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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
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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,
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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
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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
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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
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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.
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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
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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.”
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“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.”