Tamika Mallory was born September 4, 1980, in New York City. Her parents, Stanley and Voncile Mallory, were founding members of Al Sharpton’s radical pressure group, the National Action Network (NAN). She became a member of NAN at age 11 and was hired as a staff member by age 15. Mallory later became NAN’s youngest executive director in 2009, eventually leaving the post in 2013. She attended the College of New Rochelle.

Mallory, a community organizer, became a supporter of gun control after Jason Ryans, the father of her son, was murdered in 2001. Receiving the news of Ryans’ death was a formative experience for Mallory. “It was a flash before my eyes,” she said, according to the New York Daily News. “I managed to pull the car over. I realized I was indeed a real single mom, and that my son would never know his father.”

During the presidency of Barack Obama, Mallory worked with then-Vice President Joe Biden, advising the administration on gun-control legislation. In 2014 she was chosen to serve on the transition team for then-incoming New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio, helping to create the NYC Crisis Management System, part of the Mayor’s Office to Prevent Gun Violence. According to the city, the System utilizes “teams of ‘violence interrupters’ – typically credible messengers who have turned their lives around” – to “engage individuals most likely to be involved in gun violence.” These teams “work to deescalate disputes before crisis or violence erupt and connect high-risk individuals to extensive networks that provide job training, employment opportunities, mental health services and legal services to increase the likelihood of long-term violence reduction.”

Mallory also served in June 2014 as co-chair for Gun Violence Awareness Month, a project of the NYC Crisis Management System.

After Donald Trump was elected president in November 2016, Mallory, Bob Bland (actual name Mary Lynn Foulger), and several other women organized on Facebook what eventually grew into the 2017 Women’s March, which took place in Washington, D.C. on the day after Inauguration Day. Mallory, Bland, Linda Sarsour, and Carmen Perez became co-chairs of the Women’s March, which promoted a host of leftist, anti-Trump agendas — immigration reform, LGBTQIA rights, universal healthcare, environmental extremism, and preferential policies for women and nonwhite minorities.

A day after the November 25, 2016 death of Cuba’s Communist dictator Fidel Castro, Mallory said in an Instagram post: “RIP Comandante! Your legacy lives on!”  In a separate post, she added: 

“Under Fidel Castro’s leadership, Cuba engaged in Pan-African solidarity struggle with countless African countries seeking to break the chains of colonialism and supported revolutionary Black American leaders persecuted by the US government. From Lumumba to Malcolm [X] to Assata [Shakur]. From Angola to South Africa to Zambia to Palestine to Mozambique. Yes, he was deemed an enemy of our state, but he was by no means an enemy of our people and struggle.”

On October 15, 2017, the pilot of an American Airlines flight preparing for takeoff ordered that Mallory be removed from his aircraft because of her rude and belligerent treatment of the flight crew. Mallory subsequently charged that the pilot’s “white male aggression” had singled her out for “#FlyingWhileBlack.”

After a visit to Israel in January 2018, Mallory accused the United States government of backing a Jewish state that “takes the lives of people who were there first,” a reference to Palestinians, Haaretz reported.

Addressing a “Palestine Is Everywhere” event co-hosted by the Center for Constitutional Rights and the Justice Delegation in February 2018, Mallory encouraged Americans to demand that their elected officials withdraw U.S. financial support for Israel. Among her remarks were the following:

• “My soul would not rest, standing by and doing nothing about it, to know that the U.S. government – my taxpayer’s money, $10 million a day – is going to a government, a military, that takes the lives of people who were there first.”
• “This is not about stopping one side. This is about ensuring that the native people are able to enjoy the land. They shouldn’t ask anybody for their land! This is their land!”

At the same event, Mallory suggested that Israel was an illegitimate state from the time it was founded in 1948:

“When you go to someone’s home and you need a place to stay, you ask ‘Can I come into your home and can I stay here, and can we peacefully coexist?’ You don’t walk into someone else’s home, needing a place. It’s clear you needed a place to go – cool, we got that! I hear that! But you don’t show up to somebody’s home, needing a place to stay, and decide that you’re going to throw them out and hurt the people who are on that land. And to kill, steal, and do whatever it is you’re gonna do to take that land! That to me is unfair. It’s a human rights crime.”

In a February 2018 interview, Mallory said that she distrusted white women who wished to join the Women’s March, because many of them had voted for Donald Trump in the 2016 presidential election:

“We’re not really interested in hearing white women talk about how much they want to work with us, and how much they want to be allies, and how much they appreciate us, and all those great things. We don’t want to hear that, because we continue to see — in places like Alabama — and as we approach the [Trump] State of the Union [address], we’re dealing with a megalomaniac as president of this country, and white women are largely to blame for that. They are largely the cause of it. White women have been voting the wrong way.”^[38]

In the same interview, Mallory claimed that white female members of the Women’s March typically felt threatened by the fact that nonwhite women held leadership positions within the organization:

“And even within the Women’s March space, we have situations where, when women of color attempt to lead, white women are threatened by our leadership and create tension and confusion because they are unable to step aside and allow women of color to not just lead, but create space that will ultimately impact the lives of all people. They have trouble stepping aside and not being the center of attention.”

In May 2018, Mallory blamed Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu for having played a role in encouraging the Trump administration’s construction of a wall along the border between Mexico and the U.S., and for President Trump’s ban on travel from certain terrorism-prone Islamic countries, a policy that the Left persistently mislabeled as a “Muslim ban.” Mallory wrote on Twitter: “Be clear: Donald Trump’s wall + #muslimban + #deportation plan are all lines out of the #Netanyahu book of oppression. Trump has referenced this himself. We ought pay attention & not allow folks to label us + try to black list us in to silence. #JusticeDelegation (more 2 come)[.]”

To back up her claim, Mallory referred to an August 2017 Jerusalem Post article that reported on a telephone call earlier that year between Trump and then-Mexican President Enrique Peña Nieto, in which Trump had praised Israel’s security wall with the West Bank. “You know, you look at Israel – Israel has a wall and everyone said do not build a wall, walls do not work — 99.9 percent of people trying to come across that wall cannot get across and more,” Trump reportedly said to Peña Nieto. “Bibi Netanyahu told me the wall works.”

In June 2018, Mallory asserted that the founding of the State of Israel in 1948 was a “human rights crime.”

In December 2018, Mallory invited controversy by telling The New York Times that “white Jews, as white people, uphold white supremacy.” She was commenting after a Tablet magazine article earlier that month had indicated that Mallory and co-chair Carmen Perez had made statements critical of Jews during a January 2017 meeting of original Women’s March leaders. The article also alleged that Women’s March leaders had pushed out organizer Vanessa Wruble because she was Jewish.

Mallory has had noteworthy associations with the Nation of Islam’s virulently anti-Semitic leader Louis Farrakhan and Palestinian terrorist Rasmea Odeh.

Mallory posted a photograph of herself with Farrakhan on Instagram in May 2017, describing him as “the GOAT,” an acronym for “the Greatest Of All Time.” She also defended Farrakhan and her relationship with him during a television appearance on The View in January 2019:

“As a leader, as a black leader in a country that is still dealing with some very serious unresolved issues as it relates to the black experience in this country, I go into a lot of difficult spaces,” Mallory said. “Wherever my people are, there that’s where I must also be.”

Co-host Sunny Hostin challenged Mallory, asking her why she called Farrakhan “the greatest of all time.”

“I didn’t call him the greatest of all time because of his rhetoric,” Mallory replied. “I called him the greatest of all time because of what he’s done in black communities.”

“You’re talking about women, you should be talking about all women, including Jewish women and conservative women,” said co-host Meghan McCain. “Do you condemn Farrakhan’s remarks about Jewish people?”

“We didn’t make those remarks,” Mallory answered. “I don’t agree with many of Minister Farrakhan’s statements.”

McCain shot back, “Do you condemn them?”

“I don’t agree with these statements,” Mallory said. “It’s not my language, it’s not the way that I speak, it’s not how I organize … I should never be judged through the lens of a man.”

In January 2019 as well, Mallory said the following in response to leftists who urged her to repudiate Farrakhan:

“I often work with young black men in prisons. In this space I find myself working closely with people who have many attitudes, beliefs, and ideas that I disagree with, but the black experience is varied and I have to be open to all of it. To be effective when organizing people who have been discarded by society it does not make sense for me to throw away an organization—like the Nation of Islam—that has been very effective at reaching the hearts and minds of young black men to turning them away from violence. Other people are obsessed with my relationship with Minister Farrakhan. I am obsessed with empowerment in the black community.”

In a January 2019 interview, Mallory refused to say if she believed Israel had a right to exist, Haaretz reported.

In July 2019, Mallory, Bob Bland, and Linda Sarsour resigned from the board of the Women’s March amid accusations of anti-Semitism and financial mismanagement.

Like her mentor, Al Shapton, Mallory is quick to ridicule blacks who refuse to portray African Americans as victims of white supremacy, or to endorse black militancy. After Kentucky’s Republican attorney general, Daniel Cameron, a black man, refused to bow to left-wing pressure and file criminal charges against police in connection with the fatal shooting of a black Louisville resident named Breonna Taylor, Mallory characterized Cameron as a race traitor in October 2020. Said Mallory: “I thought about the ships that went into Fort Monroe and Jamestown with our people on them over 400 years ago and how there were also black men on those ships that were responsible for bringing our people over here. Daniel Cameron is no different than the sellout Negroes that sold our people into slavery and helped white men to capture our people, to abuse them, and to traffic them while our women were raped, while our men were raped by savages.”

Additional Information:

Mallory is a supporter of, and activist with, the Black Lives Matter movement.

She founded Mallory Consulting, a strategic planning and event management firm based in New York City.

She sits on the board of directors for Gathering for Justice, a far-left criminal-justice advocacy group formed in 2005 by entertainer Harry Belafonte.