8 “I’M DEAD”

The big issue in Black America in the first months of 2020 was the big issue for all of America—fear of catching a killer virus. The very first case in the United States of what would soon be named Covid-19 was confirmed in Washington State on January 20. Two days later, President Trump told the media: “We have it totally under control. It’s one person coming in from China. It’s going to be just fine.”¹

Nothing could have been further from the truth. Two months later, most Americans were locked down in their homes. Many could not go to work, to school, or to the mall. They were limited to their televisions, phones, and social media, looking for the latest update on the contagion.

Then a cell phone video of a white police officer kneeling on a Black man’s neck transfixed the nation.

It was Monday, May 25—Memorial Day. George Floyd, a six-foot, seven-inch-tall man, made a run to pick up cigarettes from Cup Foods, a corner convenience store in Powderhorn, a mostly Black and Hispanic neighborhood of Minneapolis. A few minutes after he left the store, the clerk realized that Floyd had handed him a counterfeit $20 bill.

To the clerk’s surprise, when he looked outside, Floyd was still in the vicinity, sitting in a car at the corner with two friends. The clerk approached him to ask for the cigarettes back, but Floyd didn’t respond. The young man then went back inside the store and called the police, telling them that Floyd was “awfully drunk and he’s not in control of himself. He’s not acting right.”²

When police officers arrived minutes later, Floyd was passed out. One policeman tapped on the window with a flashlight to get his attention. A groggy Floyd slowly responded by asking, “Please, officer, what’s all this for?”³

Floyd had trouble keeping his hands visible, according to the two friends in the car. This led the policeman to draw his weapon. Floyd, with a gun suddenly in his face while he was still high, freaked out. He started to weep while begging, “Please don’t shoot me, man.”

He got out of the car, and the two policemen quickly handcuffed him. But even with Floyd in handcuffs, the officers, one of whom was just five days out of training, struggled to subdue him. Floyd, forty-six years old, was a former football player and had been working as a security guard before losing his job in the pandemic. As the police officers tried to get him into the car, Floyd resisted, complaining that he’d recently had Covid and feared he was going to die in the closed, cramped backseat of the squad car.

Two backup officers then arrived on the scene. One, a white officer, a nineteen-year veteran of the force named Derek Chauvin, grabbed the handcuffed Floyd and forced him onto the ground, placing his knee on Floyd’s back to keep him under control. Chauvin then shifted the weight of his knee directly onto Floyd’s neck.

“I can’t breathe,” Floyd said, before gasping out calls for his mother. One officer responded, “You are talking fine.” Another officer asked if they should turn Floyd on his side to let him breathe more easily. But Chauvin refused, keeping his knee on Floyd’s neck.

The whole scene played out at a busy intersection. Chaos ensued as people streamed in and out of the store for late-night food while others stopped to watch the vicious treatment being applied to George Floyd. Several bystanders began screaming at Chauvin, pointing and saying that Floyd was begging for his life. One bystander, Darnella Frazier, a seventeen-year-old high school student, pulled out her cell phone and started recording video.

As Chauvin remained on top of Floyd, Frazier could be heard on the video telling someone near her: “Look how they doing people here. He’s Black. They don’t care.”

Another passerby can be heard directly calling out to Chauvin: “You’re enjoying it. Look at you, your body language explains it, you fucking bum.”

Floyd continued to squirm, insisting that he was having trouble breathing.

His last words were:

“Please.”

“Mama, I love you.”

“Tell my kids I love them.”

“I can’t breathe for nothing man.”

“This is cold blooded.”

“I’m dead.”

After eight minutes and forty-six seconds, Floyd stopped moving. A police officer checked for a pulse. There was none. No one tried to revive him.⁴

The crowd outside Cup Foods continued to grow as word spread that George Floyd was dead. A shaken Darnella Frazier returned to her home, traumatized by what she had just seen. As the flashing lights of the police cars and their wailing sirens turned her neighborhood into a crime scene, she livestreamed herself describing the whole event. Then she uploaded her video of Chauvin kneeling on Floyd’s neck with the post: “They killed him right in front of cup foods over south on 38th and Chicago!! No type of sympathy #POLICEBRUTALITY.”⁵

The Minneapolis Police Department offered a different story. Within hours of the killing, the department posted a press release on social media titled: “Man Dies After Medical Incident During Police Interaction.” Floyd’s death was deemed a result of “medical distress.” The police claimed that he hadn’t died on the scene, but later in the hospital. “At no time were weapons of any type used by anyone involved in this incident,” the press release said, in a clear attempt to dampen outrage.

Seeing the police statement, Frazier immediately went back online at 3 a.m. to respond: “Medical incident??? Watch outtt they killed him and the proof is clearlyyyy there!!”⁶

By dawn, the horrific video was quickly spreading, and the country woke up to the footage showing a police officer killing a man in a prolonged, cruel act of violence. It immediately set off alarms among people of all races already feeling anxious, threatened, and frustrated from the rising number of Covid deaths. Those alarms rang loudest among young Black activists keeping track of the recent killings of Ahmaud Arbery and Breonna Taylor. Their panic and distress went worldwide with the familiar hashtag #BlackLivesMatter. It created a rush of sharing the video and a flood of commentary about how George Floyd died.

Alicia Garza, Black Lives Matter’s cofounder, was quick join the conversation on her Twitter feed: “#GeorgeFloyd should still be alive, along with countless other Black lives taken too soon and too often. Change the laws and the people who make them. Or fail to enforce them equally—from President to prosecutor to Sheriff. #BlackLivesMatter”⁷

Former president Obama posted an online statement: “This shouldn’t be ‘normal’ in 2020 America. It can’t be ‘normal.’ If we want our children to grow up in a nation that lives up to its highest ideals, we can and must be better.”⁸

These statements and millions of others added pressure on Minneapolis’s mayor and police chief. Even more pressure came when news reports confirmed that the earlier press release from police amounted to lies. Normally in such cases, the policemen involved would be placed on administrative leave while an investigation played out. However, given the harsh and swift public condemnation, the police chief, Medaria Arradondo, took the unusual step of firing the four police officers, while also calling for the FBI to investigate George Floyd’s death in the hope of assuring the public that there would be no cover-up.

None of this was enough to stem the anger. #BlackLivesMatter was now being used worldwide more than a million times a day to express outrage and sorrow at Floyd’s death. Three days after the killing, the hashtag peaked at over eight million tweets, which according to Pew amounted to “the highest number of uses for this hashtag in a single day.”⁹ Over the coming weeks, the #BlackLivesMatter hashtag “generated approximately 3.4 million original posts with 69 billion engagements—or roughly 13% of all posts and 15.5% of all engagements on Twitter,” a Brookings study later found. Blacks and Latinos under the age of thirty had the most engagement online about the controversy.¹⁰

Whether it was a visionary act by BLM’s founders, or a matter of chance, the incredible volume of usage indicated beyond any doubt that the hashtag had struck a lasting chord. Local organizers not affiliated with BLM began using #BlackLivesMatter to call together ordinary people from around a mostly white state to join in the marches. The New York Times reported that the night following Floyd’s murder, “hundreds of protesters flooded into the Minneapolis streets. Some demonstrators vandalized police vehicles with graffiti and targeted the precinct house where the four officers had been assigned.” Rioting also started, with businesses set on fire. Police responded to the chaos with rubber bullets and tear gas.¹¹

The trouble in Minneapolis quickly spread to other big American cities. On the West Coast, there was a major march around the Los Angeles Civic Center that blocked Highway 101. In St. Louis, near the site of Michael Brown’s killing six years earlier, fires and looting broke out, with one man killed. Chicago saw six shootings and one death during demonstrations.

Floyd was an unlikely man to cause a major American social protest. His life in Minnesota was a long way from the dreams he held growing up in Houston. As a teenager, he had won an athletic scholarship to South Florida Community College before transferring to Texas A&M–Kingsville. But the young man with pro-sports aspirations could not maintain his grades and returned to Houston, where he fell into the grip of easy money hustles and began to sell and use drugs. He was jailed several times, including serving five years for aggravated robbery. In 2013, at the age of forty, Floyd was paroled. He was looking for a fresh start but could not get out of the dead-end life of small-time crime, and he struggled to remain sober and out of jail.

He then heard from a friend in Minnesota, who advised him to leave the troubled, poorer precincts of Houston and come to the affluent, white, northern city in 2017. He immediately found a job as a security guard at Minneapolis’s largest homeless shelter. Within a year, he took up work as a truck driver and as a part-time bouncer at a nightclub. But Floyd still could not escape his dark past. One of his roommates died of a drug overdose, and he often failed to make the monthly child support payments for his five children back in Houston.¹²

George Floyd’s situation worsened when Covid hit Minneapolis. He didn’t get the virus right away, but he lost his job at the nightclub as the disease shut down the city. “COVID-19 is hitting the northside community from all angles,” Louis King, the head of a Minneapolis vocational school, wrote in an open letter describing how the crisis was hitting Black Minnesotans. King compared what was going on to the high unemployment and turmoil during the Great Depression.¹³

Meanwhile, President Trump was doing nothing but criticizing local leaders for their handling of the Covid crisis. He especially attacked Democratic governors in the Midwest, including Minnesota governor Tim Walz, for taking precautions to protect the people in their states. Walz had issued a stay-at-home order to limit the spread of the virus. In response Trump tweeted: “LIBERATE MINNESOTA!” calling for an end to the lockdown.¹⁴

In spite of Trump’s tweet, the Minnesota State Fair announced that it would cancel that year’s event, the first cancellation since 1946, when polio swept through the state. The number of infections in Minnesota grew to more than ten thousand cases in less than two months, a number that included the unemployed George Floyd.

By the time of Floyd’s death, Covid had been ravaging the United States for more than four months. Nationwide there had been 1.6 million people infected, and more than 98,000 deaths. Among Black Americans, the pandemic was most devastating.¹⁵ By early June, they would account for more than half of America’s cases, and were twice as likely to die from the infection.¹⁶ Minorities’ higher rates of being uninsured and unemployed also meant that a Covid case could easily lead to falling behind on rent or a mortgage payment.

That is when the unemployed and recently back-on-drugs George Floyd was accused of passing a counterfeit $20 bill at a corner store.

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In an earlier era, Floyd could have been easily dismissed as a statistic—an unemployed former convict killed by police. First Movement leaders stayed away from people like him, fearing that aligning themselves with an imperfect character was a potential liability, a risk that could pull them away from achieving their political goals. But in this generation, after the killings of Trayvon Martin and Michael Brown, there was a sense that a victim’s humanity should not be diminished simply because they were not perfect role models.

In other words, Floyd was no Rosa Parks. In 1955 Parks famously refused to give up her seat on a segregated bus in Alabama after being trained to participate in nonviolent protests. This First Civil Rights Movement activist was a model citizen—a steadily employed member of the Black middle class. When the NAACP was filing lawsuits to break down segregation in the 1940s and 1950s, their lead attorney Thurgood Marshall looked for ideal plaintiffs like Parks. They were people with solid reputations in their communities: churchgoers, teachers, and folks with good families who could not easily be trashed by racist segregationists. In public, they all dressed in their Sunday best.

The Second Civil Rights Movement was operating in a universe of different social and cultural realities. This fight was not about integration. The focus now was on continued inequities, such as the number of Black people arrested for drugs and the high percentage of minorities in prison. This group, as well as victims of police violence, were generally not model citizens. For Black Lives Matter, this shift in emphasis was at the heart of their argument.

Black Lives Matter proudly embraced people who were negatively stereotyped and ignored by most of the country. In fact, much of the fervor came from Black America identifying with Floyd. It was not unusual for Black Americans to have a family member in jail, or dealing with drug addiction, joblessness, or trouble in school.

In so many ways George Floyd represented the poor and working-class Black males who were most often victims of police violence. He became a touchstone for Black America’s fear that any one of them could be victimized by knee-on-your-neck-style government oppression.

George Floyd was now held up as a martyr. At his funeral, he was celebrated like earlier Black activists who had died for a cause, such as Martin Luther King or Medgar Evers. But the Reverend Al Sharpton made the point that Floyd was just an ordinary man. “If George Floyd had been an Ivy League school graduate… if he’d been a multimillionaire, they would have said that we were reacting to his wealth,” Sharpton said. “If he had been a famous athlete… [they’d have said] we were reacting to his fame. But God took an ordinary brother from the Third Ward, from the housing projects, that nobody thought much about but those that knew him and loved him…. God took the rejected stone and made him the cornerstone of a movement that’s going to change the whole wide world…. And as we lay you to rest today, the movement won’t rest until we get justice.”

Attending Floyd’s funeral was a somber lineup of relatives of Black people who had been killed by police in the last few years: the parents of Trayvon Martin, Eric Garner, Michael Brown, and Ahmaud Arbery. Sharpton’s masterful eulogy tied together so many events of the Second Civil Rights Movement. “We are not fighting some disconnected incidents,” Sharpton preached to the people in the church and an audience watching on national television. “We are fighting an institutional, systemic problem that has been allowed to permeate since we were brought to these shores, and we are fighting wickedness in high places.”¹⁷

By the first week of June, thousands of protests had taken place from coast to coast, in the largest cities, in suburbs, and even in small, rural, red-state towns. It was estimated that as many as 26 million people took part in more than seven thousand demonstrations. In terms of the proportion of the total U.S. population, this made it the largest protest in American history.¹⁸

The people involved went beyond Black activists. Families of all races participated, across generations. Many in the lead were college-educated and young professionals. As a group, they were wealthier, more politically diverse, and more racially diverse than previously seen in civil rights protests.

As the majority racial group in the United States, whites also comprised the largest group of participants in these protests, at 46 percent. Hispanics surprisingly accounted for the second-largest percentage of Americans taking to the streets, making up 22 percent, which far exceeded their 15 percent share of the U.S. population. Black Americans accounted for 17 percent of protesters, compared with their 13 percent share of the population. Asians were also overrepresented relative to their population, making up 8 percent of the protests. Overall, Pew found that the participants in the protests were “more likely to be nonwhite and younger than Americans overall… also more likely to live in an urban area and to identify with or lean toward the Democratic Party.”¹⁹

This was a dramatically different demographic palette than was present at most of the protests during the First Civil Rights Movement. Professor Deva Woodly of the New School told The New York Times that the Floyd protests dwarfed the demonstrations during the 1960s: “If we added up all those protests during that period, we’re talking about hundreds of thousands of people, but not millions.”²⁰ Even the most famous demonstration of the First Civil Rights Movement, the 1963 March on Washington featuring Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech, attracted fewer than 250,000 protesters. Though racially diverse, that march was majority-Black. Other minorities were just a small percentage of the American population at that time.

As a hashtag, #BlackLivesMatter extended across the racially diverse makeup of twenty-first-century America. But as a group, Black Lives Matter was not the driving force in setting up the majority of protests. Some chapters did lend material support, provided guidance, and participated, but on the national level, Garza, Tometi, and Cullors were never guiding hands. They continued to resist that role because of their belief in a decentralized leadership model. And even if they hadn’t, controlling protests of this size, now taking place around the globe, was in fact much bigger than any of them.

Still, the ideas that had emerged from Black Lives Matter’s work and actions had continuing impact. Responding to calls from people protesting under the BLM banner, the Minneapolis City Council began serious discussions about dismantling the city’s police department, and elsewhere in the country, a number of Confederate statues were finally removed after many years of protests. The Mississippi legislature voted to replace the state flag with a new banner that did not include the Confederate battle emblem. Even the NFL and NASCAR, not natural allies for Black Lives Matter or civil rights protests of any generation, gave surprising support for people taking to the streets.

At the White House, though, President Trump was fuming. On Twitter he described Americans protesting in the street as “THUGS” and said they were “dishonoring the memory of George Floyd, and I won’t let that happen…. Any difficulty and we will assume control but, when the looting starts, the shooting starts. Thank you!”²¹

When the protests showed no signs of slowing down, Trump threatened to deploy the military, charging that he needed to protect public safety and restore public order. In fact, what had become apparent was the protests also had strong overtones of opposition to Trump’s presidency. The majority of the marches were led by people critical of his policies, including his bungled handling of Covid. Opal Tometi said she thought the protest became so large because people living in a pandemic were “just fed up and thoroughly beside themselves with grief and concern” over Covid as well as George Floyd. What made it worse, she argued, was that the Trump administration did not seem to care or “have a plan of action.”²²

To fight back against growing popular support for the marches, Trump fed the lie that most of the protests were violent. In fact, they weren’t. And Twitter took the unprecedented step of flagging the president’s tweet about the looting and shooting as a violation of its rules “about glorifying violence.” In the end, the post remained on the site. Twitter explained that it was in the public’s interest “for the Tweet to remain accessible.”²³

In addition to glorifying violence, Trump’s use of the phrase “when the looting starts, the shooting starts” had troubling racist roots extending back to the First Civil Rights Movement. It set off alarms about Trump engaging federal forces against American citizens exercising their right to protest. Professor Clarence Lusane of Howard University noted that the term originated with notorious segregationist Sheriff “Bull” Connor who was known for confronting civil rights protesters with guns, powerful blasts from water hoses, and large German shepherds.

But Trump succeeded in selling his distorted view to his base. He repeatedly lied about big cities being caught in the grip of violent mobs. A Morning Consult poll done a week after Floyd’s death found that nearly 60 percent of Republicans agreed that “most of the current protesters are trying to incite violence.”²⁴ That perception, created by Trump’s rhetoric and amplified on conservative media, directly contradicted studies that later found that more than 90 percent of protests were peaceful. The Armed Conflict Location & Event Data Project noted that this “disparity [in perception] stems from political orientation and biased media framing… such as disproportionate coverage of violent demonstrations.”²⁵

The president’s exaggeration of the violence led the New York Times’s Washington correspondent Peter Baker to note that Trump was also falsely attributing the violence “to the Antifa anti-fascist movement, one of his favorite targets.”²⁶ The fact-checking didn’t stop Trump. He went further, pushing the idea that the protests were intended as the start of a coup attempt to end his presidency.

With the presidential election just months away, polls available to Trump indicated a third of Republicans backed the marches as a show of support against injustice. Trump claimed that he was the last line of defense against spreading violence in a desperate appeal to win over those straying Republicans.

Protests outside the White House escalated four days after George Floyd’s death. On Friday night, some small barriers were knocked over, and inside the Oval Office loud chants could be heard from across Pennsylvania Avenue. Fearing for his safety, Trump briefly retreated to a bunker underneath the White House.

In a Rose Garden speech the following Monday, June 1, Trump spoke in defiant opposition to the marches: “These are not acts of peaceful protest. These are acts of domestic terror…. If a city or a state refuses to take the actions that are necessary to defend the life and property of their residents, then I will deploy the United States military and quickly solve the problem for them.”²⁷

After his remarks, Trump decided to make a show of shutting down the demonstrators at his doorstep. He ordered federal law enforcement into Lafayette Square, in front of the White House, where thousands of Black Lives Matter protesters were chanting and holding signs. Multiple federal agencies used tear gas and rubber bullets to clear the park. “What ensued,” The New York Times wrote the next day, “was a burst of violence unlike any seen in the shadow of the White House in generations.”²⁸

Trump, walking alongside the uniformed chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff as well as the attorney general, then crossed through the still smoldering park to hold a photo op. When he reached the other side of the park, he proceeded to St. John’s Episcopal Church. Outside the church he held a Bible upside down as he posed for photos.

The pointless scene increased criticism of Trump. Even some Republicans felt it was wrong to use force against a peaceful American protest. The whole episode crystallized for the demonstrating millions that they were protesting Trump as much as they were protesting the murder of George Floyd.

Throughout his years in office, from the Women’s March, through Charlottesville, and now with his mishandling of Covid, Trump consistently sparked anger. His actions reeked of misogyny, racism, and ineptitude. According to a Kaiser Family Foundation survey, almost one in five Americans even before the summer 2020 had participated in some type of anti-Trump protest since he took office, including a large number of first-time protesters.²⁹

Instead of working to bring the country together during the pandemic, Trump remained undeterred in fostering political divisions to generate support for his reelection. Since his 2016 election, there had been a rise in violence against Blacks, Latinos, and Jews. In March and April 2020, during the early months of the pandemic, he lashed out against a new target—Asian Americans. Trump regularly referred to Covid as the “Chinese virus” or the “Wuhan virus.”³⁰ At a campaign rally in Arizona, he got laughs from his supporters by calling it the “Kung Flu.”³¹

The impact of the president targeting Asians was immediate and real. One right-winger fatally attacked an Asian family shopping in a Texas supermarket, later saying that he believed they were “carriers” of the coronavirus. In another incident, an attacker yelled, “I lost my job [be]cause [of] Asians.” A new advocacy group was created, Stop AAPI Hate (the abbreviation referring to Asian American Pacific Islander), as the United Nations received 1,800 reports of racist incidents against Asian Americans in just eight weeks between March and May 2020.³²

Online, people were just as vicious. One social media post read: “There is a special place in hell reserved for the fucking Chinese and their archaic culture…. [President Trump’s] description of COVID-19 as the Chinese virus is the most accurate thing he has ever said.”³³

The George Floyd protests revealed that the damage Trump was doing to divide a racially diverse country was becoming explosive. A majority of Americans told Pew Research that in his three years in office, Trump “had made race relations worse.” Almost two thirds of Americans—across racial lines—agreed that “it has become more common for people to express racist or racially insensitive views since Trump was elected president.”³⁴

Trump’s approval rating, which never went above 50 percent, reached a high of 49 percent in the weeks before Floyd’s death, according to Gallup. After his response to the protests across the country, the president’s rating dropped to 38 percent.³⁵

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Meanwhile, former vice president Joe Biden had taken a commanding lead in the Democratic presidential primaries. There had been an intense competition among the Democrats, with more than a dozen candidates seeking the nomination. Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont was the early favorite. But the candidates were as diverse as the country itself, including a Latino from Texas, Representative Julián Castro; the Asian American businessman Andrew Yang; two Black U.S. senators, Cory Booker and Kamala Harris; as well as several white women, notably Senators Elizabeth Warren and Amy Klobuchar. The former mayor of New York, Michael Bloomberg, a billionaire, was also a surprising and self-funded presence in the race.

Early on, Biden struggled. Among young people, he was considered too old and too moderate for a party that had been pushed into an angry stance by years of Trump’s extremism. Biden lost the first contest, the Iowa caucus, to a little-known and much younger Pete Buttigieg, a military veteran and gay man who was the former mayor of South Bend, Indiana. Biden lost the second and third contests, in New Hampshire and Nevada, to the tough-talking Bernie Sanders.

Biden’s candidacy was on the ropes. His only hope rested with the Black voters in the coming primaries, a major constituency that was largely absent in the early states. The key to a Biden comeback would run through South Carolina, where a significant number of Blacks would be voting for the first time in this primary season. His secret weapon was support from the state’s leading Democrat, Black congressman James Clyburn.

Clyburn’s encounter with one Black church woman before the South Carolina primary made front-page news. She asked him who he was backing. Clyburn, who had refused to endorse until then, replied: “We know Joe. But more importantly, Joe knows us.”³⁶

Blacks made up 56 percent of South Carolina’s Democratic primary electorate. After Clyburn’s endorsement, they came out in force, with 61 percent voting for Biden. According to Edison Research exit polls, 60 percent cited the endorsement as the key factor in deciding their vote.³⁷

Biden’s big victory in the Palmetto State dramatically shifted momentum because there were also large Black populations in the upcoming Super Tuesday contests, which were mostly in the South. Out of the fourteen states that voted on Super Tuesday, Biden won ten, with his most reliable support coming from Black women, who were now being hailed as the cornerstone of the Democratic Party. This led to a positive, and perhaps much needed, change in Black Lives Matter’s strategy. An organization that had demonstrated real power in raising money to fight racism now put serious effort into mobilizing voters ahead of the fall election. This became more pronounced after the George Floyd protests, when Black Lives Matter’s approval rating stood at an astounding 67 percent. Time magazine listed the three founders among their 100 Most Influential People of 2020.³⁸

The Black Lives Matter webpage received 24 million visitors throughout the protests, a quarter of whom came from outside the United States. The organization’s social media followers also expanded—more than four million people on Instagram, more than a million on Twitter, and nearly three quarters of a million on Facebook.³⁹ This online presence became a powerful fundraising vehicle. In 2020, Black Lives Matter reported receiving $90 million in donations, dwarfing anything received during its earlier years. The organization struggled to control the flood of money coming in, establishing BLM Grassroots as a vehicle for donations to be sent to local chapters.

Patrisse Cullors, the lone member of the founding trio remaining full-time at Black Lives Matter, now took on the role of executive director of a new nonprofit, Black Lives Matter Global Network Foundation. Her priority was to mobilize the organization’s network and get people to the polls. With a dark view of Trump’s tenure, she now appreciated the potentially “transformative change” that came from winning elections. According to the website: “Elections can help eliminate oppressive structures. Elections can help create just economies and governments. Elections can ensure that we remove white supremacists from having legislative power.”⁴⁰ Black Lives Matter’s new appreciation for politics led the organization to set up a political action committee, which put millions of dollars into political ads aimed at Black voters.

Alicia Garza also turned her energy to voter registration drives. Her new group, Black Futures Lab, directed her followers to her Electoral Action Center. “Register to vote; stay up to date on election news & key dates; find out who represents you at the fed., state, & local level; see who is running where you live; and more!” she tweeted.⁴¹

In particular, she targeted Black women: “I’m all for ambitious Black women,” she tweeted. “The Biden campaign should be too—given that Black people, women, and BLACK WOMEN are key to Biden winning the White House. #AmbitiousWoman.”⁴²

The Black establishment—churches, members of Congress, and locally elected officials—had long backed Biden, as did the top Black leader in the country, former president Obama. But there remained a worry about a lack of enthusiasm among younger Black voters. They had not turned out for Hillary Clinton in 2016 and remained skeptical of establishment Democrats, who they felt were reluctant to confront racial injustice, especially when it came to the police.

When Biden announced his selection of Senator Kamala Harris of California as his running mate, it added to the case for Black Lives Matter and younger Black people to support the ticket. Harris, a woman with Black and Indian parents, had attended Howard University and now was making history as the first woman of color on a major party ticket.

With the announcement, Garza took to Twitter to say, “I’m voting Biden/Harris. I’m voting down the ticket. I’m registering and moving others to vote. And I’m going to keep pushing them. It is important to see BLM after all this time. 7 YEARS. Symbols are nice. Policy and practice is essential. Let’s go—we got work to do. #DNC2020.”⁴³

Her “7 YEARS” reference was tied to the anniversary of Black Lives Matter’s founding after George Zimmerman’s acquittal in Trayvon Martin’s death. What started as outrage and frustration in a hashtag had gone from online to the streets and now to political maturity.

Garza said the choice of Harris was a signal to Black women, whom she called the “heart of the Democratic party base” in a piece she wrote that summer for Glamour magazine. She noted that voter turnout among Black women had dropped by 10 percent in 2016. In retrospect, Garza was making an implicit criticism of Black Lives Matter’s lack of voter mobilization to oppose Trump in that election. Now she saw the political situation differently. She predicted that Harris would “energize” the Democratic Party’s most important voting bloc: “It is a signal to Black voters that we matter.”⁴⁴ By late August, when the Democrats held their national convention in Milwaukee, the George Floyd protests had died down. But the issue of racial violence was central at the convention. Biden saluted Black women at the start of his acceptance speech by honoring Ella Baker, a heroine of the First Civil Rights Movement. Baker had been instrumental in creating the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee in the 1960s, a forerunner of take-it-to-the-streets, Black Lives Matter–style activism practiced by young people in the twenty-first century.

Biden quoted Baker: “Give people light and they will find the way.” He spoke to racial violence, saying he was passionate to help “communities who have known the injustice of a knee on the neck,” a clear reference to Floyd’s murder. He then acknowledged the third anniversary of the neo-Nazi march in Charlottesville, calling it reminiscent of the “anti-Semitic bile heard across Europe in the ’30s” and lauding the heroism of those who stood up to it. He reminded the national audience of Trump’s statement that there were “very fine people on both sides.”

“It was a wake-up call for us as a country. And for me, a call to action. At that moment I knew I had to run,” Biden told his audience. His message was a salute to the people who had marched, not only the activists but also the moderates and even conservatives who had made a first-time show of activism. He said that the people who had taken to the streets were some of the “most powerful voices we hear in the country today.” He was speaking directly to the Second Civil Rights Movement.

In his most emotional appeal of the night, Biden spoke about meeting George Floyd’s six-year-old daughter, Gianna. Calling her “an incredibly brave little girl,” Biden noted that Gianna’s father had once told her that he wanted to “change the world.” In life, he had never been able to, but global attention to his murder did just that. Biden told a spellbound audience that the message he got from Gianna was: “Daddy changed the world.” He said it was “one of the most important conversations I’ve had this entire campaign.”⁴⁵

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Biden maintained a 10-percentage-point lead after the convention. But within three days there was more racial violence. It again happened in the Midwest and threatened to upend his momentum.

The flashpoint took place on August 23, the day before the Republican National Convention, when police responded to a 911 domestic violence call in Kenosha, Wisconsin. When they arrived, they found a twenty-nine-year-old Black man, Jacob Blake, who allegedly had a knife and was resisting arrest. The police tasered Blake and then shot him seven times, though he was not killed.

In response to this latest police shooting, Black Lives Matter issued a statement reiterating its opposition to violent police tactics and calling for more social service and mental health programs: “We need to move away from a culture of punishment and terror and move towards a culture of care and dignity…. Any person who will shoot someone seven times in the back is not shooting to slow someone down. They are shooting to kill.”⁴⁶

The next day, as the Republican convention began in North Carolina, protests and rioting broke out in Kenosha; several stores were burned. Kyle Rittenhouse, a seventeen-year-old from neighboring Illinois who had recently attended a Trump rally, drove across the state line to reach Kenosha. He’d seen posts online from store owners who feared their property would be destroyed.

Rittenhouse’s own social media accounts included messages that were pro-Trump and included “Blue Lives Matter,” a slogan in support of police that was being used to counter Black Lives Matter. The next night, Rittenhouse took to the street as an armed vigilante patrolling the Kenosha business strip. He shot three white Black Lives Matter protesters, two of whom died.⁴⁷

At the convention Trump responded to the shooting in Kenosha by blaming Democrats. In his acceptance speech he said: “Make no mistake, if you give power to Joe Biden, the radical left will defund police departments all across America…. No one will be safe in Biden’s America. My administration will always stand with the men and women of law enforcement.”⁴⁸

Trump sought to provoke fear among white suburbanites, key to his reelection effort, by running ads about crime, antifa, and anarchy in the streets. Less than a week later, Trump went to Kenosha for his first major post-convention stop. The governor had asked him not to come, for fear that it would prompt more violence. But Trump ignored those warnings.

Touring damaged properties, Trump pointed to the burned buildings as evidence of chaos in Democratic-controlled cities. Trump supporters wearing red MAGA hats faced off against Black Lives Matter supporters. The Rev. Jesse Jackson also showed up in Kenosha that day, and he urged Black Lives Matter supporters to stay away from Trump and his followers. “If they demonstrate, it would be a big mistake. Trump would use it as a commercial,” Jackson told reporters. Democrats limited counter protests to setting up voter registration booths.⁴⁹

Biden, who had been making campaign appearances only in his home state of Delaware and neighboring Pennsylvania due to fears about Covid, now broke with that caution to travel to Kenosha. Maintaining distance and wearing a mask, Biden said that Trump was feeding racial division instead of addressing the root of the recent violence. “We’re finally now getting to the point of the original sin: slavery. And all the vestiges of it,” Biden told a small group of Black leaders, including the local Black Lives Matter spokeswoman, who met with him in a church.⁵⁰ The presence of the Black Lives Matter representative marked a big change from the 2016 campaign, during which many Democratic candidates had their events disrupted by Black Lives Matter activists. But in 2020, Biden’s staff invited the organization to be part of a select group with the candidate at a critical stage of a campaign.

As the fall campaign kicked off, neither candidate was able to hold normal rallies due to Covid. The pandemic also prompted several states to expand their use of early voting and mail-in ballots. Black voters in particular took advantage of early voting, even before the presidential debates began.

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The first debate took place in the battleground state of Ohio, and race was a central topic. After an extensive discussion about the president’s troubled response to the Covid epidemic, the moderator, Chris Wallace of Fox News, asked the candidates who the American people should trust to deal with frayed race relations.

Biden began by calling out Trump’s over-the-top response to protests in front of the White House. “He came out of his bunker, had the military use tear gas on them so he could walk across to a church and hold up a Bible…. This is a president who has used everything as a dog whistle, to try to generate racist hatred, racist division.”

The Democratic nominee acknowledged that there was “systemic injustice in this country, in education and work and in law enforcement and the way in which it’s enforced,” indicating Black Lives Matter’s new presence in the mainstream political conversation. After praising most police as “good, decent, honorable men and women,” Biden said that they had to be held accountable. “And that’s what I’m going to do as president of the United States.”

Trump charged that Biden’s support for the Black Lives Matter protests meant that the activists were controlling Biden: “And they’ve got you wrapped around their finger, Joe, to a point where you don’t want to say anything about law and order.”

Constantly interrupting Biden’s responses, Trump attempted to dominate the conversation. Wallace failed to control a disastrous debate, always verging on collapse. But the defining moment of the night came when Wallace asked Trump to condemn white supremacists.

Trump responded by asking who he should condemn. Biden shot back: “Proud Boys.”

Instead of disavowing the violent hate group, the president said: “Proud Boys, stand back and stand by… somebody’s got to do something about Antifa and the left because this is not a right-wing problem. This is a left-wing problem.”⁵¹

It was incredible that the president appeared to be calling upon an armed militia known for its violent racism to be ready to act. Twitter and Facebook had banned them in 2018 for their extremism, forcing them to turn to other social media sites. “Within minutes [of Trump’s debate], members of the group were posting in private social media channels, calling the president’s comments ‘historic,’ ” The New York Times reported. “In one channel dedicated to the Proud Boys on Telegram, a private messaging app, group members called the president’s comment a tacit endorsement of their violent tactics. In another message, a member commented that the group was already seeing a spike in ‘new recruits.’ ”⁵²

Biden’s running mate, Kamala Harris, said after the debate: “What we saw was a dog whistle through a bullhorn. Donald Trump is not pretending to be anything other than what he is: Someone who will not condemn white supremacists.”⁵³

A few days later, as the controversy about the Proud Boys continued to dominate the news, the election was thrown into more turmoil. Trump tweeted at 1 a.m. on October 1 to tell the world that he had contracted Covid.⁵⁴ The bombshell came after Trump had been on the road for several days of public events. According to his chief of staff, Trump knew that he had tested positive but failed to take precautions to protect those around him. Despite the rising death toll, he acted with bravado, telling the American people that Covid was nothing to be afraid of, even as he was helicoptered to a military hospital, where he remained for several days, getting new treatments not yet publicly available. Upon his return to the White House, Trump acted as though nothing was wrong. He made a public show of ripping off his mask on the White House balcony as he stood in front of TV cameras. Though he acted as if all was normal, campaign events were canceled, as was the second presidential debate.

It was not until almost a month after their first debate that the two candidates met again, on October 22. Once again, racial division was the cutting edge of their confrontation.

Trump bragged that no president had done more for Black people than him “with the exception of Abraham Lincoln… nobody has done what I’ve done.”

The moderator for this debate, Kristen Welker of NBC News, reminded the president that he had called Black Lives Matter a “symbol of hate” and had “shared a video of a man chanting, ‘white power.’ ” She asked if he did not recognize that he was creating racial tension. Trump responded that he had seen Black Lives Matter supporters on TV call police “pigs”—“pigs in a blanket, fry ’em like bacon.”

“That’s a horrible thing,” Trump said before asserting, “I am the least racist person in this room.”

Biden referred to Trump’s boast that he’d done more than any president for Black people with a sarcastic remark that quickly turned serious: “Abraham Lincoln here is one of the most racist presidents we’ve had in modern history. He pours fuel on every single racist fire, every single one. He started off his campaign coming down the escalator saying he’s gonna get rid of those Mexican rapists. He’s banned Muslims because they’re Muslims. He has moved around and made everything worse across the board. He says to them about the ‘Poor Boys,’ last time we were on stage here. He said, ‘I told him to stand down and stand ready.’ Come on. This guy has a dog whistle about as big as a foghorn.”⁵⁵

Days before the election, an Idaho white supremacist was arrested on weapons charges and was found to have a list of potential targets, including Alicia Garza. When the FBI notified her, she tweeted, “This is why this President is so dangerous. He is stoking fires he has no intention of controlling. I’m ok y’all, but this shit is not ok. Vote this muthafucka out. For real.”⁵⁶

Along with Covid, the racial acrimony surrounding the election captured the public’s full attention. Despite the pandemic, two thirds of the American people found a way to vote, the highest percentage of eligible voters casting a ballot than at any time since 1900.⁵⁷

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Joe Biden won the election, and the final results showed that his victories in many swing states that Clinton had lost in 2016 were due in large part to a resurgent Black turnout. In Georgia, Stacey Abrams’s registration drives generated enough new voters to flip a state that Trump had won in 2016. Across the country and across the races, the record number of people voting suggested that Trump had created a referendum on his provocative, racially charged, and chaotic style of governance.

Black voters’ historic turnout for Biden was second only to their support for Barack Obama in the elections of 2008 and 2012. Black social media celebrated with a viral remix of a Black woman twerking at police while handcuffed, rapping, “You about to lose your job.” The message, in a raucous hip-hop remix, was aimed at Trump. A later video mash-up that accompanied it had people on the street dancing but also featured prominent politicians, including Obama, grooving in delight at the prospect of Trump’s ouster.⁵⁸

According to a Pew voter study, Biden maintained strong support among Black Americans, winning 92 percent of the Black vote. He also improved his support from Black men. Trump won 14 percent in 2016, but only 12 percent in 2020. Biden won among Latinos but made the biggest jump with Asians, with a 10-percentage-point improvement compared to 2016. Trump’s anti-Asian attacks had motivated scores of new voters to the polls, and Biden took 59 percent of their support.⁵⁹

But it was Biden’s margin of victory among Black women that was larger than any other group. These stalwart Democrats gave him an astonishing 95 percent of their vote.

When the election was called for Biden, Alicia Garza tweeted: “Just woke up and I’m gonna pop some bottles. Woke up to my neighbor screaming HALLELUJAH! #Election2020results.”⁶⁰

Patrisse Cullors put out statements celebrating the power of the Black voter to oust Trump: “Once again, Black people—especially Black women—have saved the United States. Whether in Milwaukee, Detroit, Philadelphia, or Atlanta, Black voters showed up in huge numbers to turn this country around and remove the racist in the White House…. We worked long and hard to ensure we did all we could to vote Donald Trump out of the White House—we succeeded. And in doing so, we even elected a Black woman—the first Black woman—to the vice presidency.”⁶¹

In his victory speech, Biden, with Harris by his side, reached back to when his primary campaign was on the rocks and Black voters carried him to the finish line. “Especially at those moments when this campaign was at its lowest ebb,” Biden said, “the African American community stood up again for me. You’ve always had my back, and I’ll have yours.”⁶²

But Trump did not accept the defeat and continued to press Republican state officials to search for votes that could overturn the results. In some cases, he pressured Republican state officials to ignore voters and falsely inform Congress that he had won their states. He claimed without any evidence that there had been voter fraud in big cities with large minority populations.

“Big protest in D.C. on January 6th,” Trump wrote in a tweet on December 19. “Be there, will be wild!”⁶³