“When I see this new logo, I am immediately brought back to the little Black girl I once was, searching for reflections of herself in a world that rarely offered them. I remember sitting in front of the TV before school, holding tight to the moments of representation I found in Susie Carmichael on Rugrats or singing along to the Gullah Gullah Island song.” 

These are the words of Alla Hassan, violence prevention and training coordinator for our Office for Missing and Murdered Black Women and Girls (MMBWG).

As an office not yet two years old, the MMBWG Office has taken an important step in shaping its identity and strengthening its connection to the communities it serves by developing its official logo. 

When Hassan sees the logo, she sees Black women: their childhood, their growth, their presence and their commitment. 

The logo represents visibility where silence once lived. Hassan reminds us that “Intentional representation is not an aesthetic. It is structural.” It signals to young Black girls their lives are worthy of more than community advocacy; they are worthy of protection. 

The weight of the new logo is felt by each of the six members of the MMBWG Office. They recognize the gravity of their work and the meaning behind it. 

The MMBWG team holds joy, grief, strength and resilience in the same breath. They listen to families who have been advocating for years, often without acknowledgment. The logo communicates dignity, not victimhood. Presence, not absence. Joy, not only pain.

The stories of missing and murdered Black women and girls shaped every decision of the logo design. 

Each element carries meaning. The periwinkle flower symbolizes remembrance and enduring love. The silhouette maintains humanity in a system that too often reduces Black women and girls to statistics. 

The color palette balances softness and strength, healing and resilience. The purple hues hold particular significance. 

Purple is widely recognized as a color connected to domestic violence awareness, which is one of the core factors that shaped the creation of the MMBWG Office. It represents the countless Black women and girls whose experiences with violence were minimized or ignored, and it acknowledges the advocates and families who fought to have those harms recognized. 

Purple also has a long history in Black communities as a color of dignity, spirituality and quiet power. In this logo, it becomes a visual reminder of both the wounds the office confronts and the strength it carries.

The MMBWG team partnered with Blackbird Revolt, a Minnesota-based Black woman-owned design and branding firm, to create the logo. Creating a symbol that carries generations of harm, resilience and advocacy requires designers who understand that context intuitively. “Representation without power is performance. Representation with power is transformation," Hassan notes. 

Blackbird Revolt brought cultural literacy, historical awareness and community to every part of the process. They designed with the office, not for it, weaving stories, history and culture into a visual identity reflecting the office’s mission. 

The logo honors the original task force and families who pushed legislators and stakeholders to acknowledge patterns of neglect and inequity. Their persistence opened the doors the MMBWG team now walks through.

“When I look at this logo again, I return to that eight-year-old girl singing before school," Hassan shared. "Today, she is reflected back. She is seen. She is protected. She is remembered.”