Despite the wrenching heat, mourners, mostly African-American women, packed the church from balcony to basement. I watched the services in the church’s overflow room with one of the girls from the workshop. A 16-year-old aspiring photographer, she documented Bland’s funeral for a social documentary project that she was doing on black girlhood. She originally wanted to photograph the site where Rekia Boyd, the unarmed 22-year-old who was fatally shot in the back of the head by the off-duty police officer Dante Servin, died in 2012, but Boyd’s death garnered scant attention in the weeks that followed. Even today, there are no tributes for her in the Chicago park. In comparison, there is already a large-scale mural memorializing Gray at the corner of North Mount and Presbury in Baltimore, and the protesters and pilgrims cycling through Ferguson created a makeshift shrine for Brown. A permanent plaque now memorializes the tragedy.

This disparity between the remembrance of Boyd and those of the others reflects a popular conception that racial discrimination and violence in America, past and present, are almost exclusively aimed at men: When we talk about lynching, police brutality and mass incarceration, we are almost always talking about African-American men, not women. Being a target of racism is seen as patrilineal, a social and political disadvantage that black fathers unwillingly bequeath to their sons but not their daughters. The result is a dyad of vulnerability and invisibility that most African-American women, including me, learn to navigate at an early age.

This exclusion has also been true of the paramount social-justice movement of the moment, #BlackLivesMatter. Two years after its inception, few people remember that it originated with three black female activists, Patrisse Cullors, Alicia Garza and Opal Tometi. But nearly all of the victims of police violence whose cases have been made causes célèbres by the movement have been men — despite the fact in 2015 alone, at least six black women have died in or after encounters with the police.

Sadly, this erasure of women seems far-reaching: Last year, the #WhyWeCan’tWait campaign argued against the exclusion of African-American girls from President Obama’s singular racial-justice initiative, My Brother’s Keeper, while some critics have accused author Ta-Nehisi Coates of marginalizing black women altogether in “Between the World and Me,” his profound meditation against American racism. “Black womanhood in real life isn’t — as it largely is in ‘Between the World and Me’ — about beating and loving and mourning black men and protecting oneself from physical plunder,” writes Shani Hilton on BuzzFeed, in response to Coates’s book. “It’s about trying to live free in a black body, just like a man.”

In turn, black women have responded to this flattening by making themselves more visible. The #SayHerName campaign — the movement within a movement that helped to elevate the profile of Bland’s case and that of other African-American girls and women — has emerged as a response to this dearth of coverage. A few days after Bland’s funeral, hundreds of protesters staged a rally for Bland just north of the Chicago River. Some demonstrators held up LED-lit letters spelling Bland’s name and the hashtag “#SayHerName” on the Michigan Avenue Bridge, while others shouted, “We do this for Sandra! We do this for Rekia!” And in the fall, many of these organizers will build a shrine to memorialize Boyd at Chicago’s Douglas Park.