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BLM Founder: We Would Still Be Fighting Racism If Clinton Was President

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Amber Randall Civil Rights Reporter
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Black Lives Matter would still be fighting against racism under a Clinton presidency, a co-founder of the movement said in a Friday interview.

Patrisse Cullors, one of three black women who launched the movement, said that even if President Donald Trump lost the election, the group would still need to find ways to combat racism with Hillary Clinton as president.

“Some things don’t change. I don’t want to act like if we have Hillary Clinton in office everything would be different. No,” Cullors told the Los Angeles Times. “The first thing that Black Lives Matter had to do was remind people that racism existed in this country because when we had Obama people thought we were post-racial. That was the debate. Is racism over? And very quickly we understood that it was not over.”

The Black Lives Matter movement began as a hashtag after George Zimmerman fatally shot Trayvon Martin, a black teenager in 2012. The movement gained traction when it joined the Ferguson riots over the police shooting of Michael Brown. Since then, the group has fought against police brutality and focused on “making space” for queer and transgender persons.

Cullors also said the Black Lives Matter movement was still going strong, despite some reports alleging issues within the movement. A Buzzfeed report into the group alleged that there was a lack of funding and little direction from leadership at the top contributing to the group’s issues.

“I think Black Lives Matter is very relevant today, especially given the rise of white supremacists and white nationalists across, not just this country, but across the globe. And so our work over the last four years has been putting anti-black racism on the map, talking about the impact anti-black racism has on this country, has on local government, has on policy and how it actually impacts the everyday life of black people,” Cullors said.

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