Tamika Mallory

Tamika Danielle Mallory (born 1980 ) is an American civil rights and social justice activist. She was one of the leading organizers of the 2017 Women's March, for which she and her three other co-chairs were recognized in the TIME 100 that year. She received the Coretta Scott King Legacy Award from the Coretta Scott King Center for Cultural and Intellectual Freedom in 2018. Mallory is a proponent of gun control, feminism, and the Black Lives Matter movement.

Personal life Mallory was born in Harlem, a neighborhood of New York City's Manhattan borough, to Stanley and Voncile Mallory. Her parents were activists and founding members of Reverend Al Sharpton's National Action Network (NAN), a leading civil rights organization throughout the United States. Their work in NAN influenced Mallory and her interests in social justice and civil rights. Mallory became a staff member of NAN when she was 15 years old

Mallory is a single mother to her son Tarique. Mallory explains that her experience with NAN taught her to react to this tragedy with activism. Her son is a member of NAN.

In 2018, Mallory drew criticism for her attendance at an event with, and past praise for, controversial Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan, which prompted calls for her resignation from the 2019 Women's March. Following later allegations of antisemitism, Mallory left the organization in September 2019.

Political activism

At age 11, Mallory became a member of NAN to learn more about the Civil Rights Movement. By the time Mallory turned 15, she was a volunteer staff member at NAN. Mallory went on to become the youngest Executive Director at NAN in 2011. After working at NAN for 14 years, She also served as the co-chair for a new initiative through the Crisis Management System, Gun Violence Awareness Month.

Mallory is the president of Mallory Consulting, a strategic planning and event management firm in New York City. She is on the board of directors for Gathering for Justice, an organization aimed at ending child incarceration and working to eliminate policies that produce mass incarceration.

In 2018, Mallory criticized Starbucks for including the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), an organization whose stated mission is to "fight anti-Semitism and all forms of hate", in a company-wide racial bias training after the arrest of two black men at a Starbucks in Philadelphia. In a tweet, she accused the ADL of "attack[ing] black and brown people" and wrote, "ADL sends US police to Israel to learn their military practices. This is deeply troubling. Let’s not even talk abt their attacks against .@blacklivesmatter." Starbucks subsequently dropped the ADL from its anti-bias training, a decision Liel Leibovitz of Tablet said was "giving in to bigotry."

2017 Women's March Mallory, Bob Bland, Carmen Perez, and Linda Sarsour organized the 2017 Women's March, a worldwide protest on January 21, 2017. The march was a protest against the inauguration of U.S. President Donald Trump, and also advocated women's rights, immigration reform, LGBTQIA rights, health-care reform, environmental reform, racial justice, and racial equality.

The leaders of the Women's March mobilized in Washington, D.C., and sister marches occurred worldwide. An estimated 500,000 people attended the Washington, D.C., march. The Women's March website said that total worldwide participation was nearly five million. According to The Independent, the march may have been the largest single-day protest in U.S. history. Sarsour, Mallory, Bland, and Perez were recognized in the TIME 100 of 2017. The march gave women, minorities, people of color, LGBTQIA, and others a space to voice their concerns, fears, and feelings. Mallory explains that she took on this responsibility because she "wanted to ensure that Black women's voices are upheld, uplifted, and that our issues are addressed, but this cannot happen unless we take a seat at the table".

One of the largest supporters of the march was Planned Parenthood. Mallory explains that they partnered with Planned Parenthood because they "provide women with life-saving health services". The first action was to write a postcard to Senators about issues of concern. Organizers provided a template on their website along with ways to send the postcards. The second action was to either host or attend a "huddle," an informal meeting to discuss ways to transform feelings into local and national action. The third action was to attend or host a "Hear Our Voice" event, a more formal version of action 2, in order to stimulate continuous change.

In 2021, Mallory released her first book, State of Emergency, with Black Privilege Publishing through Atria Books at Simon & Schuster. Mallory travels the world speaking on social injustices that plague Black communities. Drawn "from a lifetime of frontline culture-shifting advocacy, organizing, and fighting for equal justice, State of Emergency makes Mallory's demand for change and shares the keys to effective activism both for those new to and long-committed to the defense of Black lives”.

2019 Women's March Mallory was one of the co-presidents of the 2019 Women's March. She assumed leadership of the march along with her co-chairs from the 2017 March: Linda Sarsour, Carmen Perez, and Bob Bland. On February 25, 2018, Mallory attended a Saviours' Day speech led by Farrakhan where he made various antisemitic remarks, and later posted positive comments about the event on social media accounts. This led some supporters of the march to call for her and other Women's March leaders to resign. In December 2018, The New York Times reported that "charges of anti-Semitism" stemming partly from the Farrakhan issue as well as Mallory's allegedly berating a Jewish organizer of the Women's March "are now roiling the movement and overshadowing plans for more marches next month". She disputed that they made such remarks. An early Women's March co-founder, Vanessa Wruble, said that she had been "pushed out" of the Women's March by Mallory and others because of her Jewish identity. In an interview, when Margaret Hoover asked Mallory if Israel has a right to exist, Mallory responded that "all people have a right to exist".

George Floyd protests Mallory participated in the George Floyd protests in Minneapolis–Saint Paul in May 2020. In a speech at a news conference there, she accused some people of being more concerned with property destruction, particularly that of Target stores, than with justice for the murder of George Floyd. She also alleged that in Minneapolis paid instigators were responsible for property damage and arson.