THE NEW FIGHT FOR CIVIL RIGHTS
The movement has helped mobilise one of the largest uprisings in modern US history. What is it, and what do its activists want?
What are the movement’s origins?
Black Lives Matter emerged in the aftermath of the killing of Trayvon Martin, an unarmed 17-year-old AfricanAmerican boy who was shot dead by George Zimmerman, a white selfappointed neighbourhood watchman, in Florida in 2012. The case prompted widespread outrage but, the following year, Zimmerman was found not guilty of murder and manslaughter after a closely watched trial. The verdict was met with anguish by many in the black community, including Alicia Garza, a community organiser, who published a Facebook post entitled “A Love Note to Black People” after the trial. “I continue to be surprised at how little Black lives matter,” she wrote, ending the post, “Black people. I love you. I love us. Our lives matter.” The post was read by Patrisse Cullors, a friend of Garza, who shared it online with the hashtag #blacklivesmatter.
How did it grow?
The slogan began to trend on social media in 2013; Garza, Cullors and another community organiser, Opal Tometi, then established a series of social media pages where people could share “what they were doing to build a world where black lives matter”. But it didn’t become a movement until two more black men died at the hands of police officers in the summer of 2014. First, Eric Garner died after being put in a banned chokehold by an NYPD officer; weeks later, Michael Brown, an 18-year-old, was shot dead during a struggle with a police officer in Ferguson, Missouri. In both cases, grand juries decided not to indict the officers. Brown’s killing sparked weeks of protests and rioting. In August 2014, many activists who had formed a loose socialmedia coalition joined a “Black Lives Matter Freedom Ride” to Ferguson. Those involved became some of the leading protest organisers on the ground – then returned home to set up a formal Black Lives Matter network, with local “chapters” across the US.
Why did it gain traction?
The simplest answer is that protesters had a good point. The US arrests and incarcerates vastly more people than other nations. Its police are far more likely to use force than in comparable nations. In 2018, US police fatally shot about 1,000 people – 31 per ten million people, compared with one per ten million in England and Wales the year before. And this “militarisation” of policing disproportionately affects black people. In 2016, the incarceration rate was five times higher for black people than it was for white people; police were almost four times as likely to use force on black people than whites. These “structural” inequalities are nothing new; but campaigning for change took a new form.
What was new about it?
Black Lives Matter is a creature of social media and the smartphone. It was the first movement in US history to successfully use the internet as a mass mobilisation device, paving the way for #MeToo and #TimesUp. Young, black Americans are disproportionately likely to use social networks: 96% of African-American internet users aged 18-29 use some kind of social network. This has expedited the spread of video footage of police shootings in the US: the murder of Laquan McDonald, who was shot 16 times by Chicago police in 2014; Walter Scott, shot in the back in South Carolina in 2015. By 2016, the hashtag had been tweeted 30 million times. As Ethan Zuckerman, director of the MIT Centre for Civic Media, suggests: “Social media’s significance is that it is recognising different incidents that might have gone unnoticed and sewing them together as a coherent whole.”
How does the organisation work?
It is, technically, a foundation with over 40 independent chapters in the US and beyond (including the UK) whose mission is to “eradicate white supremacy and build local power to intervene in violence inflicted on Black communities by the state and vigilantes”. Less formally, and perhaps more importantly, it is a movement: a vast array of ordinary people who identify with its aims and ideals; people from other ethnic groups are encouraged to be “allies”. One leading activist, DeRay Mckesson, has commented that it “encompasses all who publicly declare that black lives matter and devote their time and energy accordingly”.
How is it different from the civil rights movement?
Black Lives Matter has set itself apart from earlier campaigns and has often been described as “not your grandfather’s civil rights movement”; when Jesse Jackson tried to address the protesters in Ferguson, he was booed. It is decentralised, and has no figurehead like Martin Luther King or Malcolm X. As Garza argued, “the model of the black preacher leading people to the promised land isn’t working right now”. Or as Cullors put it: “You can’t kill the movement by killing the leader, because there are many.” It was founded by women, and aims to “affirm the lives of Black queer and trans folks, disabled folks, undocumented folks, folks with records, women, and all Black lives along the gender spectrum”.
What are its ambitions?
It was born during the nation’s first African-American presidency, when police brutality was nevertheless perceived to escalate; it reflects a disillusion with traditional electoral politics, and with the legal campaigns of the civil rights movement. Its focus “has been less about changing specific laws, and more about fighting for a fundamental reordering of society wherein Black lives are free from systematic dehumanisation”, says the activist Frank Leon Roberts. Black Lives Matter policy reforms such as “defunding” of police departments – cutting police budgets and reinvesting that money in services – once seemed far-fetched. But now they are very much on the agenda in the US. The group has also called for “decarceration” (a radical reduction in the US prison population) and for reparations for slavery.