Tarana Burke

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Lore & Background

Tarana Burke, a native of The Bronx, New York, attended Catholic primary school and Herbert H. Lehman High School. Her passion for community organizing began in the late 1980s when, as a young girl, she joined a youth development organization called 21st Century Youth Leadership Movement. She attended Alabama State University, a historically Black institution, and later Auburn University at Montgomery. While in college, she organized press conferences and protests focused on racial justice. After graduating, Burke moved to Selma, Alabama, in the late 1990s. In 2003, she developed the nonprofit "Just Be Inc.", an all-girls program for Black girls aged 12 to 18. In 2006, Burke founded the MeToo movement and began using the phrase "Me Too" to raise awareness of the pervasiveness of sexual abuse and assault in society. In 2008, she moved to Philadelphia and worked at Art Sanctuary Philadelphia and other non-profits. She was a consultant for the 2014 Hollywood movie Selma. Burke served as senior director at Girls for Gender Equity in Brooklyn. She is currently the Co-Founder and Chief Vision Officer for me too. International.

Reader's Guide

Tarana Burke's significance lies in founding the MeToo movement in 2006 as a youth program addressing sexual violence, years before it became a global hashtag. In 1997, Burke met a girl named Heaven in Alabama who told her about being sexually abused by her mother's boyfriend; Burke says she didn't know what to say and never saw the girl again, and wished she had said "me too." This and other incidents led her to found Just Be Inc. in 2003. The phrase "Me Too" developed into a broader movement following the 2017 use of #MeToo as a hashtag after the Harvey Weinstein sexual abuse allegations. Actress Alyssa Milano encouraged women to say "Me Too" if they'd experienced harassment or assault, and quickly acknowledged Burke's earlier use of the phrase on Twitter. Time named Burke among "the silence breakers" as Time Person of the Year for 2017. In 2020, Harvard University published a case study on Burke. She published two instant New York Times Best Sellers: You Are Your Best Thing (co-authored with Brené Brown, April 2021) and Unbound: My Story of Liberation and the Birth of the Me Too Movement (September 2021).

Did You Know?

• Tarana Burke first used the phrase "Me Too" in 2006 as part of a youth program for junior and high school students.
• In 1997, Burke met a girl named Heaven in Alabama who told her about being sexually abused by her mother's boyfriend; Burke says she wished she had said "me too."
• Time named Burke among a group of activists dubbed "the silence breakers" as Time Person of the Year for 2017.
• Burke was a consultant for the 2014 Hollywood movie Selma, based on the 1965 Selma to Montgomery voting rights marches.
• Harvard University published a case study on Burke in 2020.