“The
ultimate measure of a man is not where he stands in moments of
comfort and convenience, but where he stands at times of challenge
and controversy.”
—Dr.
Martin Luther King, Jr.
This quote by Dr. King
applies to the 2020 protests after the brutal police murder of George
Floyd. Black Lives Matter has been actively involved in calls to end
police brutality as it has become a major force for equality and
justice. The history of this movement portrays a struggle that
started with humble beginnings and quickly spread into national and
international prominence.
The rise of the modern
Black Lives Matter movement can be traced back to two key events –
the 2012 death of Trayvon Martin and the 2014 death of Michael Brown.
To racial scholars, activists, and many community members, these
preventable deaths were only two recent examples of the stark racial
injustices that have plagued our country’s history.
In both instances, the
White police officers responsible for the deaths were neither charged
with any crime, nor taken to trial. However, despite the national and
international media attention these cases drew, they are by no means
isolated incidents. Moreover, despite the media’s disproportionate
focus on cases involving men, intersectional analyses demonstrate
that racialized police violence and misconduct are inflicted upon
women and transgendered persons of color as well.
(Jennifer
Jee-Lyn García PhD and Mienah Zulfacar Sharif MPH. “Black Lives
Matter: A Commentary on Racism and Public Health.” American Journal
of Public Health
(AJPH).
August 1, 2015.”)
In the summer of 2013,
after George Zimmerman's acquittal for the shooting death of Trayvon
Martin, the movement began with the hashtag #BlackLivesMatter. The
movement was co-founded by three black community organizers: Alicia
Garza, Patrisse Cullors, and Opal Tometi.
They began to question how
they were going to respond to what they saw as the devaluation of
black lives. San Francisco-based Alicia Garza was an organizer with
the National Domestic Workers’ Alliance. She wrote a Facebook post
titled "A Love Note to Black People" in which she said:
"Our Lives Matter, Black Lives Matter.” Patrisse Cullors, head
of an advocacy organization for incarcerated people, repeated the
line on her own social media accounts, adding the hashtag:
"#BlackLivesMatter.” Opal Tometi, director of the Black
Alliance for Just Immigration, then pledged her support, and Black
Lives Matter was born as an online campaign. The plea to acknowledge
–and fix – the disproportionate apprehension, imprisonment and
killing of black Americans by the police had begun.
(H. Ruffin
II. “Black Lives Matter: The Growth of a New Social Justice
Movement.” August 23, 2015. Retrieved from
https://www.blackpast.org/african-american-history/black-lives-matter-growth-new-social-justice-movement/)
Alicia Garza, Patrisse Cullors, Opal Tometi
In August 2014, BLM
members organized their first in-person national protest in the form
of a "Black Lives Matter Freedom Ride" to Ferguson,
Missouri after the shooting of Michael Brown. More than five hundred
members descended upon Ferguson to participate in non-violent
demonstrations.
This number included
members from Baltimore, Maryland; Berkeley and Los Angeles,
California; Boston, Massachusetts; Chicago, Illinois; Columbus, Ohio;
Denver, Colorado; Detroit, Michigan; Houston, Texas; Nashville,
Tennessee; New York City and Syracuse, New York; Portland, Oregon;
Seattle, Washington; Tucson, Arizona; Washington D.C.; and
Winston-Salem, North Carolina.
Of the many groups in
Ferguson, Black Lives Matter emerged as one of the best organized and
most visible groups, becoming nationally recognized as symbolic of
the emerging movement
Now, Black Lives Matter
Foundation, Inc is a global organization in the US, UK, and Canada,
whose mission is to eradicate white supremacy and build local power
to intervene in violence inflicted on Black communities by the state
and vigilantes.
In its website, Black
Lives Matter describes itself as “a unique contribution that goes
beyond (drawing attention to) extrajudicial killings of Black people
by police and vigilantes. Black Lives Matter affirms the lives of
Black queer and trans folks, disabled folks, black-undocumented
folks, folks with records, women and all Black lives along the gender
spectrum. It centers those that have been marginalized within Black
liberation movements. It is a tactic to (re)build the Black
liberation movement."
(“Black Lives
Matter.” https://blacklivesmatter.com/about/ )
What gets referred to as
“the Black Lives Matter movement” is, in actuality, the
collective labor of a wide range of Black liberation organizations,
each which their own distinct histories. These organizations include
groups like the Black Youth Project 100, the Dream Defenders,
Assata’s Daughters, the St. Louis Action council, Millennial
Activists United, and the Organization for Black Struggle, to name
just a few.
“Black
Lives Matter has been described as 'not your grandfather’s
civil-rights
movement,' to distinguish its tactics and its philosophy
from those
of nineteen-sixties-style activism.”
– Jelani
Cobb, The New Yorker
In white-dominated
societies, nearly any demand for equality by people of color is met
by a backlash couched in terms of white victimhood. This has been as
true for Black Lives Matter as it was for the civil rights movement.
Under the white understanding, talking about systemic racism is
itself racist, because it conjures into existence 'racial divides'
that are invisible to whites who believe themselves to be free of
prejudice.
David Smith, Senior
Lecturer in American Politics and Foreign Policy, Academic Director
of the US Studies Centre at the University of Sydney, explains …
“The hashtag and
slogan “All Lives Matter” is a declaration of “colorblindness”,
which Ian Haney-Lopez describes as “the dominant etiquette around
race” today. As is so often the case when it comes to race, liberal
rhetoric serves conservative ends.
“'All Lives Matter'
erases a long past and present of systemic inequality in the US. It
represents a refusal to acknowledge that the state does not value all
lives in the same way. It reduces the problem of racism to individual
prejudice and casts African-Americans as aggressors against a
colorblind post-civil rights order in which white people no longer
'see race.'”
(David Smith. “The
backlash against Black Lives Matter is just more evidence of
injustice.
The Conversation.
October 31, 2017.)
President Barack Obama
spoke to the debate between Black Lives Matter and All Lives Matter
(October, 2015). Obama said, "I think that the reason that the
organizers used the phrase 'Black Lives Matter' was not because they
were suggesting that no one else's lives matter ... rather what they
were suggesting was there is a specific problem that is happening in
the African American community that's not happening in other
communities." He also said "that is a legitimate issue that
we've got to address."
The Reality
In 2019 data of all police
killings in the country compiled by Mapping Police Violence, black
Americans were nearly three times more likely to die from police than
white Americans. Other statistics showed that black Americans were
nearly one-and-a-half times more likely to be unarmed before their
death.
Most states’ police
forces killed black people at a higher rate per capita than white
people, with Illinois, New York and Washington D.C. carrying some of
the largest discrepancies by state. Overall, in 2019, 24 percent of
all police killings were of black Americans when just 13 percent of
the U.S. population is black – an 11-point discrepancy. Mapping
Police Violence also showed that 99 percent of all officers involved
in all police killings had no criminal charges pressed against them.
“Black Lives Matter
doesn’t mean your life isn’t important – it means that Black
lives, which are seen as without value within White supremacy, are
important to your liberation. Given the disproportionate impact state
violence has on Black lives, we understand that when Black people in
this country get free, the benefits will be wide-reaching and
transformative for society as a whole.
“When we are able to
end the hyper-criminalisation and sexualisation of Black people and
end the poverty, control and surveillance of Black people, every
single person in this world has a better shot at getting and staying
free. When Black people get free, everybody gets free.”
-- Alicia
Garza, Co-Founder of Black Lives Matter
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