BLACK GIRLS are entering the criminal justice system in droves, many of them directly from the classroom. While incarceration rates nationwide have been on the decline after years of growth, black girls are the fastest-growing segment of the prison population, and many have been caught up in a cycle of criminalization and punishment from a young age.

Black girls represent 16 percent of female students but almost half of all girls with school-related arrests. Nationwide, they are being suspended at six times the rate of white girls — more disproportionally than black boys, who are suspended three times as often as their white peers.

But harsh school punishments and a fast track into the criminal justice system are not the only problems affecting black girls, who are also disproportionately vulnerable to extreme poverty, poor access to health care, and domestic and sexual violence. And like black men, black women are also dying at the hands of police.

Following the killings of Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown, and a seemingly endless list of black men, a growing movement for racial justice has made police accountability, the inequality of the U.S. criminal justice apparatus, and a slew of structural problems ranging from education to housing, matters of daily debate. But discussions of how such issues have specifically affected black women — who have been at the forefront of the movement for black lives — have often come in second place, just as the particular challenges black women face have often been eclipsed by fights for equal pay or reproductive rights.

Now black women are trying to change that. This week marks the second-ever Black Women’s History Week. And last week, three black congresswomen responded to an online petition by announcing the Congressional Caucus on Black Women and Girls, which will launch next month and aims to raise awareness about black women’s issues before policymakers.

“Historically, black women, while we have been leaders and foot soldiers in movements, have not been prioritized in terms of the issues that have been addressed by racial justice,” said Priscilla Ocen in an interview. Ocen, a law professor, advocate, and panelist during Black Women’s History Week, noted that the invisibility of black women’s issues is “reflective of broader patterns in the history of organizing and activism.”

The Caucus on Black Women and Girls, an initiative by Reps. Bonnie Watson Coleman, D-N.J., Robin Kelly, D-Ill., and Yvette D. Clarke, D-N.Y., is the first — after more than 430 congressional caucuses — to seek “to make Black women and girls a priority in the policy debates that occur here,” the representatives said in a release.

Like other recent efforts by legislators on racial justice issues, the caucus was prompted by a grassroots campaign by seven women who called themselves the #SheWoke committee, including activists, scholars, and the biological sister of Sandra Bland, the 28-year-old woman who was arrested during a traffic stop in Texas last summer and found dead in her cell three days later.

The group members — who initially connected through their sorority affiliation — devised the campaign when Brian Encinia, the officer who arrested Bland, was indicted for perjury in connection with the case. “We felt we should be doing more,” Nakisha M. Lewis, one of the seven and a strategist at the Ms. Foundation for Women, told The Intercept. “She could have been any one of us.”

The #SheWoke social media campaign, and this week’s #HerDreamDeferred, followed earlier attempts to bring the stories of black women and girls to the heart of the racial justice movement. #SayHerName followed Bland’s death and aimed to bring attention to the growing list of black women who have become victims of police violence.