Three black women started the hashtag #BlackLivesMatter, yet the American conversation about police brutality against black people has mostly been a conversation about police brutality against black men.
And while the most high-profile police brutality cases recently -- Freddie Gray, Walter Scott, Eric Garner and Tamir Rice -- involved black men, many black women have died at the hands of police, too.
"There are so many names that we don’t hear, and a lot of those names tend to be women and girls," Treva Lindsey, an Ohio State University professor who specializes in black feminist theory, told Mashable.
[img src="http://admin.mashable.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/05/blackwomenmatter.jpg" caption="University of Michigan senior Bria Graham, 22, stands with her mouth taped shut with "#Black Women Matter" written on the tape during a protest of the killing of unarmed black people by police, at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, Michigan. " credit="The Ann Arbor News, Patrick Record" alt="blackwomenmatter"]
But things may be changing.
Last week, the hashtag #SayHerName took off on Twitter. The campaign was designed by the African American Policy Forum to raise awareness about cases of police violence against women, and it has racked up more than 135,000 tweets as of Tuesday. Many of those tweets included the names of women killed by police who haven't received the same attention as Garner, Scott, Gray and other black men.
In 2014 Pearlie Golden, was shot and killed by the police in Hearne, TX when they were called to the home #Sayhername pic.twitter.com/0k6IHZy2HI— Bougie Black Girl (@BougieBlackGurl) May 21, 2015
Pearlie Golden was one. She was a 93-year-old black woman holding a gun when a white police officer in Texas shot her to death last year. The officer was fired, though a grand jury chose not to indict him.
Yvette Smith is another. She was standing near the door of her home after someone in the house called the police. Two men were allegedly fighting over money. An officer told her to come out of the house and, when she did, he killed her. The officer was fired and indicted for murder.
Tanisha Anderson, a schizophrenic black woman, is a third. She, like Freddie Gray, died after losing consciousness in police custody. Her death was ruled a homicide.
Data on police killings in the United States is notoriously impossible to find, meaning that the number of black women killed by police every year is difficult to pin down. A list of 101 unarmed black people killed by police in 2014, compiled by an activist group, listed seven black women. Other news articles have said that black women account for as many as 20% of black people killed by American police, though that number is based on incomplete data.
And police tend to brutalize black women differently than they do black men.
Research by the CATO Institute in 2010 showed that the second-most common complaint against police was sexual misconduct," accounting for more than 9% of total complaints.
However, stories like that of Oklahoma police officer Daniel Holtzclaw, recently charged with raping eight black women, don't result in the kind of demonstrations now associated with police brutality against black men.
"When you bring black women into the narrative, you bring a much more comprehensive understanding of the problem," Rachel Gilmer, associate director at the African American Policy Forum, told Mashable. "This is not about being a black male in this country. This is about being black."