of Unity and Liberation/SOUL.

Garza was born to a single mother in Oakland, California. Her family lived first in San Rafael and then Tiburon, and ran an antiques business, assisted later by her brother Joey, eight years her junior.

When she was 12 years old, Alicia engaged in activism, promoting school sex education about birth control. Enrolling in the University of California, San Diego (UCSD), she continued her activism by working at the student health center and joining the student association calling for higher pay for the university's janitors.

In her final year at college, she helped organize the first Women of Color Conference, a university-wide convocation held at UCSD in 2002. She graduated in 2002 with a degree in anthropology and sociology.

In 2003 Garza returned to the Bay Area, where she began a training program in political education with the School of Unity and Liberation (SOUL) that taught young people of color how to organize, by placing them with local community based organizations in West Oakland. Garza began working with Just Cause Oakland.

Completing her internship at SOUL, Garza joined a campaign that researched the relationship between increasing economic security for People Of Color, and increased community security. Her initial project with PUEBLO was to gather community resistance in East Oakland against a proposed Walmart. Despite the effort, the first Walmart in that area opened in 2005.