Since police officer Darren Wilson fatally shot unarmed teenager Michael Brown two years ago Tuesday in Ferguson, Mo., the words “Black Lives Matter” have morphed from a public outcry into a national movement.
Through a decentralized collection of grass-roots activists and groups, Black Lives Matter protesters have rallied on the streets of cities around the nation where African Americans have been killed in police-involved shootings, including Baltimore, Minneapolis and Baton Rouge. The movement even made its presence felt in protests at July's presidential conventions.
Activists who drive the Black Lives Matter movement and academics who study it say it all began with Brown’s death, when images of his body lying on the street of a northern St. Louis suburb and accounts of his killing spread widely through Twitter and sparked protests and media attention.
“If Mike wasn’t killed and people weren’t directly impacted, if we didn’t leave our homes, I don’t know where or what movement I would (have been in) two years ago,” said
Without Brown’s death, Elzie said, “I probably wouldn’t be as involved as I am now."
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Kwame Rose, 22, became an activist in Baltimore after a 25-year-old black man, Freddie Gray, died in police custody eight months after Brown's death. Black people dying at police hands isn’t new, Rose said, but the recent incidents have received more widespread attention because of social media .
“Black people have been having these conversations in our living rooms,” Rose said. “But social media has invited our followers, and millions of them, into our living rooms to have this conversation with us, in a sense.”
#BlackLivesMatter, the now-iconic Twitter hashtag, first surfaced in 2013 after the acquittal of neighborhood watch volunteer
Use of #BlackLivesMatter had diminished by summer 2014, however, said Deen Freelon, an associate professor at
Freelon co-authored a study, Beyond the Hashtags, that examined 40 million tweets related to Ferguson and Black Lives Matter. It determined that Brown’s killing, paired with the protests and media attention that followed, propelled Black Lives Matter from a expression into a national movement.
A handful of Twitter users played key roles in driving awareness of Brown’s death on Aug. 9, 2014, the study determined. First, St. Louis rapper
Then activists
What really bolstered the movement, Freelon said, were the protests and police response in the days after the
“We saw no examples of highly-retweeted eyewitness accounts supporting the police response,” the study concluded.
Multiple hashtags found widespread use after Brown’s killing, including #HandsUpDontShoot and #NoJusticeNoPeace, driving demonstrators into the streets. The simple hashtag #Ferguson was the most used in the study’s data. But #BlackLivesMatter found favor during an Aug. 30 protest march in Ferguson, the study found, when several on-the-ground Twitter users used it and found themselves retweeted widely.
“I didn’t know it would be a movement for a few months at least,” said Elzie, who was among the earliest demonstrators who began protesting on Aug. 9. But she saw first-hand how online interactions could manifest into physical action.
Elzie recalls “just meeting people literally off Twitter who wanted to help and didn’t know where to go, just making connections with strangers who all saw what happened and felt inclined to do something.”
The hashtag gained considerable prominence on Nov. 24, the day a grand jury declined to charge Wilson in Brown’s death. Before that date, #BlackLivesMatter had appeared in 2,309 tweets. Its tweet total rocketed to 103,319 that day, the study found. Tweets and retweets pushed #BlackLivesMatter in front of a diverse audience in the months after Ferguson.
Within two weeks, another grand jury declined to indict a
The lack of an indictment against Wilson, Freelon notes, was the tipping point. Twitter activity around the movement never fell to its former levels and a higher baseline emerged.
Black Lives Matter had started to take root both online and off. Over time, it became so recognized that competing hashtags from critics riffed on its format, sparking #AllLivesMatter and #BlueLivesMatter.
Now, Black Lives Matter serves as a banner under which multiple groups, individuals and protests aim to address police brutality. Elzie joined other activists to form Campaign Zero, a 10-point policy plan that calls for police use of body cameras among other proposals. Last week, a coalition called the
To Freelon, the policy proposals show that a movement "that has a very substantial online component can also have serious goals."But had Wilson never opened fire on Brown two years ago, had Brown not died about 150 feet from Wilson’s vehicle, had images of Wilson standing over Brown’s corpse not gone viral online, Freelon believes Black Lives Matter would have still happened.
“I think this was probably inevitable, the movement,” Freelon said. “Because the movement tries to communicate that these are not isolated incidents. Sooner or later, you would have seen something like this.”