User:DraconicDark/Black Lives Matter Portal
Portal maintenance status: (February 2019)
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Introduction
Black Lives Matter (BLM) is a decentralized political and social movement that seeks to highlight racism, discrimination, and racial inequality experienced by black people and to promote anti-racism. Its primary concerns are police brutality and racially motivated violence against black people. The movement began in response to the killings of Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown, Eric Garner, and Rekia Boyd, among others. BLM and its related organizations typically advocate for various policy changes related to black liberation and criminal justice reform. While there are specific organizations that label themselves "Black Lives Matter", such as the Black Lives Matter Global Network Foundation, the overall movement is a decentralized network with no formal hierarchy. , there are about 40 chapters in the United States and Canada. The slogan "Black Lives Matter" itself has not been trademarked by any group.
In 2013, activists and friends Alicia Garza, Patrisse Cullors, and Opal Tometi originated the hashtag #BlackLivesMatter on social media following the acquittal of George Zimmerman in the shooting death of African-American teen Trayvon Martin. Black Lives Matter became nationally recognized for street demonstrations following the 2014 deaths of two more African Americans, Michael Brown—resulting in protests and unrest in Ferguson, Missouri—and Eric Garner in New York City. Since the Ferguson protests, participants in the movement have demonstrated against the deaths of numerous other African Americans by police actions or while in police custody. In the summer of 2015, Black Lives Matter activists became involved in the 2016 United States presidential election.
The movement gained international attention during global protests in 2020 following the murder of George Floyd by Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin. An estimated 15 to 26 million people participated in Black Lives Matter protests in the United States, making it one of the largest protest movements in the country's history. Despite being characterized by opponents as violent, the overwhelming majority of BLM demonstrations have been peaceful.
The popularity of Black Lives Matter has shifted over time, largely due to changing perceptions among white Americans. In 2020, 67% of adults in the United States expressed support for the movement, declining to 51% of U.S. adults in 2023. Support among people of color has, however, held strong, with 81% of African Americans, 61% of Hispanics and 63% of Asian Americans expressing support for Black Lives Matter as of 2023. (Full article...)
Selected general articles
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Melina Reimann Abdullah (born September 18, 1972) is an American academic and civic leader. She is the former chair of the department of Pan-African Studies at California State University, Los Angeles, and is a co-founder of the Los Angeles chapter of Black Lives Matter and Black Lives Matter Grassroots, for which she also serves as co-director.
As an original member of the group that convened to form Black Lives Matter, she serves as a matriarch for the current movement in Los Angeles. In addition to organizing work with BLM Los Angeles, she has hosted three local radio shows, "Move the Crowd" and "Beautiful Struggle" on KPFK and "This Is Not a Drill" on KBLA. (Full article...) -
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White Lives Matter (WLM) is a white supremacist slogan that emerged in 2015 as a reaction to the Black Lives Matter social justice movement that started a few years prior. The phrase has been used by neo-Nazis, Neo-Confederates, and other white supremacist groups to recruit new members into white supremacist movements and demonstrations. Proponents of the slogan argue that they use it to raise awareness against a supposed "white genocide" and build support for a white ethnostate, and it has been frequently found at "pro-white" rallies across the United States. (Full article...) -
Image 3Save the Boards is an American nonprofit organization based in Minneapolis that collects and preserves street art that emerged during local protests of the murder of George Floyd in 2020. (Full article...)
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Image 4On August 23, 2020, Jacob S. Blake, a 29-year-old black man, was shot and seriously injured by police officer Rusten Sheskey in Kenosha, Wisconsin. Sheskey shot Blake in the back four times and the side three times after Blake opened the driver's door of an SUV belonging to the mother of his children, and attempted to reach inside. Sheskey said that he believed he was about to be stabbed, since Blake was holding a knife. Earlier during the encounter, Blake had been tasered by two officers, but the tasers failed to disable him and he continued toward the vehicle.
Blake had a warrant for his arrest from July, based on charges of third-degree felony sexual assault and trespassing and disorderly conduct for domestic abuse in May. Both Kenosha Police Chief Daniel Miskinis and the Kenosha Professional Police Association stated that the officers dispatched on August 23 were aware of the pending warrant for Blake before they arrived on scene; dispatch records confirm this. (Full article...) -
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The death of Abdirahman Abdi, a Somali-Canadian, occurred on July 24, 2016, in the neighbourhood of Hintonburg in Ottawa, Ontario. Abdi died in an incident with the Ottawa Police Service. (Full article...) -
Image 6On August 24, 2023, Ta'Kiya Young, a 21-year-old woman, was shot to death by a police officer in Blendon Township, Ohio after she accelerated her vehicle. The shooting occurred after police attempted to question her about shoplifting from a local grocery store. (Full article...)
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The shooting of Antonio Martin occurred on December 23, 2014, in Berkeley, Missouri, a suburb of St. Louis. Martin, an 18-year-old black male, was fatally shot by a white Berkeley police officer when Martin pulled a gun on him. The shooting sparked protests in the St. Louis area and other cities in the U.S. The shooting elicited comparison to the earlier shooting death of Michael Brown two miles away in Ferguson, Missouri. (Full article...) -
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Janaya Khan is a social activist from Toronto, Ontario, Canada. Khan is a co-founder of Black Lives Matter Toronto as well as an international ambassador for the Black Lives Matter Network. Much of their work analyzes intersectional topics including the Black Lives Matter movement, queer theory, Black feminism, and organized protest strategies. (Full article...) -
Image 9
In the aftermath of the August 2020 police shooting of Jacob Blake, protests, riots, and civil unrest occurred in Kenosha, Wisconsin, and around the United States as part of the larger United States racial unrest and Black Lives Matter movements. In addition to street protests, marches, and demonstrations, the shooting also led to the 2020 American athlete boycotts.
The demonstrations were marked by daily peaceful protesting followed by confrontations with law enforcement, rioting, and arson at night. A state of emergency was declared on August 23, and the National Guard was activated the following day. Further confrontations arose when armed militia members, whom Kenosha County Sheriff David Beth described as "like a group of vigilantes", arrived with the expressed intent of protecting businesses in the city. (Full article...) -
Image 10The killing of John Crawford III occurred on August 5, 2014. Crawford was a 22-year-old African-American man shot and killed by a police officer in a Walmart store in Beavercreek, Ohio, near Dayton, while he was holding a BB gun that was for sale in the store. The shooting was captured on surveillance video and led to protests from groups including the NAACP and the Black Lives Matter movement.
A grand jury declined to indict the two officers involved on criminal charges. The City of Beavercreek eventually settled civil claims for wrongful death brought by Crawford's estate and family. (Full article...) -
Image 11
During the civil unrest that followed the murder of George Floyd in May 2020, a number of monuments and memorials associated with racial injustice were vandalized, destroyed or removed, or commitments to remove them were announced. This occurred mainly in the United States, but also in several other countries. Some of the monuments in question had been the subject of lengthy, years-long efforts to remove them, sometimes involving legislation and/or court proceedings. In some cases the removal was legal and official; in others, most notably in Alabama and North Carolina, laws prohibiting the removal of monuments were deliberately broken.
Initially, protesters targeted monuments related to the Confederate States of America. As the scope of the protests broadened to include other forms of systemic racism, many statues of other controversial figures such as Christopher Columbus, Junípero Serra, Juan de Oñate and Kit Carson were torn down or removed. Monuments to many other local figures connected with racism were also targeted by protestors.. Statues of American slave owners such as Thomas Jefferson, George Washington, Ulysses S. Grant, and Francis Scott Key were also vandalised or removed. According to the Huffington Post, by October 2020 over a hundred Confederate symbols had been "removed, relocated or renamed", based on data from the Southern Poverty Law Center. (Full article...) -
Image 12A "Black Lives Matter" street mural was painted in Capitol Hill, Seattle, in the U.S. state of Washington in June 2020. Maintained by the Seattle Department of Transportation, the artwork has survived longer than many Black Lives Matter street murals across the United States. (Full article...)
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Image 13Brit(ish): On Race, Identity and Belonging is a 2018 book by the journalist Afua Hirsch. The book is part-memoir and discusses black history, culture and politics in the context of Britain, Senegal and Ghana. It received mixed critical reception. (Full article...)
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Image 14"Riot" is a song by American rapper and singer XXXTentacion. It was originally released on SoundCloud in May 2015, before being re-released posthumously for streaming services on June 1, 2020, amid the George Floyd protests. The re-released version is slightly shorter than the original, cutting a large portion of a speech from former Ku Klux Klan leader Jeff Berry, which was used to point out the rising danger of racism, homophobia, and antisemitism in the United States. (Full article...)
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Image 15
DeRay Mckesson (born July 9, 1985) is an American civil rights activist, podcaster, and former school administrator. An early supporter of the Black Lives Matter movement, he has been active in the protests in Ferguson, Missouri, and Baltimore, Maryland and on social media outlets such as Twitter and Instagram. He has also written for HuffPost and The Guardian. Along with Johnetta Elzie, Brittany Packnett, and Samuel Sinyangwe, Mckesson launched Campaign Zero, a policy platform to end police violence. He is currently part of Crooked Media and hosts Pod Save the People.
On February 3, 2016, Mckesson announced his candidacy in the 2016 Baltimore mayoral election. He finished with 3,445 votes (2.6%), placing sixth in the Democratic Party primary on April 26. (Full article...) -
Image 16
The police abolition movement is a political movement, mostly active in the United States, that advocates replacing policing with other systems of public safety. Police abolitionists believe that policing, as a system, is inherently flawed and cannot be reformed—a view that rejects the ideology of police reformists. While reformists seek to address the ways in which policing occurs, abolitionists seek to transform policing altogether through a process of disbanding, disempowering, and disarming the police. Abolitionists argue that the institution of policing is deeply rooted in a history of white supremacy and settler colonialism and that it is inseparable from a pre-existing racial capitalist order, and thus believe a reformist approach to policing will always fail.
Police abolition is a process that requires communities to create alternatives to policing. This process involves the deconstruction of the preconceived understandings of policing and resisting co-option by reformists. It also involves engaging in and supporting practices that reduce police power and legitimacy, such as defunding the police. (Full article...) -
Image 17"Shopping while black" is a phrase used for the type of marketplace discrimination that is also called "consumer racial profiling", "consumer racism" or "racial profiling in a retail setting", as it applies to black people. Shopping while black is the experience of being denied service or given poor service because one is black. (Full article...)
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Image 18
Black Guns Matter is an organization aimed at educating African Americans about gun culture in the United States, primarily around defending Second Amendment rights. The organization is led by Maj Toure, who founded it in 2016. Black Guns Matter has hosted workshops in multiple cities to teach the basics of firearm safety, U.S. gun laws, and conflict resolution. (Full article...) -
Image 19On August 7, 2020, Julian Edward Roosevelt Lewis, an unarmed 60-year-old Black American carpenter, was fatally shot by white Georgia State Patrol officer Jacob Gordon Thompson, on a rural road in Screven County, Georgia. Thompson attempted to stop Lewis for driving a vehicle with a broken tail light. When Lewis failed to stop, Thompson performed a PIT maneuver to force Lewis's car into a ditch and shot Lewis once in the face. On August 14, Thompson was charged with felony murder. (Full article...)
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Image 20
Aalayah Eastmond (born March 22, 2001) is an American activist and advocate for gun violence prevention, social justice, and racial equality. After surviving the Stoneman Douglas High School shooting, Eastmond began her activism during the 2018 United States gun violence protests. She has testified multiple times to the U.S. Congress. Eastmond is an executive council member of Team Enough, a youth-led gun violence prevention organization which is part of the Brady Campaign. Eastmond co-founded Concerned Citizens of DC in the wake of the murder of George Floyd to organize protests supporting social justice issues in Washington, D.C. She supports Black Lives Matter and protests against police brutality. (Full article...) -
Image 21"Loyal Like Sid & Nancy" is a song by American indie pop band Foster the People from their third studio album, Sacred Hearts Club (2017). It was released on June 30, 2017, as the album's second single. (Full article...)
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Image 22Jocques Clemmons, a 31-year-old, was fatally shot on February 10, 2017, in Nashville, Tennessee, United States, after a traffic stop where Clemmons pulled out a gun, leading to a confrontation with Joshua Lippert, a 32-year-old police officer. After an investigation, the Davidson County District Attorney declined to prosecute Lippert on any charges, a decision that was protested by several groups. After reviews at several levels of the Nashville Police and Tennessee Bureau of Investigation's work and reports, the U.S. Department of Justice closed the case in August 2017. (Full article...)
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Image 23This is a list of protests and unrest in the United States between 2020 and 2023 against systemic racism towards black people in the United States, such as in the form of police violence. Following the murder of George Floyd, unrest broke out in the Minneapolis–Saint Paul area on May 26, 2020, and quickly spread across the country and the world. Further unrest quickly spread throughout the United States, sometimes including rioting, looting, and arson. By early June, at least 200 American cities had imposed curfews, while more than 30 states and Washington, D.C, had activated over 62,000 National Guard personnel into unrest. By the end of June, at least 14,000 people had been arrested at protests.
Polls have estimated that between 15 million and 26 million people have participated at some point in the demonstrations in the United States, making them the largest protests in United States history. It was also estimated that between May 26 and August 22, around 93% of protests were "peaceful and nondestructive". However, arson, vandalism, and looting during the George Floyd protests alone caused approximately $1–2 billion in damages nationally, the highest recorded damage from civil disorder in U.S. history, and surpassing the record set during the 1992 Los Angeles riots. In protests that involved violence, violence was variously instigated by protesters, counter-protesters, or police, and police sometimes escalated confrontations. (Full article...) -
Image 24There have been many incidents of police violence during the George Floyd protests, an ongoing series of protests and demonstrations against police brutality and racism in policing. The protests began on May 26, 2020, following the murder of George Floyd, a 46-year-old black man, by Derek Chauvin, a 44-year-old white man employed as a Minneapolis police officer, who knelt on Floyd's neck for 9 minutes and 29 seconds during an arrest the previous day.
Lawyer T. Greg Doucette and mathematician Jason Miller compiled a list of videos posted on Twitter showing evidence of alleged police brutality, which as of July 26, 2020 contained more than 830 videos. Investigative journalism website Bellingcat documented over 140 police violence incidents against journalists during the protests. The U.S. Press Freedom Tracker found there were almost as many press freedom violations in one week as for the entire year in 2019. (Full article...) -
Image 25The Ending Qualified Immunity Act is a proposed United States Act of Congress introduced in 2020 by Justin Amash (L-Michigan) and Ayanna Pressley (D-Massachusetts) to end qualified immunity in the United States. Qualified immunity shields police officers and other government officials from being held personally liable for discretionary actions performed within their official capacity (even if those actions violate the civil rights of those affected) unless their actions violate "clearly established" federal law, a precedent requiring both that those actions violate written law and that there be a judicial precedent establishing that such actions are unlawful.
The bill was re-introduced in the 117th Congress by Rep. Pressley in the House of Representatives and by Sen. Edward Markey in the Senate. (Full article...)
Did you know...
- ... that Arkansas legislator Denise Jones Ennett took part in a Black Lives Matter protest in front of the Arkansas State Capitol?
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Selected images
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Image 1Protests in May 2020 after George Floyd's death (from Black Lives Matter)
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Image 2Al Sharpton led the Commitment March: Get Your Knee Off Our Necks in Washington, D.C., on August 28, 2020 (from Black Lives Matter)
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Image 3Black Lives Matter protest in Aotea Square, Auckland, June 14, 2020 (from Black Lives Matter)
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Image 4Black Lives Matter Plaza in Washington, D.C., as seen from space on June 8, 2020 (from Black Lives Matter)
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Image 5Protest march in response to the Jamar Clark killing, Minneapolis, Minnesota, November 2015 (from Black Lives Matter)
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Image 7Vehicle with a BLM sticker, September 18, 2015 (from Black Lives Matter)
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Image 8"Black Lives Matter" on the facade of the Washington National Cathedral, June 10, 2020 (from Black Lives Matter)
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Image 9A Black Lives Matter die-in over rail tracks, protesting alleged police brutality in Saint Paul, Minnesota (September 20, 2015) (from Black Lives Matter)
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Image 11Bernie Sanders and Black Lives Matter activists in Westlake Park, Seattle, August 8, 2015 (from Black Lives Matter)
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Image 12Ferguson, Missouri, August 17, 2014 (from Black Lives Matter)
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Image 14Protest march in response to the killing of Philando Castile, St. Paul, Minnesota, July 7, 2016 (from Black Lives Matter)
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Image 15Demonstration at Christiansborg Slotsplads, Copenhagen, June 7, 2020 (from Black Lives Matter)
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Image 16Black Lives Matter protest at Herald Square, Manhattan, November 2014 (from Black Lives Matter)
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Image 17Black Lives Matter demonstration in Oakland, California, December 2014 (from Black Lives Matter)
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Image 18"What happened to 'All Lives Matter'?" sign at a protest against Donald Trump, January 29, 2017 (from Black Lives Matter)
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Image 20Protest outside the U.S. Embassy in London, June 7, 2020 (from Black Lives Matter)
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Image 21Map depicting rates of police killings by state in the United States in 2018 (from Black Lives Matter)
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Image 22Protest in response to the Alton Sterling killing, San Francisco, California, July 8, 2016 (from Black Lives Matter)
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Image 23A Black Lives Matter protest of police brutality in the rotunda of the Mall of America in Bloomington, Minnesota, in December 2014 (from Black Lives Matter)
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Image 25Black Lives Matter protest on September 20, 2015, against police brutality in St. Paul, Minnesota (from Black Lives Matter)
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Image 26The empty pedestal of the statue of Edward Colston in Bristol. Subject to increasing controversy since the 1990s, when his prior reputation as a philanthropist came under scrutiny due to a growing awareness of his slave trading, in June 2020 the statue was toppled, defaced and pushed into Bristol Harbour. (from Black Lives Matter)
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Image 27An activist holds a "Black Lives Matter" sign outside the Minneapolis Police Fourth Precinct building following the officer-involved killing of Jamar Clark on November 15, 2015 (from Black Lives Matter)
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Image 28Black Lives Matter protest against St. Paul police brutality at Metro Green Line, September 2015 (from Black Lives Matter)
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Image 29One-year commemoration of the killing of Michael Brown and the Ferguson unrest at Barclays Center in Brooklyn, New York, August 2015 (from Black Lives Matter)
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Image 30Black Lives Matter protester at Macy's Herald Square, November 2014 (from Black Lives Matter)
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Image 31A demonstrator raising awareness of the death of Freddie Gray in Baltimore, April 2015 (from Black Lives Matter)
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Image 32George Floyd protests at Lafayette Square, Washington D.C., May 30, 2020 (from Black Lives Matter)
In the news
- 16 May 2024 – Murder of Garrett Foster
- Texas Governor Greg Abbott pardons Daniel Perry, who was sentenced to 25 years in prison for killing a man at a Black Lives Matter protest in 2020. (The New York Times)
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