African American Studies Chair Ula Taylor was featured in an op-ed for Black Entertainment Television (BET) titled "She Started It. She'll End It."
On March 11, 2026, Pastor Jamal Harrison Bryant stood at a podium inside the National Press Club and declared victory. The yearlong "Target Fast" he had led from his Atlanta megachurch was officially over, he said. He had met with the company’s new CEO. Progress had been made. Time to move on.
Within hours, Black women across the country had a different message: Not yours to call.
In Minneapolis, civil rights attorney Nekima Levy Armstrong held her own press conference outside Target’s corporate headquarters. In Ohio, former state senator Nina Turner posted five words to X: “I’m not going back to Target.” On Instagram, thousands of Black women flooded Bryant’s page to remind him that they had started the boycott, they had sustained the boycott, and they had not authorized anyone to end it on their behalf.
Two days later, Bryant went on his podcast and apologized. “I misread the room,” he said. “I was reading from a different sheet of music.”
The moment felt new. The pattern was ancient.
For as long as Black people in America have used their economic power as a weapon for justice, Black women have been the ones loading the chamber, pulling the trigger, and sustaining the fire long after the cameras move on. They have organized the carpools, printed the leaflets, redirected the household budgets, and absorbed the personal cost of collective sacrifice. And just as reliably, they have watched men step in front of the microphone to narrate the story as their own.
During Women’s History Month, the Target boycott is not just a consumer dispute. It is the latest act in a tradition that stretches back to the 1950s, sustained by women whose names were not always on the marquee but whose labor made every boycott in Black American history actually work.
UC Berkeley professor Ula Taylor, who studies the history of Black women in political movements, has described this dynamic precisely: the public face of change has often been male, but the operating system was almost always female. The infrastructure. The logistics. The unglamorous, day-after-day discipline that turns a single act of defiance into a sustained campaign.