So after connecting with Garza and Cullors, whom she was meeting for the first time, Tometi bought the domain name and built their digital platform, including social media accounts where they encouraged

So after connecting with Garza and Cullors, whom she was meeting for the first time, Tometi bought the domain name and built their digital platform, including social media accounts where they encouraged people to tell their stories, using the tag #blacklivesmatter. Demonstrations had sprung up the very night of the Zimmerman verdict, but the first planned BLM demonstration in Los Angeles was a march to Rodeo Drive in Beverly Hills.

"It's deliberate. We've done that from the beginning," Melina Abdullah, co-founder of the Black Lives Matter Los Angeles chapter, told The American Prospect. "The day George Zimmerman was acquitted, we all went to Leimert Park. That's where everybody black went when something happened; you didn't need a Facebook post. People were milling around, hugging each other. Then we decided to march. I had a debate with another organizer who wanted to march south down Crenshaw Boulevard. I was holding a bullhorn, and I yelled into it, 'Go north!' If you go south into black neighborhoods, nobody cares what you do. If you go north into whiter, more affluent neighborhoods, they do."

The phrase made the rounds. They were hardly the only group that formed in the wake of Martin's death, but they were the ones to most effectively harness the power of social media. But, as Tometi recalled to The New Yorker recently, "we began more as a platform and a space to develop community and share analysis."

Then on Aug. 9, 2014, in Ferguson, Mo., a police officer shot and killed 18-year-old Michael Brown Jr.