The neighbors called him “Mouse” because he was such a quiet kid. To his mom, he was “Cupcake.”
On the night of February 26, 2012, he was walking down the street, a lonely and bored seventeen-year-old.
His dad had gone out to dinner, leaving him at home to watch TV and play video games. He loved old sitcoms like Martin. He loved playing video games. But by 6 p.m. he was restless and wanted something to do.
Mouse occasionally got into trouble. He was suspended once for talking back to his teachers and another time he was suspended for spray-painting “WTF” on lockers. When his locker was opened after that incident, school officials found some jewelry inside, leading to suspicion that he had stolen it. But he was never charged with any crime.
For all the trouble at school, family and friends said that Mouse was one of the good kids in his Miami neighborhood, an awkward and often shy teenager. And his family knew him as a hero. When he was nine, he pulled his dad out of a kitchen fire after the older man had been burned by hot cooking oil and was unable to get himself up and out of danger.
In the neighborhood, Mouse liked to put on a tough front. He always wore a hooded sweatshirt and baggy jeans to cover his skinny, five-foot-eleven, 150-pound frame. He thought tattoos were cool, and his parents let him get ink on his thin arms, a pair of praying hands and the names of his grandmother (Cora Mae) and his great-grandmother (Nana). That was not very tough, but he bought some fake gold teeth he could put in his mouth to look like one of the hard guys in hip-hop music videos.
Three weeks earlier, shortly after he turned seventeen, Mouse had been suspended for a third time, when a marijuana pipe was found in his backpack. His dad wanted to send a strong message that the school suspensions had to stop. To take Mouse away from any bad influences in his Miami neighborhood, his father decided to have him spend some time living with him in Sanford, outside Orlando, four hours away. It was a strong punishment. Mouse was isolated, alone, and bored in a gated community of town houses. He couldn’t wait to get back to his friends in Miami.
It was raining that Sunday night. At around 7 p.m., Mouse walked out of a 7-Eleven, where he had bought a package of Skittles and an Arizona Iced Tea. He was chatting on his cell phone, talking to a girlfriend, Rachel Jeantel. He pulled up his hood to keep the rain off as he took his time walking home.
Parked in an SUV nearby, a volunteer community watch guard decided that the Black youngster looked suspicious. George Zimmerman, a stocky twenty-eight-year-old, five-foot-seven and about two hundred pounds, called the Sanford police to report that a Black kid was walking around the neighborhood slowly and looked suspicious. “He’s got his hand in his waistband. And he’s a Black male… these assholes, they always get away.”
The 911 operator told him not to stop the youngster.
But Mouse noticed Zimmerman eyeing him from the SUV. As he walked by, he told Rachel that the man in a nearby car was “creepy.” Listening over the phone, she later told lawyers she overheard him asking the man in the car why he was watching him. The response was “What are you doing here?”
Rachel later said she thought Mouse told him off and kept walking. But Zimmerman got out of the car and caught up with him on foot. This time the phone call was cut off. A fight erupted and Mouse’s earpiece fell out.
Later, a recording of another 911 call, this time from a neighbor, revealed sounds of people screaming and crying and then a gunshot.
Mouse’s dad was out at dinner and had no idea what had happened, even after coming home to sleep. To his surprise the next morning, his son wasn’t around. He called the police to report his son missing. When officers arrived at the house, they showed the father a crime scene photo of the dead boy, the victim of a gunshot to the chest. It was his child, Trayvon Martin.
Zimmerman claimed he shot Martin in self-defense as they fought in the street. Unlike Zimmerman, Martin had no weapon. And Zimmerman admitted to the police that he had initiated the confrontation. His conversation with the 911 operator was evidence that he had pursued Martin on baseless suspicions and contrary to the operator’s instruction. However, he said he got into a fight with Martin and used the gun to defend himself. Zimmerman had a bloody head wound and a broken nose.1
Police said there was nothing to refute Zimmerman’s claim of self-defense. Martin was dead, but the police did not treat Zimmerman as a murder suspect. He wasn’t handcuffed. He got first aid on the scene and went home. The next morning, he even returned to the crime scene to reenact the fight and the shooting. Did police know it was the shooter, not the Black teenager, who had the criminal record, an arrest for allegedly assaulting an undercover police officer?
A homicide detective, Christopher Serino, later said that he wanted Zimmerman charged with manslaughter. He noted that Zimmerman did not identify himself to police that night as a neighborhood watch volunteer. But Serino was apparently overruled. No charges were filed.2
Two weeks after the killing, in mid-March, the only news about the shooting remained small, initial reports. The 10 o’clock local news on WOFL television mentioned the shooting on the night after it occurred. But the station aired no videotape, no interviews with witnesses or neighbors.
A brief mention of the murder appeared in the online edition of the Orlando Sentinel, but the story did not make it into the print edition. An editor at the newspaper later explained that it seemed to be little more than a “fight gone bad.”3
Trayvon Martin’s grieving parents wanted the Sanford police to arrest the man who had shot their son. A relative put them in touch with Ben Crump, a personal injury lawyer known locally for using video footage to win a 2006 case involving the death of a fourteen-year-old Black boy named Martin Lee Anderson, who had died after being beaten by adult guards in a Florida youth reform camp.
In that case, Crump used grainy, dark surveillance video as the centerpiece of his argument that the state of Florida had put the child in danger. The video showed the boy being brutally beaten by camp guards. To settle the case, the state paid the family $5 million, with no further prosecutions made.
When Trayvon Martin’s family contacted Crump, the lawyer told the father his services wouldn’t be required. He later recalled, “I thought you got a dope with a 9-millimeter gun, a private citizen, and they shoot and kill an unarmed teenager who was on the phone, holding a bag of Skittles…. I believe the system is supposed to work… so I told him to take a couple of days” to see what happened.
The Martin family called back two days later, and Crump, still thinking the problem with the police could be easily corrected, agreed to help for free. His first move was to build public pressure for an arrest through a media campaign. This was the strategy he had used in the reform camp beating case. “The court of public opinion has a profound impact on the court of law,” he said.4
The first national news article about the parents’ dissatisfaction with the police was a Reuters wire-service story on March 7. The next day, CBS This Morning picked up the story. On camera, Tracy Martin, Trayvon’s dad, asked how police could dismiss the incident as a matter of self-defense when a man with a gun killed an unarmed Black boy. His face sagging with anguish, he said he couldn’t believe the man who killed his son had never been charged and had walked free.
“It was one of those stories that, when you hear the pitch, you just say ‘Wow, this has to be told,’ ” said CBS producer Chris Licht. “We knew we’d hit on something significant.”5
The story immediately became a sensation on social media, where minute-by-minute updates were available to a growing audience. Kevin Cunningham, a white lawyer in Washington, D.C., who had attended the historically Black Howard University Law School, read about the case on a listserv called “Men of Howard.” Cunningham started a petition calling for Zimmerman to be prosecuted.6
The petition collected ten thousand signatures. Soon the up-and-coming website Change.org asked Cunningham to transfer control of the petition drive to Martin’s parents.7
Change.org’s petition went viral when Black celebrities began tweeting about the murder. “Will you help spread the word about the petition #Trayvon Martin’s parents started,” wrote MC Hammer. Janelle Monae tweeted a link to the petition, adding, “Justice 4 #TrayvonMartin.” The campaign became the fastest growing campaign in Change.org’s history. Within days it received more than 250,000 signatures, eventually reaching over two million.8
Athletes jumped on, too. LeBron James and his Miami Heat teammates posed for a photograph wearing hoodies before a game against the Detroit Pistons to signal their support for Trayvon Martin and his family. Prince, the music superstar, called Rev. Al Sharpton and offered large donations to support both the family and the legal case.
Established civil rights groups now started to pick up on the growing national attention to Martin’s killing. “Trayvon’s murder mirrored hostility built into law enforcement from days of white supremacy,” said Wade Henderson, the president of the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights. The legacy organizations were getting on board a protest train driven by social media.9
Crump and Martin’s parents promoted a rally on March 21, 2013, in New York City, soon to be known as the “Million Hoodie March.” Celebrities, including P. Diddy and Nellie, also threw their support to the march and calls to prosecute Zimmerman.
The Million Hoodie March brought hundreds to Union Square alongside people still taking part in the ongoing Occupy Wall Street protest and the groups formed in opposition to Troy Davis’s execution.
At the march, Al Sharpton compared Martin’s mother, Sybrina Fulton, to the mother of Emmett Till, the Black teenager killed by Mississippi segregationists in 1955. Sharpton recounted how Till’s mother had refused to be silent about her son’s death, even choosing an open casket funeral to show the horrific beating her son had suffered before dying. She wanted the world to see the physical damage done by the evil of racial hate.
Fulton then addressed the crowd. “My heart is in pain,” she said, “but to see the support of all of you really makes a difference. This is not a Black and white thing—this is about a right and wrong thing.”10
Crump and the boy’s parents also organized a march in Florida. That day-long rally drew thousands to hear Martin’s father, and civil rights leaders like Jesse Jackson, the NAACP’s Ben Jealous, and Sharpton.
Though the story was boiling on social media, it was confined to a few paragraphs in most newspapers.
But shortly after the New York rally, President Obama put the story on mainstream media’s front pages. In an unscheduled White House news conference, he said: “If I had a son, he would look like Trayvon, and I think [his parents] are right to expect that all of us as Americans are going to take this with the seriousness it deserves.”11
Now it was clear that Trayvon Martin’s murder had hit a nerve. Unlike the reaction to Troy Davis, which had been limited to civil rights activists and a few celebrities, something very different was now in motion with Trayvon’s killing.
For the first time in history, the leader of the free world had called attention to the murder of a Black teenager. And this president of the United States spoke as a parent of Black teenagers. He also spoke knowledgeably about the threatening image of Black kids, implying that Martin had been targeted and killed by a neighborhood vigilante because he’d been wrongly suspected of being a criminal.
Nearly fifty years earlier, during the race riots and protests of the First Civil Rights Movement, President Lyndon Johnson had spoken out about racial violence. As a white man, Johnson could never have spoken about a Black boy’s death in the same way that Obama could. It was personal for Obama, and that made his message unique for America, especially for Black Americans, who expected him finally to take action, using the power of the presidency to deal with this personal racial injustice in a way that no other president ever had.
But despite his very personal statement, Obama stood back and took no further action to address the injustice. Just as he had done with Troy Davis, Obama said it was a matter for local officials. He said it was up to them to decide whether to prosecute and convict the shooter. He did not ask the Justice Department to intervene, nor did he challenge the “stand your ground” laws in Florida that were being discussed as Zimmerman’s possible defense.
The old Civil Rights Movement’s dream was to have Black people in power, at the controls of politics and police. Obama was in power, yet he acted only as a referee. He said that because he was the president of all the American people, he wouldn’t take any special level of response as a Black man.
The disconnect between the expectation that Obama would act as a savior and deliver justice and racial healing stood in contrast to political realities. Obama was focused on his 2012 reelection campaign. If he once again took sides in a racial fight, as he had done without popular success in the conflict between Henry Louis Gates and the white Cambridge police officer, it would cost him votes among white Americans and make him a one-term president. There was a disconnect between the president’s thinking as a politician and the sense of urgency among young Black activists demanding attention to racial wrongs.
Older civil rights leaders still supported Obama and felt he deserved their loyalty because he was the first Black president. But this controversy about Trayvon Martin’s death didn’t fit with the experience those veterans had during the First Movement. The public fury and media attention in response to this killing were quite different from what the reaction had been in the 1960s. Trayvon Martin was just an average kid. He was no Medgar Evers, a civil rights leader whose murder generated national attention. Anger on the street in those days was channeled into established organizations, like the NAACP.
But Martin’s parents had no ties to civil rights leaders. Their attorney, Crump, had no affiliation with activist groups. The young people rushing to demand justice for Martin’s death did not belong to any of the civil rights groups and had no interest in joining such organizations; in fact, they felt estranged from the overwhelmingly older, male leadership of the First Movement.
The biggest theme in the social media posts from young Black people centered on the idea that Trayvon Martin had done nothing wrong. He was not a criminal. He was just walking down the street. They made no apology for stories reporting on his love of “gangsta” rap music, his hoodie, or reports that he had been suspended from school.
Their defiant perspective led to a backlash from conservative talk radio and news. Just as segregationist newspapers and radio existed in the mid-twentieth century, mostly in the South, now there existed a modern right-wing media ecosystem to take up the cause.
Bill O’Reilly, a top-rated conservative host on the Fox News channel, had called Trayvon Martin’s death a sickening tragedy when it first happened. But as the movement built anger over the shooting and after Obama spoke out, O’Reilly shifted to defending Zimmerman. He played on the fears of his conservative, older, mostly white audience, particularly their fear of crime committed by young Black men, portraying Zimmerman as a law-and-order hero who was unfairly called a racist by a liberal press and the first Black president.
Zimmerman’s father went on Fox to say that his son had shot Martin in self-defense. Then Zimmerman’s brother also went on television to say that the fight had left Zimmerman with a broken nose. Finally, Zimmerman himself appeared on Fox’s Sean Hannity show, a leading platform for conservatives, to say that Martin had threatened him and had beaten him bloody.12 He would later sue NBC (unsuccessfully) for its editing of the 911 audio, claiming that the network had framed him as a racist who was “racially profiling Trayvon Martin.”13
Right-wing media outlets and social media personalities chastised national newspaper coverage for reporting that Martin had been shot by a white man. They pointed out that Zimmerman had Hispanic heritage and argued that he should not be described as purely white. They also celebrated Zimmerman as a civic-minded volunteer crime fighter and reported that Martin’s blood analysis had tested positive for marijuana. They also pointed out his numerous school suspensions.
Martin’s package of Skittles even became a source of suspicion. To his supporters, the candy was an emblem of Martin’s youth and innocence. But the right-wing media reported that Black teens often combined candies and sugary soft drinks with cough syrup to get high. Martin did not have any cough syrup. He had never even opened the bag of Skittles. But the suggestion conveyed the image of a thuggish, threatening, drug-addled Black teenager in a dark hoodie. Geraldo Rivera of Fox News made headlines when he called hoodies “Thug Wear.”14
Martin was no Mouse on right-wing talk shows.
Liberal media outlets told a different story. “Trayvon was the victim,” Tracy Martin told NPR, but now his son was being transformed into the “villain in this case.” NPR later reported that “white nationalists and the alt-right adopted Zimmerman’s cause, seeing in him a martyr being sacrificed on the altar of political correctness.”15
The white lawyers with whom Crump consulted were mystified. They could not imagine their child “walking home from the store, being profiled, pursued, and shot in the heart… they can’t even fathom that.” White parents, he realized, “can’t even believe that the police would ever kill their child—it is not part of their reality.” His team went to work, taking on a “yeoman’s job of trying to push back” on portrayals of Martin in right-wing media as a “criminal menace.”16
Because of Crump stirring public pressure, Zimmerman was finally charged with second-degree murder in April. Conservative talk show hosts and websites, led by Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck, launched fundraising drives for Zimmerman, quickly raising $200,000. It was “an early example of how social media activism reflects real-world partisan divides,” Washington Post reporter Reis Thebault would observe more than a decade later.
At the time of Martin’s murder “social media activism was in its infancy…. It wasn’t default logic to use social media for activism and to raise awareness,” said Sarah J. Jackson, a University of Pennsylvania professor.17
The Second Civil Rights Movement’s new style of activism was having an impact. One month after the shooting, rallies in support of Trayvon Martin were being successfully organized online, from coast to coast, uncoordinated by any larger, nationally established civil rights organization. Fifty years earlier, the First Civil Rights Movement featured precisely timed marches with the best-known leaders lined up in front. These marches were tightly controlled by the NAACP, Black churches, and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s Southern Christian Leadership Conference. Now a movement was forming with no widely recognized leaders and with no master plan for timing and execution.
Still, Crump was aware that the Second Movement began to coalesce around issues of criminal justice around the time of Troy Davis’s execution. “Troy Davis is symbolic of hundreds of innocent people of color put to death by a racist criminal justice system,” he reflected, years later. He believed that Troy Davis’s case was a first step in changing the focus on the justice system. Whether it was complaints that the man who shot a Black kid was not charged, or about police treating Black people unfairly, or Black people getting harsh sentences and jailed in disproportionate numbers, this was a new frontier for civil rights activism.18
In the 1950s and 1960s, innumerable stories of brutal police and racist judges, especially in small Southern towns, went ignored by local media. And so one hallmark of the First Civil Rights Movement was its success in getting a few national newspapers and television networks to pay attention to stories of racial injustice.
To get national media to send reporters and cameras, the top civil rights groups arranged for dignified, orderly marches in which everyone wore their Sunday best. And when their protests ventured into segregated restaurants, the activist groups informed reporters of the exact timing to ensure coverage of the demeaning treatment endured by Black people in the segregated South. The strategy paid off mightily when television began to show local whites turning fire hoses and sharp-toothed dogs on peaceful, well-dressed people trying to register to vote. For those who weren’t around at the time, it’s easy to underestimate the amount of work and planning that went into attracting that type of media attention.
Martin Luther King Jr. became the star of this kind of television coverage. He was gifted in using it to its full potential. “We are here to say to the white men that we no longer will let them use clubs on us in the dark corners,” he said in Alabama during protests in 1965. “We’re going to make them do it in the glaring light of television.”19
King wrote to his aides during the Birmingham protests that even with him in jail, “we must have a sense of drama”20 to capture media attention. The drama unfolded on-screen: police setting dogs on protests, powerful blasts of water from fire trucks knocking down demonstrators, and police using batons on people trying to register to vote. King and his deputy, Ralph Abernathy, “knew the country had never taken Black people’s word for the horrors that they endured,” the journalist Alexis C. Madrigal observed. “It would not be enough to talk about the Black experience of America. White Americans, through their televisions, would have to see, with their own eyes, some of those horrors enacted.”21
Besides King and the established leaders of the NAACP, the National Urban League, and the churches, the only other voices allowed into that national news coverage were white politicians and public officials. It was an event if a leader from a more militant movement, like Malcolm X or Stokely Carmichael, got airtime. Uneducated, poor Black people from the rural South or from Northern ghettos existed only as background figures.
Newspaper front pages and television news programs preferred educated Black people with leadership titles who could be trusted to make reasoned appeals for fair treatment. They designated King a leading voice, comfortable with a man who spoke against violent tactics, making his claim to the American dream on behalf of patriotic, hardworking Americans who happened to be Black.
That history was quite a contrast to the hyperactive media-on-steroids, no-gatekeeper world of websites like Facebook and Twitter that were being leveraged by the new civil rights movement taking shape in the twenty-first century.
One thing hadn’t changed all that much: major print and television news outlets were still reticent to pay close attention to the plight of Black Americans. But young Black people found the new social media platforms an open road. They could hear from one another without waiting for editors and producers to judge their stories worthy of attention. Their narratives were filled with their own hip-hop style, culture, and the political sensibility of Black neighborhoods.
Posting or tweeting required no entrance fee and followed no rules. All you needed was a cell phone or a laptop. It became an easy-access, online highway for sharing and receiving news more quickly and easily than ever before. Cell phones with cameras also created a world of people ready to record any encounter where they—or someone nearby—were treated badly.
By 2012, this new frontier in media had become an open door to a new civil rights movement. It embraced Black anger, encouraged radical thinking, and celebrated extreme stands by rewarding them with “likes” that further spread the message. One study that year found that more than 96 percent of Black people between the ages of eighteen and twenty-nine who had access to the internet were active on social media. These young Black people also represented a larger portion of Twitter users than their share of the U.S. population, according to audience metrics.22
Black political voices on social media had first come to the forefront after Hurricane Katrina devastated New Orleans back in 2005. People shared horrific stories and pictures of houses torn apart by high winds, whole streets flooded, as well as Blacks struggling to get out and being cut off from white areas by police. By 2008, “Black Twitter” had started to become a recognized phenomenon.
Funny memes circulating among Black people on social media, such as “#YOUKNOWYOUREBLACKWHEN,” had enough power to become the topic of a 2009 article appearing on The Root, a website devoted to Black news stories.23
The next year Farhad Manjoo, writing in Slate, described Black Twitter users as a distinct group in social media. They formed “tighter clusters… they follow one another more readily, they retweet each other more often and more of their posts are… directed at other users who initiate hashtags [creating]… a high-density, influential network.”24
All these voices were boiling over by the time George Zimmerman finally went on trial in June 2013, more than a year after Trayvon Martin’s death. After three weeks of testimony, the six women who made up the jury—five whites and one Hispanic—ruled that he was not guilty of murder or manslaughter.
A racial split immediately spread across the country. Eighty-six percent of Black people were dissatisfied with the outcome, but only 30 percent of whites felt that way. The divide was far deeper on social media.25 Among the five million tweets on the day after the verdict, a Pew study found that by four to one, the younger, more racially diverse people using social media condemned Zimmerman’s acquittal.26
This finding highlighted a very real generational split with the younger, more racially mixed group of people at the forefront of outrage at the verdict. These young Black people shared first-person stories about repeated intimidation by police, from stop-and-frisks without cause to brutal beatings by officers who were never held accountable.
In the Trayvon Martin case, the not-guilty verdict led to more nationwide protest marches, most of them outside courthouses and police stations. Speakers called for the federal government—run by the first Black president and the first Black attorney general—to file new charges against Zimmerman. Notably, the most common request was for charges that Zimmerman had violated Martin’s civil rights.
Days later, the president stepped into the White House Press Room to say that he had no problem with the judge or jury, observing that “reasonable doubt was relevant.” He added that Holder was reviewing the case. But he distanced himself from any expectation that he might be a leading actor in the fight for justice for Trayvon Martin. He explained that the killing was subject to state and local criminal codes, not federal law, so there was no way he could take action to punish Zimmerman.
Still insisting that he wasn’t the “Black president,” Obama spoke across racial lines by acknowledging a common refrain of white conservatives: there is a high rate of crime among Black teenagers, and Martin was more likely to have been shot dead by another Black person his own age than by a white policeman. He acknowledged that young Black men are “disproportionately… both victims and perpetrators of violence.” Even so, he maintained that this was still no excuse for labeling young Black men as likely criminals.
Obama did take the Black perspective in one regard. He said that systemic racism in the criminal justice system was punishing Black people. This was the line of conversation that continued to dominate Black social media. “There is a history of racial disparities in the application of our criminal laws. A lot of African American boys are painted with a broad brush. If a white male teen was involved in the same kind of scenario… both the outcome and the aftermath might have been different.”
He then ended his remarks by talking about the positives in race relations. It was a strong rebuttal to the idea that Black-white relations were worse than they had been fifty years earlier, during the First Civil Rights Movement.
“I don’t want us to lose sight that things are getting better,” Obama said. “Each successive generation seems to be making progress in changing attitudes when it comes to race. It doesn’t mean we’re in a post-racial society. It doesn’t mean racism is eliminated. But when I talk to Malia and Sasha [his daughters], and I listen to their friends… they’re better than we were on these issues.”27
Obama’s remarks were deeply disappointing to younger Black people, especially those who were influential online. They wanted a more active, more zealous response against what they increasingly labeled as structural racism, systemic bias against Black people in criminal justice and other areas of life. Obama’s pledge to put federal money into educating more young Black men did not excite passions among this group.
There was also a glaring divide on social media about Obama’s claim that “things are getting better” in American race relations. On this question, white people divided from Black people, young people from old people, and, especially, young Black people from older Black people. The older generation of civil rights leaders—men like Andrew Young, Jesse Jackson, and Al Sharpton—agreed with Obama that contemporary America was a “better” place than ever to be Black. But the younger generation saw the heroes of the First Civil Rights Movement losing touch with a changing reality, the twenty-first-century face of racism.
To the new generation, the height of the First Civil Rights Movement was upending laws enforcing racial segregation in schools, pools, housing, employment, and at the voting booth. The new movement, launched by the rise of Obama, was propelled by social media and gave oxygen to discontent with the realities of the current Black experience in America, the persistence of double standards and de facto segregation. This generation was now looking beyond talk of Obama representing a post-racial nation and looked instead at everyday injustices in Black people’s lives, like Black people being marginalized at work. But the stories that went viral online were of Black people being treated as criminals while shopping, while driving, or while running. Black voices now had an unprecedented online platform and called for the government to stop treating all Black people as criminals by allowing the police, the courts, the jails to abuse them.
There is data to support the charge that Black people confront abuse in the criminal justice system. While the high share of Black people in the country’s prison population is well known, Latinos also are heavily represented. They make up 16 percent of the nation but make up 23 percent of the prison population.28
A report by the Pew Research Center found that Black men are “especially likely” to be imprisoned. In the U.S. they are incarcerated at twice the rate of Latinos and five times more than whites. “The rate was even high among Black men in certain age groups,” Pew found. “Among those ages 35 to 39, for example, about one-in-twenty Black men were in state or federal prison in 2018.”29
The conversation about Black people in the justice system inevitably circled back to talk about the high incidence of poverty among Black people, especially children from poor neighborhoods with failing schools. It extended to talk about “white privilege” and ongoing racist stereotypes in a culture that celebrated “gangsta” Black rappers.
This contrasted with white conservatives’ focus on high crime rates among Blacks and lower levels of academic achievement. These conservatives argued they were being silenced by a “politically correct” culture. They argued it was “PC” to make a big deal out of white frat parties featuring college kids in blackface while ignoring threats from Black crime.
To Black people this line of argument was an ongoing insult. Black activists on social media didn’t dispute these statistics about poverty, education, and crime, but they saw such data as evidence of the reach and tenacity of entrenched structural racism. While some racial progress had been made by the First Civil Rights Movement, implicit stereotypes still painted Black people as more violent, more criminal, and less educated than white people. White men still dominated executive office suites in big cities across the country.
The elevated outcry after the Davis execution exploded after Trayvon Martin’s death and grew into discussions of ingrained racial disparities. New Black voices amplified their discontent. The emotional power of the moment was captured by Alicia Garza, a young Black woman living in Oakland, California.
She was sitting at a bar when word came of the Zimmerman verdict. Discouraged, even depressed, she went home and scrolled Facebook to see what people had to say. She noticed that Black people “were blaming Black people for our own conditions,” she later told USA Today. She read comments about the need for Black boys to avoid wearing hoodies because they are associated with street gangs. Other people insisted that Black boys needed to pull up their pants to avoid being negatively stereotyped. Garza felt that these self-criticisms were misplaced. “It wasn’t Trayvon Martin’s fault that [George Zimmerman] stopped him and murdered him,” she argued.30
Garza, who worked on special projects for the National Domestic Workers Alliance, said that it depressed her to see all the analysis, by Blacks and whites, focus on Martin’s behavior while Zimmerman was essentially given a free pass for killing an unarmed Black teenager. Ever since news of the acquittal, she told The Guardian, she felt “incredibly vulnerable, incredibly exposed, incredibly enraged… it was a verdict that said: Black people are not safe in America.”31
Garza grew weary of the pessimism among Black people on Facebook when she saw posts saying there was no reason to be surprised at a racist verdict. “Stop saying we are not surprised,” she wrote on Facebook. “That’s a damn shame, in itself.
“I continue to be surprised at how little Black lives matter… stop giving up on Black life.” Then she added for her Facebook followers: “Black people. I love you. I love us. Our lives matter.”
Patrisse Cullors, a friend of Garza’s who was engaged in prison reform work, read this social media post and shared it to her own network. With the message, she tagged “#Blacklivesmatter.”32
A third friend, Opal Tometi, an immigration rights activist, joined them to set up social media accounts for others to make statements affirming that “Black lives matter.” The resulting social media traffic became an instant online sensation.
That night the racial tensions, the swelling frustrations, that had been bubbling beneath the surface of American life suddenly erupted into something entirely unexpected.