Ayọ Tometi, formerly known as Opal Tometi, is an American human rights activist, writer, strategist, and community organizer. She is a co-founder of Black Lives Matter (BLM). She is the former executive director of the United States' first national immigrant rights organization for people of African descent, the Black Alliance for Just Immigration (BAJI), working there in various roles for over nine years.
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Ayọ Tometi (Opal Tometi) is a Nigerian-American human-rights organizer and co-founder of Black Lives Matter who has also worked extensively on Black immigrant rights. The most useful way to place this record in context is to start with the institution or movement through which the person could actually exercise influence, rather than treating visibility as equivalent to control. Tometi, who now uses the name Ayọ Tometi, co-founded Black Lives Matter with Alicia Garza and Patrisse Cullors after the 2013 acquittal in the killing of Trayvon Martin, helping develop the digital infrastructure and international reach of the movement. That baseline is supported by Ayọ Tometi official biography (opens in a new tab), which anchors the chronology and the relevant office, legal proceeding, campaign or movement. The surrounding context matters because political and social outcomes are usually produced by coalitions, institutions and external constraints as well as individual choices. Tometi remains an organizer and public advocate, while the decentralized nature of Black Lives Matter means no single founder controls the movement’s many local organizations or every action taken under its name. A second source, Black Lives Matter (opens in a new tab), helps distinguish the durable part of the record from later interpretation or reputation.
The documented record has two especially important strands. First, Tometi, who now uses the name Ayọ Tometi, co-founded Black Lives Matter with Alicia Garza and Patrisse Cullors after the 2013 acquittal in the killing of Trayvon Martin, helping develop the digital infrastructure and international reach of the movement. Second, Her earlier and continuing work has centered on immigrant rights, including leadership at the Black Alliance for Just Immigration. Black Lives Matter’s own account says she transitioned out of day-to-day network leadership in 2018 to focus on other work. Read together, these events identify where Ayọ Tometi (Opal Tometi) had direct agency and where the person operated through a larger institution, coalition, court, company, union or movement. Ayọ Tometi official biography (opens in a new tab) supports the first strand, while [Black Lives supports the second. That distinction prevents over-attribution: holding a title can create leverage, but it does not mean every outcome during a tenure was personally authored. At the same time, formal limits do not erase responsibility for decisions, testimony, organizing, bargaining or public advocacy that the evidence connects directly to Ayọ Tometi (Opal Tometi).
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