One page five paragraphs essay please read the instructions and follow them carefully

User Generated

Noqhyynu9n

Humanities

Description

Required Readings:

“The Next Civil Rights Movement?”

“Does Black Lives Matter Pick Up Where The Black Panthers Left Off?”

“How Social Media Is Shaping Civil Rights Movements”

“#BlackLivesMatter: the birth of a new civil rights movement”

write an argumentative essay.

-There is a substantial difference between a younger generation of social activists who have been at the forefront of the #Blacklivesmatter movements and older generation of Civil Rights Leaders. Organizers for #Blacklivesmatter events usually resist commentary from figures such as Al Sharpton or Jesse Jackson at their events, saying that they are from a bygone era. The movement is also open about rejecting the Civil Right movement’s structure of hierarchical leadership, usually with a charismatic male as the face and voice of the movement (e.g. Dr. Martin Luther King during the 60s and Jesse Jackson in the 80s.)

* Write an essay in which you argue whether younger leaders are right to resist guidance and leadership from Civil Rights Era leaders.

Keep the following in mind:

Your essay must contain a parallel three-point thesis statement that answers one of the above prompts.

The ideas presented in your essay must reflect sound reasoning and support for your examples.

You must quote at least two of the listed sources in your essay.

Please make it simple and perfect and follow all the

Unformatted Attachment Preview

The Next Civil Rights Movement? Fredrick C. Harris Peaceful protests in Baltimore, April 28, 2015. Photo by Arash Azizzad, via Flickr. Kareem Jackson, a St. Louis hip-hop artist who goes by the name Tef Poe, was interviewed this February by a BBC talk show host about why the Black Lives Matter movement was necessary. A leader in the organization Hands Up United, which was founded in the wake of Michael Brown’s murder, Poe explained: “One of the negligent areas of the civil rights movement is that we did not move the moral compass of racism to the right direction.” Though the 1960s movement addressed the civil and political rights that were denied to black people—access and use of public accommodations, the right to vote, and ensuring fair employment and housing opportunities—it did not directly confront the racialized degradation black people endured, and many continue to endure, at the hands of the police. What the Black Lives Matter protests have done, however, is not only put police reform on the policy 1 agenda but demanded that American society reconsider how it values black lives. Tef Poe had not been directly involved in politics until Brown’s death. He was a struggling hip-hop artist who occasionally wrote a column for the Riverfront Times, an independent newspaper in St. Louis. One day, while checking his Instagram account, Poe noticed a post that shook him. It was a photograph of Brown’s stepfather holding up a hand-written sign that read simply, “My unarmed child has been murdered by the Ferguson police.” As he watched the wave of anger, disgust, and disbelief mount on his social media feed within hours of the shooting, Tef Poe knew he had to go to Ferguson. This is how he—along with legions of people across the country—was transformed into an activist, not just concerned with civil and political rights but with black humanity. The protests that have erupted since the deaths of Brown and other casualties of police brutality have been extraordinary. Seemingly out of nowhere, a multiracial, multigenerational movement asserting black humanity in response to racist police killings and vigilante violence has ripped across the country. The police brutality and killings are not, to be sure, new; the emerging movement against them, however, is. The upsurge in anti-racist organizing is a break from what we normally consider black activism in the United States. Each periodic wave of activism for the last half century— whether centered on electoral politics or protests—has traced its lineage to the “golden age” of the 1960s. But while there is a great deal of nostalgia in these comparisons, core activists of the Black Lives Matter movement have been quick to remind us that this current wave of protest “is not your grandmamma’s civil rights movement.” In a purely tactical sense, that assessment is correct. The movement’s use of technology to mobilize hundreds of thousands of people through social media is light years away from the labor that was once required to mobilize black people and their allies during the 1960s or even a few years ago. Jo Ann Robinson of the all-black Women’s Political Council in Montgomery, for instance, spent hours using a hand-driven mimeograph machine to crank out over 52,000 leaflets that announced a mass protest after Rosa Parks’s arrest in 1955. Today, social media—particularly Twitter— can reach individuals throughout the nation and across the world in milliseconds, drastically slashing the time it takes to organize protests. As a recent New York Times Magazine spread noted, through Twitter, core Black Lives Matter activists like Johnetta Elzie and DeRay Mckesson, 2 who are based in St. Louis, now have the ability to frame events and direct the actions of hundreds of thousands of people across the nation at their fingertips. Not only is social media a tool for mobilization, but the intense reporting on police brutality via social media also influences print and television coverage, which means that attention to such incidents has multiplied. Twitter and Facebook have, in this way, become documentary tools for Black Lives Matter activists, a way for them to become citizen journalists capturing the protests and police responses in almost real time. Indeed, for this reason, the spontaneity and the intensity of Black Lives Matter is more akin to other recent movements—Occupy Wall Street and the explosive protests in Egypt and Brazil—than 1960s activism. Similarly, images of police violence are helping put pressure on municipal police departments to address these issues. Unlike the images of brutality that sparked outrage in the past—photographs of lynch victims hanging from trees during the age of Jim Crow or newspaper images of brutalized black bodies lying in a coroner’s office—we are now able to witness and document police violence as it happens. Videos from handheld phones and surveillance cameras have shown Marlene Pinnock being beaten by a California highway patrol officer, the ambush police shooting of John Crawford at a Walmart in Ohio, the chokehold death of Eric Garner in Staten Island, the drive-by police shooting of twelve-year-old Tamir Rice in Cleveland, and the crippling condition of Freddie Gray as he was arrested in Baltimore, before he eventually died. But it is not only technological and tactical differences that separate Black Lives Matter activists from their civil rights predecessors. When activists remind us that the Black Lives Matter movement is different from the civil rights movement, they are making a conscious decision to avoid mistakes from the past. They are rejecting the charismatic leadership model that has dominated black politics for the past half century, and for good reason. This older model is associated with Martin Luther King and the clergy-based, malecentered hierarchal structure of the organization he led, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. In the ensuing years, this charismatic model has been replicated, most notably through organizations like Jesse Jackson’s Rainbow PUSH Coalition and Al Sharpton’s National Action Network, but also by hundreds of other locally based activist organizations across the country. But Black Lives Matter activists today recognize that granting decision-making power to an individual or a handful of individuals poses a risk to the durability of a movement. Charismatic leaders can be co-opted by powerful interests, place their own self-interest above that of the collective, be targeted by government repression, or even be assassinated, as were Martin Luther King and Malcolm X. The dependence of movements on charismatic leaders can therefore weaken them, even lead to their collapse. Instead, core activists of the Black Lives Matter movement have insisted on a groupcentered model of leadership, rooted in ideas of participatory democracy. The movement has modeled itself after the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), the 1960s organization that helped black Americans gain legal access to public spaces and the right to vote. Black Lives Matter organizers also operate on the principle that no one person or group of individuals should speak for or make decisions on behalf of the movement. They 3 believe, as the legendary civil rights activist Ella Baker believed, that “strong people don’t need strong leaders.” In some ways, the new tools of technology—particularly social media and especially Twitter—have facilitated the emergence of just such a bottom-up insurgency led by ordinary people, and have displaced the top-down approach of old guard civil rights organizations. But this model has also been adopted by design. For many young black Americans, leaders like Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton, as well as heads of civil rights organizations such as the NAACP and the National Urban League, are no longer seen as the gatekeepers of the movement’s ideals or the leaders who must broker the interests of black communities with the state or society. Additionally, with the exception of Al Sharpton’s National Action Network, which has represented families of victims but has been less effective accomplishing police and prison reform, policing and mass incarceration have not been aggressively pursued by these more traditional organizations. And none, certainly, have adopted the disruptive protest tactics—the street marches, die-ins, bridge and tunnel blockades, and the intense publicity campaigns—that have helped Black Lives Matter force these issues onto the national political agenda. Unlike the civil rights movement, the focus of Black Lives Matter—on policing in black and brown communities, on dismantling mass incarceration—is also being articulated less as a demand for specific civil or political rights, and more as a broader claim for “black humanity.” This insistence on black humanity has repeatedly been used by Black Lives Matter activists as a catalyst for political action. “If you can see a dead black boy lie in the street for four and a half hours and that doesn’t make you angry, then you lack humanity,” said Ashley Yates, a Ferguson activist and co-founder of Millennial Activists United, at a rally last October. Evoking humanity is used to express communal anger against police brutality, but also to mobilize those who aren’t acting. Yates explained further: And at the very core of this is humanity— Black Lives Matter. We matter. We matter. Black lives matter because they are lives. Because we are human. Because we eat. Because we breathe. Because he [Michael Brown] had a dream, because he made rap songs, they may have had cuss words in them. Yeah. He was human. And when we neglect to see that we end up where we are today. Activists like Yates have also used the claim of humanity to challenge the politics of respectability, a black middle-class ideology that has its origins in the turn-of-thetwentieth century response to black people’s loss of civil and political rights following Reconstruction’s collapse. The politics of respectability is invested in changing the personal behavior and culture of poor and working-class black people, rather than squarely addressing the structural barriers that keep them locked into a perpetual state of marginality. This appeal to humanity too has deep— though hidden—roots in the history of the black freedom struggle. The eighteenthcentury anti-slavery campaign roused the consciousness of nations by pleading to those who kept them and profited from their bondage, “Am I Not a Man and a Brother?” The agitation of the anti-lynching campaigns of the first half of the twentieth century highlighted the inhumanness of mob violence against black people. Striking garbage workers fighting for a living wage in Memphis in 1968 carried with them 4 placards proclaiming, “I am a Man.” But with the successful passage of major civil rights legislation—specifically the 1964 Civil Rights Act, 1965 Voting Rights Act, and the 1968 Fair Housing Act—and the expansion of these laws in subsequent decades, the language of civil rights came to dominate both the ideas and the strategies of leaders and organizations concerned with racial inequality. With Black Lives Matter, we now have a revival of these historical roots. Its recognition that all black lives deserve humanity, regardless of their gender, class, or sexual orientation, has breathed new life into the legacy of the black freedom struggle. Today’s new—and much larger— movement is also articulating the national struggle for racial justice as a broader one for human rights. In 1951, the “We Charge Genocide” campaign—which included William Patterson, Paul Robeson, W.E.B. Du Bois, Claudia Jones, and family members of victims of racial violence such as Josephine Grayson and Rosalie McGee—petitioned the United Nations to examine human rights abuses against black Americans. The petitioners sought to frame their claims— that African Americans were being persecuted, denied the right to vote, and “pauperized” because of their race—as a question of both black humanity and as a human rights issue: “[A]bove all we protest this genocide as human beings whose very humanity is denied and mocked.” The horrific evidence compiled for the petition, culled from stories in black newspapers and accounts collected by civil rights and labor organizations from 1945 to 1951, is eerily similar to the accounts we hear today. We may be more familiar with the evidence that petitioners document in the Jim Crow South, but the incidents recorded outside it are especially revealing. In many pockets of the urban North, the policing of black migrants was merely a parallel to the Jim Crow violence that terrorized them in the South. For instance, in February 1946 in Freeport, Long Island, a policeman shot and killed two unarmed black men, wounded a third, and arrested a fourth for “disorderly conduct.” The men had objected to being denied service in a café. The Freeport police, in a move that resembles the police’s response to protesters in Ferguson, “threw a cordon around the bus terminal and stationed men with tommy guns and tear gas there, saying that they wanted to ‘prevent a possible uprising of local Negroes.’” Three months later in Baltimore, police shot and killed Wilbur Bundley. “Nine witnesses stated that he was shot in the back while running,” the petition reports. In July, Lucy Gordy James, a member of a prominent family of “Negro business people in Detroit,” was “beaten severely” by three police officers. “She sued the officers for $10,000 damages, charging illegal arrest, assault, and maltreatment.” And in 1951 in Philadelphia, “forty police officers killed an unarmed 21-year-old Negro youth, Joseph Austin Conway, allegedly being sought for questioning in a robbery. He died in a hail of bullets while seeking to draw fire away from his family and neighbors.” This catalogue of disaster—to quote James Baldwin—is documented in over 200 pages. In the 1950s, Malcolm X and Martin Luther King also used the language of human rights to internationalize the issue of racial inequality in the United States. During his travels abroad, Malcolm X enlisted the assistance of heads of states in Africa and the Middle East to condemn the United 5 States for their treatment of black Americans. He discovered that by framing the mistreatment of black Americans as an international human rights issue instead of a national civil rights one, “those grievances can then be brought into the United Nations and be discussed by people all over the world.” For him, as long as the discussion was centered on civil rights, “your only allies can be the people in the next community, many of whom are responsible for your grievance.” Malcolm X wanted “to come up with a program that would make our grievances international and make the world see that our problem was no longer a Negro problem or an American problem but a human problem.” In framing racial discrimination in human rights terms, the Black Lives Matter movement is today picking up the baton of civil rights activists before them. The parents of Trayvon Martin and Jordan Davis have raised the issue of discriminatory policing with members of the UN Committee on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination in Geneva. The parents of Mike Brown along with representatives of organizations in Ferguson and Chicago traveled to Geneva to share information about their cases with the UN Committee Against Torture in November 2014. Brown’s parents submitted a statement to the Committee that read in part, “The killing of Mike Brown and the abandonment of his body in the middle of a neighborhood street is but an example of the utter lack of regard for, and indeed dehumanization of, black lives by law enforcement personnel.” Following its examination of the United States, the Committee Against Torture recommended that it undertake independent and prompt investigations into allegations of police brutality and expressed concerns about racial profiling and the “growing militarization of policing activities.” After it reviewed the human rights record of the United States this May, a review procedure of the UN Human Rights Council recommended strengthening legislation to combat racial discrimination and addressing excessive use of force by the police. struggle for human rights is once again gaining strength. Hopefully this time, we can win the more than century-long campaign that has demanded of our nation simply to see us as human. When Anthony Scott saw the video of his brother Walter Scott being shot as he fled a North Charleston police officer, he remarked, “I thought that my brother was gunned down like an animal.” It is a curious thing for black people in the twenty-first century to once again have to claim their humanity. We live in a society where people are more likely to be convicted of animal cruelty than police officers are likely to be charged for the murder of unarmed black, brown, and poor people. But with the Black Lives Matter movement, black America’s Fredrick C. Harris is professor of political science and director of the Center on African-American Politics and Society at Columbia University. He is the author of several books, including The Price of the Ticket: Barack Obama and the Rise and Decline of Black Politics. His essays have appeared in numerous publications, including the London Review of Books, the New York Times, and Transition. 6 Join the Dissent community resourcemagonline.com How Social Media Is Shaping Civil Rights Movements Matt Lavietes Women's March on NYC by Jason Leiva The idea that social media has evolved for purposes beyond social use is an understatement. While posts featuring evening sunsets, birthday celebrations, and (unsolicited) selfies are still applauded, the power of social media has long surpassed its original objective. Social media is now largely used in business to market products, promote brands, and connect to current customers. On a greater scheme, social media has been used as a weapon to spread causes for social struggles of freedom, justice, and equality. Civil rights movements have capitalized social media’s influence, making cause’s values and ideas unavoidable to everyday users. In recent years, movements including the Women’s March, Black Lives Matter, and the Human Rights Campaign have all been leaders in multiplying supporters through social networking. (You can also read our cover story on Jerome Jarre and how he’s using social media to redirect millions of marketing dollars to help humanity.) On the night of the recent presidential election, Nov. 8, 2016, Teresa Shook, resident of a small Hawaiian island, took to Facebook expressing her concerns for the future of gender equality under the country’s new administration. That’s when she catalyzed an uproar for the Women’s March on Washington. It started with a Facebook event invite. Shook’s initial Facebook event included the 40 of her friends of which she personally invited. When Shook woke up the following morning, she was shocked to see that 10,000 strangers had RSVP’ed to the event with 10,000 more expressing interest. In total, her 40 Facebook invites sparked a whopping 500,000 men and women to march in D.C and 600 subsequent marches throughout the rest of the country in weeks to follow. Shook, a grandmother who is in her 60s, told the Washington Post, “I guess in my heart of hearts I wanted it to happen, but I didn’t really think it would’ve ever gone viral.” Shook continued: “I don’t even know how to go viral.” On the day of the Women’s March on Washington, Jan. 21, Shook made an on-stage appearance addressing the hundreds of thousands of who took to the streets of D.C. organizations efforts to gain awareness and momentum. A study conducted by the Pew Research Center called “Social Media Conversations About Race,” was performed to analyze how and why social media users use the hashtags #BlackLivesMatter and #AllLivesMatter within their posts. For some users, the hashtag serves the purpose of the cause. For others, the hashtags have been used to do just the opposite. According to the study, the hashtag #BlackLivesMatter was used roughly 12 million times on Twitter from July 12, 2013 to March 31, 2016. Researchers found that while 38 pecent of #BlackLivesMatter tweets were in support of the movement, 11 percent of tweets compiled of opposition. In addition, the 51 percent of tweets including the hashtag were sorted as neutral references to #BlackLivesMatter, general racial issues separate from the specific movement, and the 2016 election. “I’m overwhelmed with joy. A negative has been turned into a positive. All these people coming together to unite to try and make a difference. That’s what we’re going to be doing for the next four years. I see it’s really going to happen,” Shook said in an interview the day of the march. While Shook’s use of social media sparked the event itself, the greater power of social networking didn’t end there. The official Women’s March Organization promoted partakers in the March on Washington and marches around the country to post the hashtag #WhyIMarch on their Twitter and Instagram accounts. The #WhyIMarch hashtag makes marches searchable to users, encouraging further awareness for those unable to attend the march. Black Lives Matter has also utilized social media as a key instrument in their While social media has proven to be positive for social rights movements, the study shows the harsh reality of how users largely take advantage of social networking to damage social struggles for equality. To target such users, the Guardian reports that in recent years, civil rights groups have sought out executives at companies like Twitter and Facebook to moderate abusive users. However, as reported, moderation systems by such companies are largely viewed as being “racially biased.” Civil rights groups argue that data shows how Facebook specifically censors activists of color and Black Lives Matter posts, but ignores posts of white supremacists spreading violent threats. “Despite obstacles to improve the supervising of social networking sites, without doubt, social media has progressed development of social freedom and equality, and will continue to do so.” In effort to work with social networking companies to improve company moderation systems, 70 civil rights organizations collaborated in a letter to Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and director of Facebook’s global policy Joel Kaplan. The letter urged Facebook to not only stop censoring political speech for social justice, but also for the company to take further and larger steps at targeting offensive users. Black Lives Matter has argued that although Facebook most certainly has the means to address these problems, the capable company has yet to make the issue of primary concern. Despite obstacles to improve the supervising of social networking sites, without doubt, social media has progressed development of social freedom and equality, and will continue to do so. With the direction of our country’s growing social and political awareness, whether or not you enjoy seeing social rights movements across your news feeds, it’s doubtful that such stories can be avoided. No matter if you enjoy seeing social struggles for freedom and equality broadcasted on your news feeds, it’s undeniable that social media’s growing influence on such causes is an incredible outcome from where social networking once started. theguardian.com #BlackLivesMatter: the birth of a new civil rights movement Elizabeth Day Alicia Garza was in a bar in Oakland, California, drinking bourbon when the verdict came in. It was July 2013 and she had been following the trial of George Zimmerman, a neighbourhood watch volunteer in Sanford, Florida, who had shot dead a 17-year-old African-American by the name of Trayvon Martin in February of the preceding year. Martin had been unarmed, on his way back from a 7/11 convenience store where he had just bought himself an iced tea and a bag of Skittles. There had, of course, been shootings of young black men before. But this one had a particular resonance. Garza had a younger brother of a similar height and build to Martin. She felt it could just as easily have been him. In the bar, Garza, her husband and her two friends had been checking their phones for updates from the trial. The jury had been deliberating for 16 hours on Zimmerman’s fate. When the verdict was announced, she learned of it first through Facebook: not guilty of second degree murder and acquitted of manslaughter. “Everything went quiet, everything and everyone,” Garza says now. “And then people started to leave en masse. The one thing I remember from that evening, other than crying myself to sleep that night, was the way in which as a black person, I felt incredibly vulnerable, incredibly exposed and incredibly enraged. Seeing these black people leaving the bar, and it was like we couldn’t look at each other. We were carrying this burden around with us every day: of racism and white supremacy. It was a verdict that said: black people are not safe in America.” each time she reposted: #blacklivesmatter. The following day, Garza and Cullors spoke about how they could organise a campaign around these sentiments. “A call to action,” says Garza. “To make sure we are creating a world where black lives actually do matter.” They reached out to Opal Tometi, another activist they knew in the field of immigrant rights. The three women started by setting up Tumblr and Twitter accounts and encouraging users to share stories of why #blacklivesmatter. Garza made protest signs with block capital letters and put them in the window of a local shoe shop. Cullors led a march down Rodeo Drive in Beverly Hills with a banner emblazoned with the same hashtag. The slogan started gaining traction. Then, on 9 August 2014, a little over a year after Zimmerman was allowed to walk free from court, 18year-old Michael Brown was shot dead by a white police officer in Ferguson, Missouri. Officer Darren Wilson had fired 12 rounds. Brown had been unarmed. Garza logged on to Facebook. She wrote an impassioned online message, “essentially a love note to black people”, and posted it on her page. It ended with: “Black people. I love you. I love us. Our lives matter.” Protests broke out the day after Brown’s shooting. There was some unrest and looting. Cars were vandalised, commercial properties broken into. Police officers in riot gear took to the streets. Watching the drama unfold on TV, Garza had that same sickening feeling she’d had when she heard of Trayvon Martin’s death. Along with Cullors and Tometi, she organised a “freedom ride” to Ferguson under the auspices of the #blacklivesmatter campaign. More than 500 people signed up from 18 different cities across America. When they reached Ferguson, Garza was astonished to see her own phrase mirrored back at her on protest banners and shouted in unison by people she had never met. Garza’s close friend, Patrisse Cullors, read the post in a motel room 300 miles away from Oakland that same night. Cullors, also a community organiser working in prison reform, started sharing Garza’s words with her friends online. She used a hashtag When a grand jury announced Darren Wilson would face no indictment in the matter of Brown’s death, a group of protesters chanting “Black lives matter” shut down a local shopping mall. Later, after a spate of further deaths of unarmed black men, the phrase started appearing on T-shirts and mugs and badges. In December, Hillary Clinton used the phrase in a speech delivered at a human rights gala. It was referred to in television programmes – an episode of Law & Order; the finale of Empire. By January 2015, the American Dialect Society had declared #blacklivesmatter as their “word” of the year. In June, following the shooting of nine people by a suspected white supremacist in a church in Charleston, the activist Bree Newsome climbed the flagpole outside the statehouse in Columbia, South Carolina and removed the Confederate flag. Her actions were tweeted and retweeted under the hashtag #blacklivesmatter. At a subsequent eulogy for the victims of the church shooting, President Barack Obama paid tribute to black churches for being a place where children were “taught that they matter”. There are now over 26 Black Lives Matter chapters across the United States. From one heartfelt Facebook post, it has spawned a new civil rights movement. Garza has been astonished by the response. “This wasn’t something that we – you know…” She pauses. “We didn’t have a strategic plan.” Black America is in a state of protest. The 21stcentury civil rights movement, exemplified by the action taken by Garza and those like her, is democratic in its aims and agile in its responses. It is fuelled by grief and fury, by righteous rage against injustice and institutionalised racism and by frustration at the endemic brutality of the state against those it deems unworthy. In almost every area of society, black Americans remain disadvantaged. Education? Forty-two percent of black children are educated in high-poverty schools. Employment? The unemployment rate for black high-school dropouts is 47% (for white highschool dropouts it is 26%). Housing? Although black people make up just 13.2% of the US population, they account for 37% of the homeless. Voters’ rights? One in every 13 African Americans of voting age is disenfranchised because of a felony conviction – a rate more than four times greater than the rest of the US population. In fact, African Americans now constitute nearly 1 million of the total 2.3 million jail population and are incarcerated nearly six times as often as white people. Despite the election of America’s first black president in 2008, those profound structural fissures remain. But although the challenges might be similar, the new civil rights movement is tackling them in new ways compared to the 20th-century movement. The most notable difference is that, in 2015, there are no leaders in the conventional sense: no Martin Luther King or Malcolm X, no single charismatic voice that claims to speak for the many. Several people I interview insist this is a strength: they make the bleak point that, historically, single leaders of civil rights movements have almost always been assassinated. They have also been male. “We have a lot of leaders,” insists Garza, “just not where you might be looking for them. If you’re only looking for the straight black man who is a preacher, you’re not going to find it.” Instead, the new civil rights movement combines localised power structures with an inclusive ethos that consciously incorporates women, lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer activists. DeRay Mckesson, one of the most high-profile activists with a Twitter following of 176,000, is a gay man. Garza identifies as queer (her husband is transgender). The new movement is powerful yet diffuse, linked not by physical closeness or even necessarily by political consensus, but by the mobilising force of social media. A hashtag on Twitter can link the disparate fates of unarmed black men shot down by white police in a way that transcends geographical boundaries and time zones. A shared post on Facebook can organise a protest in a matter of minutes. Documentary photos and videos can be distributed on Tumblr pages and Periscope feeds, through Instagrams and Vines. Power lies in a single image. Previously unseen events become unignorable. Events like the arrest of a 43-year-old man named Eric Garner, who was placed in a chokehold for 15 to 19 seconds by a white police officer on the sidewalk of Staten Island, New York, in July 2014. Garner can be heard on mobile phone video footage saying, “I can’t breathe” a total of 11 times and was pronounced dead in hospital an hour later. The video went viral. “I can’t breathe” became a totemic phrase for protesters. The basketball player LeBron James wore a T-shirt with the words emblazoned across the front and was praised by President Obama for the act. Events like a pool party in McKinney, Texas in June where a white police officer threw a 14-year-old black girl to the ground, pinning her down for several minutes, before pulling a gun on two teenage boys. A bystander filmed the fracas, posted it on YouTube where it was viewed almost 500,000 times before being picked up by all the major news channels. The officer was suspended and later resigned. Events like this were happening before – as many activists say, “there’s a Mike Brown in every town” – but it is only now that technological advances and digital savvy have ensured the dots are joined. “Social media’s significance is that it is recognising different incidents that might have gone unnoticed and sewing them together as a coherent whole,” says Ethan Zuckerman, the director of the MIT Center for Civic Media and the author of Rewire: Digital Cosmopolitans in the Age of Connection. “And that means we’re forced to recognise very serious structural issues.” Social networking sites are used disproportionately by young, black Americans – 96% of AfricanAmerican internet users aged 18-29 use a social network of some kind. Forty per cent of the same group say they use Twitter – 12% more than the comparable figure for young white people. According to Todd Wolfson, the author of Digital Rebellion: The Birth of the Cyber Left, the new civil rights movement has important precursors in grassroots uprisings such as the Arab spring and Occupy: “The Cyber Left is about flattening hierarchies, flattening governance processes, combined with using the logic of social networks for deep consensus building.” Kwame Rose, a 21-year-old civil rights protester from Baltimore, agrees: “Social media plays a big part in everything. I find out information, I put it on Twitter, it starts trending the more people talk about it and then the institutions start feeling the pressure.” It is no coincidence that the majority of these new digital activists are in their 20s – internet natives, brought up in the online age, versed in the politics of revolution. Mckesson composes his speeches in tweets to ensure the soundbites can be shared in 140 characters. One community organiser I speak to says with a straight face that “a youth activist means up to the age of 35”. When I ask another about her attitude towards violence, she replies coolly: “What is violence? Is violence denying people proper access to food, housing and healthcare? If you’re referring to rioting, I guess it’s a reaction to the system in which we live. The state is violent.” Although #blacklivesmatter was the original call to action, it is only one tributary in a larger, fast-flowing river. Other organisations have sprung from a shared sense of unease, such as the Coalition Against Police Violence, which is run by two female activists, or the Black Youth Project 100, which has chapters across the country and campaigns against the use of racially motivated force, or the Florida-based Dream Defenders, which has mobilised communities against racial profiling and state oppression, and which started before Black Lives Matter. These activists communicate and link up online, minting a solidarity through social media that gives their separate voices mass focus and power. As a result, says Steven Pargett, the communications director for Dream Defenders: “There are fewer gatekeepers, in terms of being able to tell our own stories.” He points out that during the protests in Ferguson, activists could take to Twitter to highlight the contradictions between police reports and eyewitness accounts. So while the TV networks were reporting on incidents of rioting and looting, realtime tweets from protesters on the ground claimed that the police had been firing tear gas and rubber bullets into groups of peaceful protesters. In April, a similar thing happened in Baltimore. There were protests in the city following the death of 25-year-old Freddie Gray, who fell into a coma while in police care and later died of spinal injuries; the full autopsy has yet to be released. On the evening of 28 April, Kwame Rose was watching the coverage on television. He was “riled up” by what he saw: inflammatory language, talk of “riots” and no mention of the community initiative that had taken place earlier that day to try and clean up the streets. “When the media started saying ‘tensions were high’, they were lying,” he tells me over Skype, peering out from beneath a pristine black baseball cap. At 9.30pm, he went out with a group of organisers to help get people off the streets in time for the curfew. They asked some police to drop their riot gear and hold hands in prayer. It was, says Rose, “very calm”. Then he stumbled across a TV crew from Fox News. They were there to film the mustachioed talkshow host Geraldo Rivera who was attempting to interview a state senator among the crowds. Rose confronted Rivera about Fox News’s “biased” account of what was happening. “You’re not here reporting about the boarded-up homes and the homeless people,” he said, in an impassioned, impromptu speech caught on video. “You’re not reporting about the poverty levels up and down North Avenue… you’re here for the ‘black riots’. You’re not here for the death of Freddie Gray.” The clip was shared on Twitter. When Rose woke up on Wednesday morning, the video had been picked up by the World Star Hip Hop aggregating blog. “That’s a big thing,” Rose says now, shaking his head. At the time, he had a job as the doorman of a big hotel chain. When he got to work that day, his general manager told him the film was all over the TV. He lost his job as a result of the attention. When Kwame was growing up, his father, “Big Rose”, had taught him about civil rights history. Now, Kwame realised, he was fighting the same fight. He quotes James Baldwin by way of explanation: “To be black and conscious in America is to be in a constant state of rage.” “I see what’s being done and I’m mad about it,” he says. “It’s an attack on black masculinity. You see it all the time [in the mainstream media]. When Dylan Roof [the suspect in the Charleston church shooting] was arrested, you see all these baby pictures of him. We are the same age. After the Rivera video, I was called every other name than the one my parents gave me. Dylan Roof was ‘a lost child’. Mike Brown, at 18, was ‘a troubled black man’.” Indeed, when Brown was gunned down, the photo initially used by some of the rightwing media was one taken from below, throwing his face into halfshadow, showing him glowering at the camera making a V sign. It was widely interpreted by conservative pundits as a gang-related gesture. There were other pictures available, including one of Brown as a chubby-cheeked teenager in headphones and a Varsity jacket. Thousands of people took to Twitter to post contrasting images of themselves, posing the question as to which would be chosen if they became the subject of a news report under the hashtag #IfTheyGunnedMeDown “This was a way of saying ‘Hey, mainstream media, you’re doing something really bad! Here’s this pattern, what are you going to do about it?’” says Ethan Zuckerman from MIT. “What’s interesting is it didn’t get talked about to me. But the newspapers moved away from this problematic image [of Michael Brown].” It was a perfect example of new civil rights activism: online pressure brought to bear on a single potent issue with high visibility. Similar action ensured the removal of the Confederate flag from the South Carolina statehouse in the wake of the Charleston church shooting. Because so many of the new generation of activists are young and smart and technologically engaged, there is a restless, inventive energy to their campaigns, which can be started with little more than an iPhone. With the dissemination of information online, there is greater accountability. The mainstream has fewer places to hide. Since Brown was killed in the street in Ferguson, several other unarmed African Americans have been the victims of fatal violence at the hands of the police – Tamir Rice in Ohio, Tony Robinson in Wisconsin and Walter Scott in South Carolina, to name only a few. Online activism has ensured we know the victims’ names and that they are linked in our collective mind. Until now, deaths like these were viewed as a chronic problem, endured by local communities yet largely hidden from broader public consciousness. But the rise of a new generation of digital activists such as Garza, Mckesson, Rose and others, has created a sense of emergency in America. Fatalities at the hands of police are now front-page news. They can no longer be ignored. Samuel Sinyangwe’s earliest experience of racism was at elementary school. He grew up in Orlando, Florida in a predominantly white community and he remembers being beaten up by an older kid and being called the N-word in the playground. He had soccer practice just down the road from where Trayvon Martin was shot. “I used to go to that same 7/11 [as Martin] every day for a packet of Starburst,” he says, talking from his home in San Francisco. “It could have been me. It really could have been anyone who looked like me.” When the Ferguson protests erupted, Sinyangwe felt a similar sense of injustice at the fate of Michael Brown and Trayvon Martin as many of those who took to the streets. But, he says, there was no comprehensive data available on police shootings “so we couldn’t get into the place of having a solutionsdriven conversation”. Sinyangwe, a 25-year-old Stanford graduate, data scientist and policy analyst, had the necessary skillsset to fill the gap. He had been following DeRay McKesson’s live-tweeting from Ferguson (“Tear gas feels like extreme peppermint tingling” and “Really bad car accident. Looting across from it. Pray for me”) and tweeted him. The two of them spoke on the phone. Along with fellow activist, Johnetta Elzie – an important presence in the movement – they set up Mapping Police Violence. The aim was to collate all the necessary statistical information on police killings nationwide, with a particular emphasis on black deaths at the hands of police. It was a gargantuan task. Sinyangwe set about sourcing the core data from the three largest crowdsourced databases on police killings in the country and then comparing these to social media, police and local newspaper reports in order to identify the race of 91 percent of all victims. Within four months, the site went live. The results were shocking. Sinyangwe’s work claimed that at least 1,149 people were killed by police in 2014, and that 304 of these – 26% – were black. Black people were nearly three times as likely as white people to be killed by police in 2014 and at least 101 of them were unarmed, according to Sinyangwe’s record. In March 2015, 36 black people were killed by police – one every 21 hours, and a 71 percent hike in numbers from the previous month. (When the Guardian launched The Counted, a longterm investigative project, providing the most comprehensive database of officer involved deaths in the US ever published, which includes deaths in police custody and victims hit by vehicles, they found the tally for the same month to be 37 black Americans with 113 deaths across all ethnicities.) Compiling the data was, says Sinyangwe, deeply depressing. For one of the pages on the site, he posted individual photos of unarmed victims killed by police in 2014, along with their stories. “All of that is incredibly heavy and sobering,” he says. “You’re reading these stories of people who were chased down for riding a bike in the street. However, it’s work that needs to be done. “We have been holding a mirror up to the nation. And we’ve shown what has been going on for a very long time: that we are being brutalised. That the state is being violent against us… The nation is now aware of the problem. Whether we can agree on a solution or not is another question but at least they acknowledge something is going on and that’s a great first step.” But what happens after that first step? Zuckerman warns that although social media can give the illusion of empowerment, it also runs the risk of diverting attention away from the knottier problems of longerlasting policy change. “We’re at a moment where trust in our major institutions is at an all-time low,” he says. “When you start losing trust in those institutions, you start losing your ability to change things. Social media is a place where people feel they can move the wheel, and they’re right – they can change the representation of a gun victim in mainstream media. They can build momentum around removing the Confederate flag. But the fear is that it might be harder to make these much bigger structural changes in education or wage policy or to have a conversation about our gun culture.” Some fear that certain actions are little more than publicity-seeking. When DeRay Mckesson recently visited South Carolina in the wake of the Charleston shooting, wearing the bright blue Patagonia bodywarmer he wears to protests, several residents took to Twitter to express their anxiety that his presence would stir up unrest and created the #GoHomeDeray hashtag. Oprah Winfrey, too, publicly aired her concern in an interview with People magazine at the beginning of the year. “It’s wonderful to march and to protest,” she said. “What I’m looking for is some kind of leadership to come out of this to say: ‘This is what we want. This is what has to change.’” On Twitter, she was condemned as being “out of touch”. It is perhaps inevitable, as a movement gains in ground and size, that divisions will appear, that its focus will become messier. Alicia Garza talks of how #BlackLivesMatter has been appropriated by other, well meaning groups who have tried to adapt the message to state that “All Lives Matter”. “The reality, of course, is that they do,” Garza says, “but we live in a world where some lives matter more than others. ‘All Lives Matter’ effectively neutralises the fact that it’s black people who are fighting for their lives right now.” And then there are the inter-generational tensions. Some younger activists are wary of being dubbed “the new civil rights movement” because such a label undermines the traumatic nature of what is being faced in the present moment by black Americans and also because the new movement has not yet had the chance to mature, making any comparison unbalanced. Some resent the reverence accorded men such as Al Sharpton, Jesse Jackson and Harry Belafonte, who, in their eyes, represent a bygone era and who turn up in cities to hold press conferences only after the hard protest work has been done on the ground. They fear that the peaceful protests advocated by these elder statesman have little impact; that change will only be achieved by more assertive action. Last December, there was a march organised by Sharpton’s National Action Network in Washington DC. Johnetta Elzie was one of several younger campaigners who climbed on to the stage, yelling into the microphone “We started this!” In the crowd, someone else held up a sign stating in vivid green letters: “We, the youth, did not elect Al Sharpton our spokesperson. Have a seat.” When I speak to Jesse Jackson, he is sanguine about such incidents. “Well some of them [the younger generation of campaigners] are respectful and some of them aren’t,” he says, talking over a crackling phone line just after attending the funeral service for the Charleston Nine. “But you’re not protected from racism by age or by class. The fact is, there’s no hiding place. We’ve got to work together. “There’s been nothing more dynamic in America over the last 12 months than these mass marches. There’s a backlash. This is a mammoth backlash and it needs to happen.” And there is evidence of real change if you look for it: charges were filed against six Baltimore police officers in May relating to the death of Freddie Gray and it is likely that police reform will be an unavoidable subject in the forthcoming presidential campaign. But Freddie Gray is still dead. So are many more black people who died in police custody this year. That’s the real issue. Back in Oakland, Alicia Garza is reflecting on how much has happened since her original Facebook post, which became the hashtag that launched a thousand protests. Progress has been made, she says, and yet there is so much further left to travel. “I have to be honest,” she says. “I feel like I live in a constant state of rage and I think a lot of black people do… It’s more than depressing to me. It makes me angry, particularly when people try to deny it’s happening.” When she was younger, Garza wanted to be an architect. She liked the idea of “figuring out how to create something from nothing”. And, in truth, she and her two friends have ended up doing just that. Not by building a house, but by building a movement from the foundations up. newsweek.com Does Black Lives Matter Pick Up Where The Black Panthers Left Off? Sean Elder “You tell all those white folks in Mississippi that all the scared niggers are dead.” So said Stokely Carmichael at the birth of the Black Power movement in the 1960s. The Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee organizer wasn’t feeling so nonviolent after spending a few years watching police beat civil rights protesters with billy clubs in the South. With the Lowndes County Freedom Organization, Carmichael and other SNCC members tried to overthrow the all-white power structure running that majority-black Alabama county in 1965. They failed, but the group’s symbol—a lunging black panther—endured, claws out, teeth sharp, ready to bite. Google “Black Panther” today, and the first hit is the superhero slated for big-screen treatment in 2017. That Black Panther debuted in Marvel Comics’ Fantastic Four in 1966—the same year Oakland college students Bobby Seale and Huey Newton founded the Black Panther Party, 50 years ago this October. Both superhero and mortal men took their name from Carmichael’s ferocious feline, but the real-life Panthers had more style than the cat in the cat suit. The Afro, the leather jacket, the shades—that look has been referenced in films such as Forrest Gump and in Beyoncé’s 2016 halftime Super Bowl show, where she and her dancers freaked out Breitbart News just by donning black berets. But the real Black Panther Party (BPP) was a lot more than superfly costumes. It was a group of utopian visionaries who sought to serve the oppressed and underserved communities not with guns (though they had those) but by demanding food, housing, education and so on. “There have been these blaxploitation cutouts [that stand in for] the way we think of these historical figures,” says Alondra Nelson, author of Body and Soul: The Black Panther Party and the Fight Against Medical Discrimination. “These were human beings; they weren’t angels. There’s lots of complicated stuff. There was gun violence. People were murdered…. This was a complicated organization. But there’s still lots we don’t know about the breadth of the party.” That was, in part, by design: Early on, the FBI set out to discredit and destroy the BPP by infiltrating the group and setting members against one another. Drugs, egos and disorganization also contributed to the problem. At times, it seemed the Panthers didn’t need any help breaking up the band. “Do you think anyone still cares about the Black Panthers?” I was asked last month at a dinner party in Oakland, California, just miles from Merritt College, where students Newton and Seale came up with the party’s 10-point program and flipped a coin 1 to see who would be chairman. (Seale won; Newton became minister of defense.) And this was from someone who had produced a documentary about Mumia Abu-Jamal, the former Black Panther on death row for killing a Philadelphia police officer in 1981. Maybe people don’t. Most ex-Panthers are in their 70s now and probably not in your Twitter feed. The Black Panthers march in protest at the trial of Newton, who was convicted of voluntary manslaughter in the death of an Oakland police officer. Getty Images As Black Lives Matter is doing today, the Panthers responded forcefully to police brutality (with guns instead of cellphones), but they also fed thousands and opened health clinics for the poor. And as indicated by recent police shootings and protests—Tulsa, Oklahoma, and Charlotte, North Carolina, in September and perhaps somewhere else by the time you read this— their mission remains unfulfilled. “‘Black Lives Matter’ is a call to action and a response to the virulent anti-black racism that still permeates the American landscape,” Seale wrote last year. Yet some have a hard time figuring out what principles underlie the movement and what, specifically, it hopes to achieve. “I’m not sure what your point is in raising all the names of these people who are dead if you don’t have a real plan for what to do,” says Elaine Brown, chairwoman of the BPP from 1974 to 1977, about Black Lives Matter. “And they don’t seem to have a plan. Our plan was revolution. We had an ideology; it was called revolution.” ‘Barely Escaped a Lynching’ “A toddler named Huey Newton was spirited from Monroe [Louisiana] to Oakland with his sharecropper parents in 1943,” Isabel Wilkerson wrote in The Warmth of Other Suns, her award-winning book about the African-American diaspora. “His father had barely escaped a lynching in Louisiana for talking back to his white overseers. Huey Newton would become perhaps the most militant of the disillusioned offspring of the Great Migration.” Billy X. Jennings was Newton’s aide in the early 1970s and is now the party’s unofficial historian; his website, It’s About Time, is a clearinghouse for all things Panther. Jennings’s parents were from Anniston, Alabama, where locals torched a Freedom Riders bus in 1961. “First thing we did when we came to California was my dad had to buy my mom a TV,” says Jennings. “Every day, we’d watch Walter Cronkite breaking down what’s going on, and my mother used to get so mad at Bull Connor and the rest of those racists, she would get up and turn off the TV, boiling mad. She’d look at me and say, ‘Boy, don’t you never let nobody treat you like that!’” The Panthers were born at a time when police violence went largely unreported, and political assassinations were as much a staple of the daily news as shootings at schools and malls are today. Small wonder these guys wanted to take up arms. “I was highly influenced by Martin Luther King at first and then later Malcolm X,” Seale said in 1988. (He declined to be interviewed by Newsweek; Newton was murdered by a member of a drug-dealing gang in 1989, not far from where he grew up in Oakland.) “Largely, the Black Panther Party came out of a lot of readings.” Armed with guns and law books, Seale and Newton began “police patrols”: They and other members of their nascent party would drive around Oakland’s black neighborhoods and pull over to observe cops who had stopped citizens, often without cause. (Both Keith Scott in Charlotte and Terence Crutcher in Tulsa were shot by police who stopped them and believed them to be armed.) “The guns [were] loaded,” Seale recalled. “They're not pointing at anyone because we also know [under] California Penal Code [that] constitutes assault with a deadly weapon.” Their interventions were dramatic and began to win the Panthers respect in the community. “Ultimately, they made a law against us, to stop us from carrying guns,” Seale said. “That's how legal we were.” Newton sits in front of a poster of himself on a rattan throne, a spear in one hand and a rifle in the other, that adorned many a dorm room wall. Ted Streshinsky/Corbis/Getty On May 2, 1967, a contingent of about 30 Panthers went to the state Capitol in Sacramento to protest legislation to ban the public display of loaded weapons—a bill inspired by those armed Black Panthers. Governor Ronald Reagan was on the lawn in front of the building, talking to a group of parochial schoolchildren when the Panthers arrived. Reporters quickly abandoned Reagan and the kids to photograph the armed revolutionaries strolling toward the Capitol steps. “Who in the hell are all these niggers with guns?” a security guard asked, and after the Panthers marched into the assembly chamber, their rifles pointed toward the ceiling, some legislators took cover. The group was ordered to leave, and many of the Panthers, including Seale, were arrested for “disturbing the peace.” The sight of those gun-toting black men and women only helped the legislation get passed: The Mulford Act (aka the “Panthers Bill”) had the support of Reagan and the National Rifle Association, and California still has some of the strictest open-carry laws in the nation. But the Panthers were never really about the guns; their 10point program demanded jobs, housing, health care and control over the institutions that affected black people’s lives. Though the sight of armed black men in the streets of Oakland was a real conversation starter, guns were not going to awaken people to what the Panthers saw as institutionalized racism, let alone win the revolution. “If we had pooled our guns together from all over the country and were prepared to fight, we would not have won a battle against the LAPD,” says Brown. (The Los Angeles police engaged in a four-hour shootout with six Panthers in 1969; though they ultimately surrendered, and no one was killed that day, the news footage of half a dozen men battling 200 cops, not to mention the nation’s first SWAT team, made an indelible 2 impression.) And while the defiant image of the group resonated with a lot of young people (a poster of Newton in a rattan throne, a spear in one hand and a rifle in the other, adorned many a dorm room wall), it clearly scared the hell out of the authorities. “If you talk about revolution against the state,” says Peniel Joseph, author of Waiting ’til the Midnight Hour: A Narrative History of Black Power in America, “the state responds accordingly!” In the early hours of October 28, 1967, Newton and another Panther were stopped by Oakland policeman John Frey; Newton produced a law book and, after Frey insulted him and struck him in the face, a gun. Frey was killed in the melee, and a wounded Newton nearly became the BPP’s first martyr. Newton was convicted of voluntary manslaughter. “Free Huey” became the movement’s rallying cry, and in 1970 his conviction was reversed on appeal. (Another Panther who’d been on the scene took the Fifth when asked if he might have “by chance” shot Frey.) By then, the BPP had grown to over 50 chapters, boasting thousands of new members. And while many of those new recruits came for the guns, they stayed for the ideology. Jamal Joseph was 15 when he entered a BPP office in Brooklyn, New York, in 1968. Joseph was an honor student who had been radicalized by the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. and was eager to join the Black Panthers. “My friends had told me I’d have to prove myself and probably have to kill a white dude, if not a white cop,” he recalls. “Jumping up in the meeting, not really listening to someone explaining the 10-point program, I said, ‘Choose me, brother! I’m ready to kill a white dude!’ The whole room gets quiet. The brother that was running the meeting calls me up front and looks me up and down, real hard. He was sitting at a wooden desk and reaches into the bottom drawer. My heart was pounding, like, Oh my god, he’s gonna give me a bigass gun!’ And he hands me a stack of books: The Autobiography of Malcolm X, Soul on Ice by Eldridge Cleaver, The Wretched of the Earth by Franz Fanon, the famous Little Red Book [Q uotations From Chairman Mao Zedong ] we all carried. “And I said, ‘Excuse me, brother, I thought you were going to arm me.’ And he said, ‘Excuse me, young brother: I just did.’” 3 Black Panther Eldridge Cleaver stands beside a bulletriddled campaign poster in the window of the party’s headquarters in 1968. AP America’s Scariest Breakfast Ideas are far more dangerous than guns; sometimes, so are pancakes. The communist ideas Seale and Newton had discovered in college fit with their view of racial oppression in America; they were also anathema to most of “the Greatest Generation” and (not coincidentally) of renewed interest to their kids. (The Panthers made money selling Quotations from Chairman Mao Zedong to University of California, Berkeley, students for a dollar, after buying them for a quarter.) But to reach deep into the black community, the party needed to be more than just articulate and well-read; they needed to provide safety, education, food. “The germ of the social programs was always in the party’s original imagining of itself,” says Nelson. In January 1969, the Panthers started serving breakfast for kids at St. Augustine’s Church in Oakland at no charge; the Free Breakfast for Children program went national and was soon feeding 10,000 kids a day. The press loved it, and people liked seeing Panthers serving pancakes. Not all people, of course. The FBI had already infiltrated the BPP, and much of the internal strife that finally tore the party apart was stoked by informants—and obsessively monitored by J. Edgar Hoover, who called the Black Panthers “the greatest threat to the internal security of this country.” It was in the early ’70s that Cointelpro, the bureau’s secret program to disrupt revolutionary groups, was most active. “What Hoover feared about the BPP the most was not the berets and the guns,” says Jamal Joseph. “It was the Panther breakfast program. He thought this was the most subversive program in America…. He was right in that it was a formidable organizing tool because we used the breakfast program to point out to kids that not only do you have the right to eat, but what kind of country do you live in that you have to go to school hungry?” And breakfast was the least radical of the group’s demands. Revised in 1972, the 10-point platform says, “We want completely free health care for all Black and oppressed people,” and starting around that time the Panthers began pushing for that in their communities. “The Panther encouraged all their social programs, but didn’t provide resources to develop them,” says Nelson. “They had to figure it out for themselves…. They had to find their own volunteers and doctors, nurses, medical supplies.” The idealistic medical personnel they recruited were inspired by the example of the Medical Community for Human Rights, a group of doctors who’d participated in 1964’s Freedom Summer. And the DIY clinics that sprang up in storefronts and trailers in cities across the country, where people would come for emergencies or to be screened for sickle cell anemia, were part of a larger trend. The Haight-Ashbury Free Medical Clinic in San Francisco had opened in 1967 to treat residents for crabs and bad acid trips, while the Boston Women’s Health Clinic begat the feminist health bible, Our Bodies, Ourselves. “I think it would be impossible today to do what the Panthers would do, which would be to go to a storefront, take some equipment and some doctors, or people with training, and set up a clinic,” says Nelson. You’d need to have the existing health care structure utterly decimated—as it was in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina in 2005. Two days after Katrina ripped through the city, when bodies were still floating in the flooded streets and President George W. Bush was flying overhead, former Black Panther Malik Rahim started the Common Ground Clinic, says Nelson. “When asked, ‘How in the world are you going to do this when the city is destroyed?’ he’d say, ‘We did this when we were Panthers.’” Members of the Black Panther party demonstrate outside the Criminal Courts Building in New York on May 1, 1969, one month after 21 Panthers were charged with plotting to dynamite city stores, a police station and a railroad right-of-way. Jack Manning/New York Times/Getty Chairman Mau-Mau “History doesn’t repeat itself, but it does rhyme.” While there’s no evidence Mark Twain actually said that, it’s the sort of expression historians use to explain similarities and differences between then and now, and groups as diverse as the Panthers, which took root in the ghetto, and Black Lives Matter, born on the internet. By 1970, the Panthers had achieved celebrity status, and their fundraisers for the Panther 21 (New York members arrested on charges of planning bombings throughout the city) were held in some of Manhattan’s swankiest apartments. Tom Wolfe attended one at Leonard Bernstein’s home and lampooned the proceedings in the New York magazine article “These Radical Chic Evenings”: “‘I’ve never met a Panther,’ one of the attendees told Bernstein’s wife; ‘this is a first for me!’… never dreaming that within forty-eight hours her words will be on the desk of the President of the United States.” (Richard Nixon shared Hoover’s obsession with the Panthers and the white liberals who supported them.) Almost 50 years later, members of Black Liver Matter were invited to the White House to meet with President Barack Obama, who later criticized the group for not moving beyond protest. “Once you’ve highlighted an issue and brought it to people’s attention and shined a spotlight, and elected officials or people who are in a position to start bringing about change are ready to sit down with you, then you can’t just keep on yelling at them,” Obama said. This was December 2014, while there were people protesting police shootings in large numbers across the country, shutting down roads and malls in the run-up to 4 the holiday season. When one of those in attendance said they felt their voices weren’t being heard, Obama said, “You are sitting in the Oval Office, talking to the president of the United States.” after he was shot by a white policeman—proved as galvanizing as that of Huey on the throne. “It felt like that meeting was, ‘Come and sit down, and let’s figure out how we can get back to business as usual,’” says Ashley Yates, a Black Lives Matter activist from Oakland who was there. “I don’t know how helpful it was, but it did feel like in that moment we were seen,” she says. “But it also felt like Obama was taking that moment to tell us to go slower, something we talked about later. A little bit of both, a little bit of politician double-talk—‘It’s a long fight, guys, and since it’s a long fight, you might want to save your breath.’ And we’re like, ‘We have enough to go hard.’” Call it another of those rhyming-history moments: President Lyndon B. Johnson said something similar to King during the civil rights struggle, sometimes in that same room. One obvious difference between then and now is that Obama is our nation’s first black president; another is that today’s Black Lives Matter movement has less clear goals than ending segregation (such as “dismantling the patriarchal practice that requires mothers to work ‘double shifts’” and “embracing and making space for trans brothers and sisters”) “I think just the declaration ‘Black lives matter’ is everything that the Panthers were about,” says Yates. “Just saying that black people are worthy of defense, that black people are worthy.” The 31-year-old spokeswoman has history with the BPP. While a member of the Legion of Black Collegians at the University of Missouri, Yates brought Fred Hampton Jr. to speak on campus. Hampton, son of the Chicago BPP leader murdered by Chicago police in 1969, was in his mother’s womb at the time of the shooting; today, he is chairman of the Prisoners of Conscience Committee, which bills itself as “a revolutionary organization.” “I don’t think we have the analysis as a movement at large that the Panthers did around imperialism, internationalism, international solidarity and what it really means to push against the American empire,” Yates says. “My generation and this movement have just started to see that [for us], one of the largest forms of oppression is not Cointelpro; we talk about diversion tactics, divide and conquer, but what we’re really trying to raise [is] the tactic of imprisonment as a tactic of oppression.” Their issues may not fit easily on a placard, but the image of Michael Brown’s body—lying uncovered on the street in Ferguson, Missouri, for hours 5 Armed members of the Black Panthers Party stand in the corridor of the Capitol in Sacramento on May 2, 1967 protesting a bill before an Assembly committee restricting the carrying of arms in public. Walt Zeboski/AP Chicago Police Killed the ‘Black Messiah’ The idea of “community” has morphed since the Panthers’ time and even Obama’s days as a community organizer in Chicago. “I think Black Lives Matter is absolutely connected to the larger civil rights–Black Power period,” says Peniel Joseph. “It’s rooted in the same fight, but things have changed because the black community has become much more stratified, much more geographically separated than it was 50 years ago.” Born in the wake of the Trayvon Martin shooting, Black Lives Matter went from a hashtag to a national movement in the summer of 2014 with the sometimes violent protests that followed the shooting of Brown. Social media allows the movement and its most recognizable figures to remain in touch in ways the Panthers could hardly have imagined. Black Lives Matter spokesman DeRay Mckesson, for instance, posted a video on Periscope of himself getting arrested in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, following the police shooting of Philandro Castile, in July 2016. “All we had were transistor radios and walkie-talkies, mimeograph machines,” says Jennings of the Panthers’ early days. “It took until 1994 and Rodney King getting his ass kicked for people to believe that there was really police brutality going on. And look at all the thousands of people who took ass-kickings way before that time!” (Forty-six years after it was recorded, Gil Scott-Heron’s “The Revolution Will Not Be Televised” remains prophetic, if somewhat ironic: “There will be no pictures of pigs shooting down brothers on the instant replay.”) Though the methods for distributing cellphone, dashboard and body cam videos have made the outrage more instantaneous (and incontrovertible), some exPanthers feel there’s no substitute for organizing. “It’s almost like we have too much information,” says Jamal Joseph. “People spend so much time on their devices, reading on their laptops, that we’re not getting in the same room the way we did.” (Or as Yates says, “It’s a lot easier to establish yourself as an expert who has done things in the movement when you’re sitting at home tweeting.” ) Political process is less stimulating than protest, but it’s where many revolutionaries end up after trying to change the system from without. By the early ’70s, the Panthers were shifting from agitating to campaigning. Seale ran for mayor of Oakland in 1972 and lost in a runoff; Brown ran unsuccessfully for City Council twice before managing the campaign of Lionel Wilson, who became Oakland’s first black mayor in 1977. Black Lives Matter’s Mckesson, currently the interim chief of human capital for Baltimore City Public Schools, ran for mayor of that city this year. “An outside-only strategy is not a strategy to win,” he says. “The Black Panthers serve as an important model for a way to organize and have inspired activists and organizers in continuing to develop new ways of organizing as tools change and the context changes.” The Panthers will have a chance to inspire more people in Oakland this month; the Oakland Museum is opening an exhibition called “All Power to the People: Black Panthers at 50,” and there will be reunions of both party members and people from affiliated groups, such as the Brown Berets, the Young Lords and a largely forgotten white group from Chicago called the Young Patriots, who had met with Fred Hampton, the charismatic leader Hoover privately feared was the “black messiah” who would unite the disparate revolutionary groups of the ’60s. Bill Whitfield, a member of the Black Panther Party chapter in Kansas City, serves free breakfast to children before they go to school on April 16, 1969. The FBI feared the Panthers for their breakfast program because of its potential as a community organizing tool. William P. Straeter/AP Joseph was one of the Panther 21 (who were acquitted of all 156 charges in 1971) and later, the Black Liberation Army, which ambushed police in the ’70s. He served time in Leavenworth for his involvement in the 1981 Brink’s robbery in which two security guards were killed and earned two college degrees while inside. Today, he is a professor at Columbia University, “of which I used to say, ‘Let’s burn this damn place down!’” He is often called upon to speak to young black activists. “When I talk about it, I get a little dismayed,” he says. “I give a pretty good speech, a pretty good pep talk. They take it to heart, and then they leave and get right back on their news feed, you know what I mean? ‘Panthers were cool,’ they tweet, and then go back to what they were doing.” 6 “They organized the same way the BPP did, around tenants’ rights,” recalls Brown, even though they were not the most natural of allies. “Some of them would have jackets with a Confederate flag sewed on them, and they were working with the BPP to the point where, when Fred Hampton was killed, many of them were calling him Chairman Fred. I’m talking about tobaccochewing, teeth-missing, no-shoe-wearing, call me ‘nigger’ [guys]—that’s what I’m talking about. I’m not talking about the SDS [Students for a Democratic Society] white people who went to school in Berkeley. I’m talking about some serious white people.” Brown believes that if the Young Patriots had survived, “these people would not be voting for Donald Trump.” But maybe revolutionary groups are built to fall apart. “The goal of the BPP was not to have every member of the black community become a Panther,” says Joseph. “The goal of the party was to show people the possibility of struggle, the possibility of fighting for your freedom. “We wanted to make ourselves obsolete.”
User generated content is uploaded by users for the purposes of learning and should be used following Studypool's honor code & terms of service.

This question has not been answered.

Create a free account to get help with this and any other question!

Related Tags