Here’s how to send Breonna Taylor a birthday card to demand justice for her death

Warning: This article discusses violence, murder, and police brutality.

As many people across the country continue protesting, making calls, signing petitions, and doing important work to demand justice for George Floyd and get the message across that Black lives matter, there’s a group we can’t leave out: Black women. Black women, trans included, disproportionately experience police brutality as Black men do, yet their names rarely receive the same media attention, and their deaths often don’t evoke the same level of outrage. Breonna Taylor is one of these women, and, today, on what would have been her 27th birthday, people are making sure her name isn’t forgotten.

Taylor was an award-winning EMT living in Louisville, Kentucky. After midnight on March 13th, Louisville police executed a “no-knock warrant,” crashed into Taylor’s apartment, and fatally shot her at least eight times. The reason? They were undergoing a drug investigation—at the wrong apartment. While recent protests and public action across the country have led to the arrests and charges of all four officers involved in George Floyd’s death (which is a start, but not an end to justice), the three officers involved in Taylor’s death are simply on administrative leave with no charges against them.

To shed more light on Taylor’s case and demand justice for her wrongful death, freelance writer and creator of the lifestyle blog BattyMamzelle, Cate Young, created the #BirthdayForBreonna campaign.

Young created a website connecting visitors to 10 action items visitors can take to call for justice for Breonna Taylor.

The focus of the effort is the campaign to send birthday cards in Taylor’s honor to the Kentucky Attorney General Daniel Cameron, demanding that he lay charges against the officers who killed her.

Other action items include: signing the Change.org petition for justice for Taylor; donating to her family’s GoFundMe; emailing the Kentucky attorney general, mayor and governor; flooding social media with remembrances for Taylor using the hashtags #SayHerName and #BirthdayForBreonna; sending her family loving and supportive notes; donating to the Louisville Community Bail Fund to bail out protesters; and spreading the campaign all over social media. You can find out how to participate in all of these through the #BirthdayForBreonna site here.

The efforts to remember and find justice for Taylor support the ongoing #SayHerName movement, which calls attention to the police violence against Black women, girls, and femmes. A report first-issued in 2015, “Say Her Name: Resisting Police Brutality Against Black Women,” had the same goal.

“Although Black women are routinely killed, raped, and beaten by the police, their experiences are rarely foregrounded in popular understandings of police brutality,” Kimberlé Crenshaw, director of Columbia Law School’s Center for Intersectionality and Social Policy Studies and co-author of the report, told Neighborhood Funders Group.

She continued: “Yet, inclusion of Black women’s experiences in social movements, media narratives, and policy demands around policing and police brutality is critical to effectively combatting racialized state violence for Black communities and other communities of color.”

As we continue fighting for an end to police brutality and racial injustice, the fight must be intersectional. Say her name, say their names, never forget, and never give up.