As activists, we’ve also witnessed this firsthand. Twenty years ago, when we helped the filmmaker Aishah Shahidah Simmons make “NO! The Rape Documentary,” she was initially rejected by every major distributor. An executive from HBO even told her in 1998, “Let’s face it, very unfortunately, most people don’t care about the rape of black women and girls. And therefore, we’re concerned that there won’t be many viewers who will tune in to watch NO!, were we to air it on our network.”

Even today, as #MeToo continues to dominate headlines, black girls have been invisible in the movement. Instead, the media has primarily focused on white Hollywood actresses who have come forward with their accounts of systemic abuse and harassment.

But we learned through our work with A Long Walk Home, a nonprofit we founded in 2003 in response to Salamishah’s own experience of rape when she was 17, that one of the most overlooked yet effective ways to create social change is to just believe the stories that girls and young women of color tell us. And since black girls live at the crossroads of gender and racial violence, if we want to empower them, we have to confront and dismantle each system of oppression that affects them.

This past summer, for example, young artists and activists in our organization, which works to end violence against girls and women, led their first public art campaign, called “The Visibility Project.” They took over Douglas Park in Chicago, where several girls from their school had been abducted and later sexually assaulted. It’s also where a 22-year-old black woman, Rekia Boyd, was killed by an off-duty police officer in 2012.

As the girls shared their stories of sexual assault or gang violence, they refused to separate the impact of sexual violence, gun violence and political brutality on their lives and on their city. And there was a ripple effect. We’ve noticed in our work that black girls are very powerful organizers; they recruit boys, other girls, their parents and ultimately their community into the movement. That’s another reason we have to make sure that this current moment of listening to and believing black girls and young women is durable. If it’s fleeting, the#MeToo movement will fail.

This requires new forms of collaboration and coalition-building. Legacy civil rights organizations must prioritize sexual assault and domestic violence with the same passion that they bring to voting rights or criminal justice reform. White feminists should organize for equal pay and reproductive rights around an anti-racist framework. Victims’-rights organizations must offer culturally specific resources and lift up the work of organizations led by black women that have long been on the front line of these issues like Black Women’s Blueprint, Girls for Gender Equity, Love With Accountability, Project Nia and the Sasha Center.

With each passing day, more young women accuse R. Kelly of sexual assault. That means more people and institutions — with the glaring exception of his label, RCA — are taking their voices and by extension, girls who look like them, seriously. We’ve been waiting for this moment for a long time. Let’s not squander it.