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#BlackLivesMatter co-founder asks, 'What have you done to save black lives?'

Civil-rights organizer and #BlackLivesMatter co-founder Patrisse Cullors didn't so much tell a crowd of 300 people Tuesday night at North Central College in Naperville why black lives matter as much as she asked them.

"What have you done to save black lives?" she asked at the beginning of her keynote speech during the college's Martin Luther King Week. "What will you do?"

Cullors, 32, of Los Angeles, called King a "fierce and powerful leader" who often is sanitized instead of remembered as a man who had 32 "purposeful" arrests during his life of advocacy.

"MLK understood the need to disrupt. MLK also understood the need for civil disobedience," Cullors said.

Protesters with the 31 chapters of the Black Lives Matter movement have been carrying out that legacy of civil disobedience, Cullors said, occupying space in cities such as Chicago to call for an end to killings of black people and state violence in its many forms.

The movement has become what black people need it to be, she said. At times, Cullors said, #BlackLivesMatter is a hashtag, a social media declaration, a rallying cry of rage, a sharing of light.

"Black Lives Matter comes from a place of love, but it also comes from a place of rage," she said.

One thing the movement aims to be is inclusive. Founded by three black women, Black Lives Matter re-imagines the social rights movement of King's time by showing new examples of leadership.

"We've chosen to play a different role in this time, saying that we're going to show up as our full selves," Cullors said about she and co-founders Alicia Garza and Opal Tometi. "We're going to show little black girls that they can lead a movement. … One of the most important things is that when we're talking about Black Lives Matter, we're talking about every single black life. We're not being selective."

Cullors told her audience the movement she helped create in 2013 after George Zimmerman was acquitted in the shooting death of Trayvon Martin is bigger than the protests for which it is best known.

Black Lives Matter exists not only to fight police killings of black people, but also to counteract other ways in which racist systems discriminate and perpetuate social injustice. Cullors called these systems "state violence," which she said includes situations that leave some black people unable to feed their children, unable to find shelter or without access to healthy food.

Cullors challenged the crowd of North Central students, faculty, staff and West suburban residents to take action against these discriminatory systems in policing and government.

Receptive to her call, many members of the crowd of black and white listeners asked questions during the half-hour that followed her speech in Wentz Concert Hall.

Mike Siviwe Elliott, a member of the Chicago Alliance Against Racist and Political Repression who is black, told Cullors of his group's push for an elected council to oversee Chicago police.

She called it a "great demand."

The Rev. Tom Capo of DuPage Unitarian Universalist Church, who is white, was among three Unitarian church members who asked what they, as white people, can do to advance the movement.

"White communities can organize themselves around anti-racist whiteness," Cullors said.

As Black Lives Matter stands up for all black lives, their contributions, their worth and their rights, Cullors challenged everyone who attended her speech to imagine a world in which black people can freely and truly live. Imagining that world can help create it, she said.

"Our movement is built by all of us. It is our duty to join the growing movement for justice inside and outside of this country," Cullors said. "If you don't see yourself as an active participant in the liberation of black people, now is your opportunity. All of our lives depend on it."

  A crowd of at least 300 people at North Central College's Wentz Hall attend a keynote speech Tuesday night by Patrisse Cullors, co-founder of #BlackLivesMatter, as part of the college's annual Martin Luther King Week. Mark Black/mblack@dailyherald.com
  Patrisse Cullors, co-founder of #BlackLivesMatter, challenges an audience at North Central College in Naperville to become an active part of the movement to liberate black people. Mark Black/mblack@dailyherald.com
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