Exactly a year and a day after George Zimmerman was ruled not guilty, the next national fire alarm on race relations rang out. On July 17, 2014, police in New York City were videotaped using a chokehold that left an unarmed Black man begging for mercy.
Eric Garner, a 350-pound, forty-three-year-old man who suffered from asthma, began gasping, “I can’t breathe!” He repeated the phrase eleven times, trying to get the police off him before he passed out.
The scene began on a busy commercial strip, Bay Street, in a working-class area of Staten Island. There was no chase, no guns drawn, no robbery, no drug deal. There was only Garner, in a white T-shirt, talking loudly to two policemen dressed in plain clothes. The police had approached Garner because they saw him involved in what looked like a sidewalk argument in front of a discount beauty supply store. When the incident was over, Daniel Pantaleo, a twenty-nine-year-old officer, accused Garner of illegally peddling single cigarettes from an open pack in his pants pocket. Garner had been arrested more than thirty times, including for selling single cigarettes, or “loosies,” as well as for having marijuana on him, and for driving without a license. This time Garner, who was out of jail on bail, reacted defiantly, telling the cops to leave him alone, that he had a right to stand on the street.
“Every time you see me, you want to mess with me,” he said. “I’m tired of it. It stops today…. I didn’t sell nothing… every time you see me you want to harass me…. I’m minding my business. Please leave me alone.”1
One of the policemen started pulling at his hands, trying to handcuff him. Garner, now angry, asked the officers not to touch him. That’s when Pantaleo grabbed Garner around the neck, pushing his face against the beauty shop’s window front. The big man fell to his knees. Then five other white policemen jumped on his back, pushing Garner flat on the sidewalk. He pleaded with them, saying he could not breathe. A Black uniformed police sergeant came on the scene and allowed the arrest to continue. Garner soon blacked out, and an ambulance was called. An hour later he made it to the hospital, but he had suffered a heart attack and was dead.
The Reverend Al Sharpton, responding to news reports, held a news conference in Staten Island two days later. He complained about the way the police had choked Garner. People held up signs reading “I Can’t Breathe.” The slogan instantly became a social media hashtag. Activists around the country, loosely organized under the new Black Lives Matter banner, picked up on it, and #ICantBreathe became a national slogan.
Days later, shouts of “I Can’t Breathe” became a chorus for a Times Square protest featuring Broadway stars. “Arrests look more and more like modern-day lynching,” rapped the Broadway musical star Daniel J. Watts, standing outside the NYPD booth on Times Square. “It’s your job to bear arms but not to wrap your arms about and choke like a boa constrictor.”2
This was followed by a march in Staten Island, organized by Sharpton; most of the 2,500 people present had connected online.
Three weeks later the city’s medical examiner ruled that Garner had died because of the chokehold and “compression of chest” as the police held him on the ground. The police union also strongly defended the use of force against Garner, making the case that the big man had resisted arrest, even if he had been unarmed. They complained about the increasingly “slanderous, insulting, and unjust manner in which police officers are being portrayed.”3 And a grand jury did not indict the policeman.
But numbers don’t lie: a study by the medical journal The Lancet later showed that in the period between 1980 and 2018, “Black Americans were estimated to be 3.5 times more likely to die from police violence than white Americans.”4 And millions who watched video of the police choking Garner saw visceral, disturbing evidence that the statistics on police violence against Blacks were true. In large numbers they took to the streets, joining protests against the police tactics that had led to Garner’s death. More protests in New York followed the decision not to indict the police officers, though the city eventually paid a multimillion-dollar settlement to Garner’s family. This had become a familiar script, repeated time and again across the nation as incidents of police violence against Black people resulted in civil suits but little systemic change.
Fifty years earlier, during the First Civil Rights Movement, the facts were worse, with more and more brutal violence. But the debate was ignored. Police violence against Black citizens almost never resulted in a civil-suit settlement for the victims. In that era, big-city newspaper editors and TV network executives constantly celebrated law enforcement. They ran upbeat stories about the heroic “boys in blue” making sacrifices and risking their lives to protect the public. The perspective of Black people rarely got past the white gatekeepers of the mainstream press. When police resorted to brutal treatment of Blacks, it got ink only when prompted by a lawsuit. But that was rare, because poor people lacked lawyers—and also because judges, who were often former prosecutors with ties to the police, were unsympathetic.
The bloody policeman’s hand runs deep in American culture and history, going back to the pursuit of runaway slaves, lynching, post–Civil War chain gangs, and Black prisoners being put to work as cheap labor. In the 1950s and 1960s, small-town Southern sheriffs commonly resorted to violence in their interactions with Black people. Public display of explicit racist violence was less frequent in the North, but it was no less a fact of life. It was no secret that the nightstick kept Black people on the wrong side of the tracks, in their segregated, broken areas of town. It was accepted that Black people had to bend to the threatening, even vicious, presence of white police if they got near a white neighborhood.
All this remained true even as Dr. King spoke of his “dream” and successfully marched on Washington in 1963 for passage of the Civil Rights Bill.
As we’ve seen, the First Civil Rights Movement’s priority was to end segregation as enforced under the power of local laws. That style of activism operated on the assumption that integrating voting booths was the path to racial justice. Dealing with violence by all-white police forces was a secondary concern.
In the 1960s only the Black Panthers and the Nation of Islam, commonly known as the Black Muslims, made a point of complaining about how the police treated Black people. They got nowhere. In fact, the big white-owned newspapers and television stations trashed them, dismissing them as militants. The white media also put Malcolm X in the category of a radical figure who simply hated America and white people.
The Black press largely treated the Panthers as extremists, too. While some members of the Black press offered a few articles about the Panthers as “Robin Hood”–type revolutionaries, protecting the interests of the poor, most Black papers, like the New York Amsterdam News, depicted them as far outside the organized protests led by established civil rights groups.
But the mainstream papers always portrayed the police, even when brutal with Black people, as standing in defense of the good life, manning the “Thin Blue Line” between chaos and peace. In July 1964, for example, The New York Times gave more coverage to rioting in Harlem than to the cause of the discontent—a policeman had killed a Black fifteen-year-old named James Powell. Front-page articles described six days of violence and protests in which “groups of Negroes [roamed] through the streets, attacking newsmen and others… standing on tenement roofs [and] shower[ing] policemen in steel helmets with bottles and bricks.” Little attention was paid to how police used force against the crowds. An incredible number of people—five hundred, mostly Black—were arrested.5
Later that year, when both a grand jury and a police panel cleared the officer who had shot Powell, the Times wrote nothing about complaints of violence from the Black community against the overwhelmingly white New York Police Department. Instead, the newspaper’s story emphasized that civil rights groups had “stepped up their demands for a civilian review board” and noted that the mayor had rejected the idea. The Times did report that “2000 complaints a year” had reached the police. But only 10 percent of those cases merited “departmental trials,” which took place behind closed doors, with no public accountability.6 This was a time when white power players were able to curb activism by pressuring white employers to fire Black protesters. They even had banks pull mortgages from Black activists.
But in the twenty-first century, firing activists, beating down, or killing Black people was suddenly more difficult to hide. The internet opened the door to these stories about rough, sadistic handling of Black individuals by police.
In 2006, twenty-three-year-old Sean Bell and a group of his friends were shot more than fifty times by New York City police officers as he left his bachelor party in Queens. Four shots hit Bell in the body and neck, killing him. Three of the policemen involved were indicted, but they were found not guilty by a racially mixed jury that was told about drug use and drunkenness at the club where the incident took place. After the acquittals, the protests were old-school, with Sharpton leading marches to block streets and bridges. But a new force was also at play, as people could now easily send emails to share stories popping up on the internet.
Three years later the internet was a much bigger force for protests when police in Oakland, California, shot twenty-two-year-old Oscar Grant at a train station. Grant was unarmed. Cell phone video of the killing became a national sensation on the internet. A policeman said he intended to tase Grant but mistakenly shot him with a gun, killing him. However, cell phone video showed Grant seated on the ground, hands in the air, before he was shot. The footage inspired hundreds of people to march in protests that resulted in looting and a police car being set on fire.
Like the videotape that captured the 1991 police beating of Rodney King, the Grant video was taken by a bystander. And now video technology was in everyone’s pocket. The use of cell phone videos in the Grant case gave people an incredibly effective new tool to hold the police accountable. It led to cell phones popping up to record police stops coast to coast. Still, in spite of the shocking images, neither Grant’s case, nor any other, started a national protest movement.
It’s hard to say precisely why. But it’s notable that these incidents happened before there was a Black president. They also took place just as new technology in the form of social media applications became available on cell phones. Previously, websites had been gathering places for people to share information, and they were much faster than printed papers and scheduled TV programs. But the integration of social media into smartphones kicked the nascent media revolution into hyper-speed. Suddenly people could be easily and instantly alerted, at any time of day or night, to reports and videos of police violence.
The use of social media apps to expose police violence pushed the stories into mainstream media, increasing coverage of such violence in Black communities. This in turn prompted politicians to speak out on the issue as they never had before.
The impact of social media was particularly evident in generating attention and protest after the murder of Trayvon Martin. The protests around the Eric Garner case mirrored the tactics and strategy that had developed after the Martin case. The difference this time was that smartphones had become universal and even Black people living on the lowest economic level had immediate access to social media. It gave everyone a way to tell their stories of abuse by police, prosecutors, and the courts.
Additionally, there were more Black politicians in office, including at the highest level of power. Black activists online started asking why these politicians did nothing about the bad police. And they wanted to know why the major civil rights groups didn’t do more.
Within weeks of Eric Garner being choked to death in New York, the rising tide of attention to police violence became a flood. The tipping point was an encounter between white police and a Black teenager in the small St. Louis suburb of Ferguson, Missouri.
There was a lot of resentment among Black residents against the white establishment in Ferguson, but the town had no history of big racial protests and was home to no major civil rights leaders. Yet the police shooting of a young Black man there in the summer of 2014 attracted national attention far beyond Eric Garner’s death in the biggest media market in the country. And the difference in the response was the result of seeds planted the year before in the wake of Trayvon Martin’s killing.
The basic elements of what happened were similar to other cases of police violence against young Black men. The Ferguson police got a call about a Black teenager stealing a box of Swisher Sweets cigars from a corner store called Ferguson Market and Liquor. The teenager also pushed an older man, the store’s owner, into a display rack. After he left, the owner called the police, reporting a robbery.
The first response was a radio alert for two suspects, young Black men. A few minutes later, without hearing the radio report, a white police officer happened to see two young Black men walking the yellow line along a twisting street. The policeman, Darren Wilson, put down his car window and shouted at the men to get on the sidewalk. Eighteen-year-old Michael Brown and his friend, twenty-two-year-old Dorian Johnson, ignored him.
Despite his large size, Brown was an adolescent, and he was struggling. He didn’t live with either of his parents and had recently been put out of his grandmother’s house. He was staying at a friend’s crowded apartment and his highest hope was to go to a technical college to learn how to repair air conditioners.
Several years after the fact, a documentary by Jason Pollock, Stranger Fruit, showed Ferguson Market’s security video from the night before the shooting. The video shows Brown handing what looked to be a bag of marijuana to the store clerks, who appear to offer cigars in exchange for the bag. Brown, smiling on the video, hands the cigars back. It is not clear if there was a deal made—there is no audio. He may have intended to pick up the cigars the next day.
But when Brown returned the next day, it was a different shift, with different people working, none of whom appeared to know about any deal. They refused to hand over the cigars to Brown, who appeared angry, grabbed the cigars, and walked out. That, and shoving the old man, led to the call to the police.7
Now as the police confronted him for walking in the middle of the street, Brown turned and defiantly told Officer Wilson to get lost. The cop had already driven past the men when he realized that Brown was cursing at him. He put the car in reverse, backing up to come face-to-face with them.
Brown, at six feet four inches and weighing nearly three hundred pounds, began pushing the door to keep Wilson from getting out and brashly telling the cop to mind his own business.
According to a police report on the incident (which fit with a later review by the U.S. Justice Department), as Brown pushed on the door, he reached through the car window and punched Officer Wilson, also a big man at six feet four inches and 210 pounds. At that point, according to testimony, Wilson reacted by reaching for his gun. As Wilson pulled out the weapon, Brown grabbed it. The gun went off, shooting Brown in the hand. Bleeding, Brown pulled his arm out of the car and began running away. That was when Wilson got out of the police car, holding his gun.8
The worst of the confrontation seemed to be over. But as Brown continued to run, Wilson shouted for him to get on the ground.
At this point there are two versions of the story. In the first, the young man, enraged, turned and charged at the police officer, who was standing in the street with his gun drawn. The police officer again yelled for Brown to get on the ground before firing his gun. In the other version, Wilson got out of the police car and fired at the fleeing Brown.
In either version of the story, Wilson fired ten shots, missing with several but hitting Brown in his chest, his arm, through his right eye, and at the top of his head, killing him.
The whole episode was over in about ninety seconds. It took place on a residential street, bordered by green lawns and low-rise apartments. It was noon on a Saturday, and the two-way street was busy with traffic. Wilson’s police car was stopped at an angle, near an intersection, blocking all traffic. People from the neighborhood began walking close to the scene, gawking at the police and the dead body.
An ambulance arrived, and the paramedics declared Brown dead at the scene, at 12:05 p.m. Traffic began backing up. A crowd gathered as more police arrived, followed by crime investigators. Brown’s body remained on the street the whole time, uncovered, for hours. Finally, the police set up orange screens to block public view of the body, but it was four hours before Brown’s body was finally taken away.
Pictures of Brown’s dead body on the hot, midday August street began showing up immediately on social media. People in the neighborhood rushed to the scene with their phones out to video the police activity as well. One of them, Emanuel Freeman, lived in a garden apartment just feet from where Brown’s body lay, and tweeted (under the handle @theepharoah), “I JUST SAW SOMEONE DIE OMFG.”9
Twitter also began spreading reports from Brown’s friend, Dorian Johnson, who said that the police had shot his friend in the back. Johnson, who hid behind a car during the gunfire, said that Brown had yelled at Wilson, “Hands up, don’t shoot!”
Soon, Brown’s mother, Lezley McSpadden, arrived, demanding to see if it was her son who had been shot. The police refused her request, saying that it was an ongoing investigation. Social media accounts showed the desperate mother, crying and unable to reach her child, and the indifference of the police.
That night, the rapper Tef Poe got national attention for tweets that went viral, including a post of Brown’s dead body in the street. These were heavily retweeted by young Black people who got their news from Black Twitter. Soon the story spread nationwide, and the mainstream media began to pick it up. The AP ran a story with the headline “Ferguson, Missouri Crowd After Fatal Shooting of Unarmed Teen: ‘Kill the Police.’ ”10 Other major TV and newspaper outlets began running their own stories that night, based on social media accounts on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook.
By the next night, the overwhelmingly white police and the younger Black protesters engaged violently, in what became a riot. Police dogs and a police team with the SWAT designation—Special Weapons and Tactics—were also brought in to deal with the crowd. Some of the 150 officers arrived with military surplus weapons, many riding in armored, tank-like vehicles built for war.
The military-style look of the police fed tensions, not only in Ferguson but also around the country. The David-and-Goliath contrast between the two sides led reporters to investigate the source of this new military equipment. Federal and local officials around the country revealed that a stream of surplus military gear, left over from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, had been sent to local police departments. The militarization of the police led to still more outrage online and the hashtag #Ferguson immediately began trending as the confrontation grew.
As the riots and overwhelming police response turned into a nightly event, Governor Jay Nixon set a curfew and declared a state of emergency. He called in the National Guard. Clergy and older Black leaders tried to calm the conflict. At one point, hundreds of Black teenagers pushed into a police line, but Black ministers intervened to prevent another bloody scene. The nightly duels between police and young people with rocks and firebombs continued for two weeks. There was also a counter-protest in support of the police, featuring fifty people carrying a banner that read: “I Am Darren Wilson.”11
Obama’s initial response was to send Attorney General Eric Holder to Ferguson. The elegant, tall Holder met with both sides, talking with police and holding hands with the grieving Brown family. But the biggest impact of his visit was to open a new wave of ugly recriminations on Black media about feckless Black political leadership. Eddie Glaude Jr., a professor of African American studies at Princeton University, pointed out that “the hell that Black communities are catching has happened on Black people’s watch.”12 As Obama sought to lower the heat, his words satisfied neither the supporters of the police nor the growing number of Black young people who were involved in the protests and gaining nationwide support on social media.
Ebony magazine, long a champion of Obama’s, published an October edition that signaled disappointment among older, more middle-class Black Americans, noting the “tone-deaf response of the Obama Administration” to the events in Ferguson. The magazine scolded the president as part of Black leadership practicing “respectability politics instead of [voicing] the visceral pain and rage so eloquently articulated on the streets of Ferguson.” In harsh language, the magazine pointed out that “the Ferguson rebellion has exposed deep-seated racism, hyper-militarized state forces, unabashed police brutality and the soul-crushing poverty that will come to define the ‘Age of Obama.’ ”13
Ebony’s comments were surprising because the president remained widely admired—a beloved icon in Black America. After he won the presidency in 2008, the magazine’s cover featured a beaming Obama and the headline: “In Our Lifetime.” But now polls showed a drop in Obama’s personal approval rating among Black people due to his handling of the riots. The president—rightly acting as president of all Americans and not as the president of Black America—continued to urge calm and respect for the rule of law even as the protests continued.
In November, a grand jury declined to bring charges against the white police officer for Brown’s killing. Riots again broke out. The president delivered the same message he gave after a jury cleared Trayvon Martin’s murderer. Both Black and white people, he said, must accept that “the decision was the grand jury’s to make.” He called for the violence and rioting to stop. Then, doing his best to give voice to Black discontent, he shifted his persona to speak as a Black president. Noting that he had witnessed “enormous progress in race relations over the course of the past several decades,” he nevertheless pointed out “that in too many parts of this country, a deep distrust exists between law enforcement and communities of color… result of the legacy of racial discrimination in this country…. We need to recognize that this is not just an issue for Ferguson, this is an issue for America.”14
The question still haunting the president was why he didn’t go to Ferguson or make a major speech from the White House. Remaining noncommittal, he told reporters: “Well, let’s take a look and see how things are going,”
The president never went to Ferguson. Instead, he created a “Task Force on 21st Century Policing.” Its mandate was to report to him in ninety days on ways to improve law enforcement, with an emphasis on better relations between the police and Black people. He arranged for some of the young people in the protests to join older civil rights leaders in Washington as he unveiled the task force. Obama’s initiative also included more money for body cameras on police and improvements in law enforcement training, along with a presidential order to federal agencies to review procedures for sending military equipment to police departments and to assess whether the United States was “militarizing domestic law enforcement unnecessarily.”
“And in the two years I have remaining as president,” Obama said, “I’m going to make sure that we follow through—not to solve every problem, not tear down every barrier of mistrust… but to make things better.”15
But many of the young Black protest leaders present at the meeting didn’t think it was enough. They said they were heading back to the streets to lead more protests. “We appreciate that the president wanted to meet with us, but now he must deliver…. We are calling on everyone who believes that Black Lives Matter to continue taking to the streets until we get real change for our communities,” said James Hayes, the head of the Ohio Student Association, who attended the meeting.16
How people viewed Brown’s death reflected a deep racial split across the nation. Less than a week after the shooting, Pew Research reported that only 37 percent of white people believed the shooting raised “important issues about race.” But 80 percent of Black Americans said it did.17
Politics compounded the racial split. Most Democrats, including most white Democrats, said the shooting was an important racial issue. But only 22 percent of Republicans agreed. When television cameras showed young Black people shouting insults and threats at police, the divide got worse. Chris Christie, the Republican governor of New Jersey, said that the antagonism toward the police revealed the protests to be a fraud, arguing that such protests “can’t be justified when they are calling for the murder of police officers.”18
At Brown’s funeral, a huge crowd of 4,500 people came to mourn, including national figures. Martin Luther King III was in the audience, as was Jesse Jackson (in the front row), the movie director Spike Lee, the rapper Snoop Dogg, and the radio talk show host Tom Joyner. Trayvon Martin’s parents also attended. Their presence highlighted the pattern of Black men being killed and the lack of faith in the legal system to deliver justice, whether in Florida, New York, or now Missouri.
Al Sharpton, in his eulogy, asked if the mourners could imagine what it felt like for a Black family to have “their son taken, discarded and marginalized,” referring not only to Brown’s body being left in the street for hours “like he didn’t have any loved ones, like his life value didn’t matter,” but also stirring memories of Trayvon Martin’s family going through a night without knowing that he had been shot dead. It provoked memories of Eric Garner’s family suddenly being told one afternoon that he was dead. It was a different way of saying “Black Lives Matter.”
Then Sharpton changed direction: “Michael Brown does not want to be remembered for a riot,” he argued. “He wants to be remembered as the one that made a difference…. This is not about you! This is about justice!”
Sharpton’s voice hit high when he said that Black America had to feel outraged at Brown’s death but also when Black-on-Black gunfire killed a nine-year-old child in Chicago or when young Black people were “running around gun-toting, [shooting] each other so that [police] are justified in trying to come at us, because some of us act like the definition of Blackness is how low you can go.”
Sharpton called on the young people taking to the streets to redirect their energy and improve life in the Black community: “We can’t have a fit; we’ve got to have a movement. A fit you get mad and run out for a couple of nights. A movement is when you turn your chants into change, our demonstration into legislation…. We’ve got to clean up our community so we can clean up the United States of America.”19
Outside the church some people didn’t appreciate Sharpton chiding the young people marching in protest as having a “ghetto pity party.”
“I just don’t see the relationship between the discourse of Black personal responsibility and the set of actions that resulted in Michael Brown’s death,” said Eddie Glaude of Princeton University. More criticism came from Ta-Nehisi Coates, who later complained that Sharpton engaged in “moral hectoring of black people.”20 The Brown killing provoked a national conversation about both police violence toward Blacks and Black responsibility for criminal behavior. The amount of national attention this captured was a surprise given that it was initiated by a killing that took place in a small Midwestern town, far from political and mainstream media power. St. Louis seemed an unlikely setting for a major civil rights event, but the city was just north of large Black populations in Arkansas, Mississippi, and Louisiana. It was best known for its iconic arch, marking it as the gateway to the American West. But its reach into the Southern states had made it a center for slave traders before the Civil War.
The city on the Mississippi ranked as second only to Baltimore in Black population for most of the twentieth century. It was also one of the ten most segregated metropolitan areas in the nation. When the industries that powered the nation’s economy began moving further south and even overseas in the 1970s, whites began leaving town.
St. Louis’s population fell from close to a million in 1950 to 300,000 by 2014, and the city became nearly half Black. The wealth remained in white hands, however. So, too, did the political power and the media. By the 1980s working-class Black people began following whites escaping St. Louis. They pushed into cheap housing in the suburbs, like Ferguson, only to find white people reacting once again by moving away.21
By 2014, the northwest suburb of Ferguson was home to only about 21,000 people, two-thirds Black and mostly working-class. A quarter of the people in Ferguson lived below the U.S. poverty level.
In ten years, between 1990 and 2000, Ferguson’s racial makeup went from 74 percent white to 52 percent Black. The politicians and the police in Ferguson, however, remained mostly white. And 93 percent of the arrests made by Ferguson police were of Black people. When it came to jailing Black men, the town was later revealed to lead the country in that category for cities with more than ten thousand people. It was also a town where tickets for illegal parking and driving violations provided much of its revenue. In three years, 2012 to 2014, 85 percent of the drivers stopped by police were Black.22
This was the heated mix in Ferguson waiting to ignite like a volcanic eruption before Michael Brown was killed. Given the persistently high level of segregation in communities across the country, the issues that came to the forefront in Ferguson exemplified the tensions that remained. These tensions had not been resolved by the First Movement. Now they were left squarely in the hands of the Second Movement.
Far away, in Los Angeles, Patrisse Cullors, one of the women who had founded #BlackLivesMatter a year earlier, watched the around-the-clock social media updates after Brown’s killing, especially the dramatic images of armored police standing against young Black people.
“I stayed up all night trying to figure out how to support the brave and courageous community of Ferguson and St. Louis as they were being brutalized by law enforcement, criticized by media, tear gassed and pepper sprayed night after night,” she said.23
Opal Tometi, who had purchased the website BlackLivesMatter.com and had started Facebook and Twitter accounts for Black Lives Matter, activated those platforms. She used the network from her job with Black Alliance for Just Immigration to send email blasts to “dozens and dozens of Black community organizers,” inviting them to become part of a Black Lives Matter network.24
The first time this nascent network showed its power was in Ferguson, as Tometi, Cullors, and the third founding member, Alicia Garza, began organizing what they called a “Freedom Ride.” They called on their social media followers to go to Ferguson and add their bodies to the protests. Their call to action was a reference to the First Civil Rights Movement’s Freedom Rides in 1961, protesting segregation on buses traveling through the South.
The Black Lives Matter protests in Ferguson were scheduled for Labor Day weekend. “We understood Ferguson was not an aberration but, in fact, a clear point of reference for what was happening to Black communities everywhere,” Cullors explained.25 In a later speech, she said that Black Lives Matter became a “tool to reimagine a world where Black people are free, free to live.”26
Looking back, Tometi told a Georgetown University podcast that in her mind Ferguson was an unprecedented social media event: “And so, with less than two weeks of organizing, there was a mobilization of over five hundred Black people to Ferguson, Missouri.”27 In the weeks leading up to the Labor Day protests, the hashtag #BlackLivesMatter peaked at 58,747 citations a day.28
The power of the protests was described by Tometi as “righteous rage.” She said it was the first time activists had dared to counter a “militarized police force” that “brutalized” people.29 And it was being done as “the entire world watched” via social media video streams, taking the racial conflict global. This was different from the First Civil Rights Movement’s protests for voting rights in Selma, where the video of violence by the Alabama state police against the marchers could not be seen until the videotape made it back to newsrooms in New York, and then only if the networks decided to broadcast it on the evening news.
In this new era, the Second Civil Rights Movement did not have to wait for distant media gatekeepers to tell its story. Social media provided an immediate connection for people of all races to share details that never made the press. Now supporters around the world could follow simply by using #BlackLivesMatter, which was becoming increasingly widely used.
By November 24, the day when a grand jury declined to indict Wilson for killing Brown, the hashtag reached 170,000 uses. It kept growing in the days that followed, soon reaching 1.7 million. It grew even further two weeks later, when a New York grand jury refused to indict Daniel Pantaleo for choking Eric Garner.30
Athletes and celebrities used their public appearances to amplify the movement. LeBron James and other basketball stars wore warmup shirts at nationally televised games that read “I Can’t Breathe.” Members of the St. Louis Rams football team came onto the field in uniform with their hands held up, signaling their support to claims that Brown had said, “Hands up, don’t shoot!” These acts of solidarity took #BlackLivesMatter to an even higher plane of visibility in American popular culture.
For the first time since the O. J. Simpson case and the Rodney King beating two decades earlier, the predominant national conversation was about race. Whereas before Ferguson, the Black Lives Matter banner had only been carried online, after Ferguson, local Black Lives Matter chapters began forming, including in St. Louis. It was a model followed by protesters who came to Ferguson from around the country. When they left, they went home to form chapters, more than eighteen in the month after Brown’s death.
Years later in an interview with The New Yorker, Tometi and Garza said that their success in Ferguson led them to conclude: “Hey, Fergusons are everywhere, and we don’t want to just go back home and act like this was a one-off act of solidarity. We want to do something. And that was essentially the beginning of our network.” The Black Lives Matter founders decided that “power goes on in the local chapters because they know what is going on, and they are the ones familiar with the terrain.”
Unlike the NAACP, which was a centralized structure overseeing local chapters, BLM was different. Most of BLM’s free-form chapters did not have a legal charter. Nor did many register initially for 501(c)(3) status with the tax authorities. Some chapters just “come and go,” in the words of Tometi and Garza.31
And while most people saw Black Lives Matter as a movement against police brutality, some of the chapters envisioned a more expansive mandate. They wanted Black Lives Matter to lead the fight against white supremacy in all forms, extending the idea of confronting racial injustice to fighting for a higher minimum wage, supporting sex workers, advocating for more support for Black studies programs in high schools and universities, or taking a stand with the LGBTQ community. There were also calls for the movement to identify racism in news coverage as well as in Hollywood. “So different chapters might take on different issues, but there is this throughline of valuing Black life and understanding that we are not a monolith but being radically inclusive in terms of chapter makeup,” Tometi and Garza explained to The New Yorker.32
In contrast to the First Civil Rights Movement, this new movement had an absence of hierarchy. There was also an absence of commanding men in leadership, in the tradition of Martin Luther King or Thurgood Marshall. Instead, this movement had three female founders who did not position themselves as leading the group.
They also spoke openly about sexuality. This was a big contrast with the men leading the twentieth-century movement, who kept their distance from such topics. It was also a cultural break from older members of the Black community who still held disdain for expressions of homosexuality. Their views reflected a time when the country had no tolerance for public support for gay life. For example, Bayard Rustin, the key organizer of the 1963 March on Washington, always kept a low public profile as a closeted gay man.
The Second Movement’s embrace of LGBTQ rights and turn away from male leadership did not undermine its effectiveness. By April 2015, Black Lives Matter was on the cover of Time magazine.33 By the end of the year, the movement was on the shortlist of everyone’s most significant developments of the year. The brand remained strong. “The prevalence of the Black Lives Matter hashtag prompted media outlets to seize the phrase as shorthand for the struggle writ large,” Time wrote. “The new civil rights movement had its rallying cry.”34
It had become a true force in American society; millions of Americans were using #BLM to discuss policing and race relations on social media. Time summed it up: “A new civil rights movement is turning a protest cry into a political force.”
But the political pressure, just like any other force in nature, generated a reaction, a counterforce. And it was on the way.