THE REVOLUTION WILL BE LIVE-STREAMED
ON FEB. 18, a police officer shot and killed Jimmie Lee Jackson, an unarmed 26-year-old black man, in Marion, Ala. Massive protests ensued though the Black Lives Matter (BLM) group, a response to repeated police killings of unarmed African Americans, didn’t take part. Jackson died in 1965. The resulting marches, from Selma to Montgomery, became milestones in American civil rights activism a year after Bob Dylan declared “The Times They Are A-Changin’.” Now, more than five decades later, as police killings of unarmed black citizens make headlines almost daily, it’s clear little has actually changed.
The fuse, in reality, has burned for decades, through the 1970s and ’80s to the Rodney King beating, fear of race riots if the O.J. Simpson verdict went the other way to #OscarsSoWhite. As in 1965, the demand remains equality. And, also, please stop killing us. Back then, though, there were no smartphone videos to carry the echo of the fatal gunshot into homes across the country. Today, the revolution is not only televised – it’s live-streamed on Facebook. Politicians and church representatives march, but they no longer lead. MLK gave way to BLM singing Kendrick Lamar’s “We Gon’ Be Alright” in unison as they demonstrate.
The Stand in the Schoolhouse Door has morphed into a vocal opposition that asserts that “all lives matter” and demands the removal of black actor Jesse Williams from Grey’s Anatomy after his call to action speech at this year’s BET Awards. Rudy Giuliani, dubbed America’s Mayor after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, declared that the BLM movement is “inherently racist.” Mark Fuhrman, the former LAPD officer infamous for racist remarks unearthed during the O.J. Simpson trial, dismissed police shootings as a “micro-moment” in history the day after a peaceful protest in Dallas concerning two seperate killings of unarmed black men by police officers in 48 hours ended when a disturbed African American killer downed five police officers. Cops killed the assailant with a bombcarrying robot – a far cry from robohousekeeper Rosie on The Jetsons and how we believed, in the 1960s, machines would serve us in the future.
In response the BLM protests, like the Selma marches at first, are often pegged as provocative. But the speed with which activists and artists can communicate and affect change today couldn’t be imagined in the 1960s. Hit television shows like Black-ish and musicians from Beyoncé to Snoop Dogg are actively prompting discussion. Even Batman himself took pause in a 2015 issue of the comic that dealt with the police shooting of an unarmed black teen.
And the movement has spread