Biography
Tamika Mallory is an activist and advocate of gun control, feminism and the Black Lives Matter movement. She was a co-founder of the Women's March on Washington and a national co-chair until July 2019.
Mallory was born on September 4, 1980, in The Bronx, New York. Her parents, Stanley and Voncile Mallory, were founding members of Al Sharpton's National Action Network (NAN), a leading U.S. civil rights organization. Mallory joined NAN at age 11 and was a staff member by age 15. She became the youngest executive director at NAN, stepping down in 2013 to work on behalf of her own activist goals.
Following the murder of her son's father, she worked closely with the Obama administration on gun control legislation. In 2014, she was selected to serve on the transition committee of the New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio, helping to create the NYC Crisis Management System. She also served as co-chair for Gun Violence Awareness Month, an initiative through the Crisis Management System.
After the November 2016 presidential election, Bob Bland and several other women independently launched Facebook events for a march on Washington to be held after the inauguration. After thousands of women signed up, the events were merged and Mallory, Linda Sarsour and Carmen Perez were invited to be co-chairs with Bland for the 2017 Women's March. The march advocated for women's rights, immigration reform, LGBTQIA rights, healthcare reform, environmental reform, racial justice and racial equality. An estimated 500,000 people attended the march and millions more participated in sister marches across the country, making it possibly the largest single-day protest in U.S. history. Malory, Bland and Sarsour resigned from the board of the Women's March in July 2019 amid accusations of anti-Semitism, infighting and financial mismanagement.