Before #BlackLivesMatter: The Roots of Black Digital Activism
n 2015, two colleagues—Deen Freelon and Meredith Clark—and I set out to better understand how Black Lives Matter emerged. Our report, Beyond the Hashtags, the Online Struggle for Offline Justice, crystalized then-NAACP president Cornell Brooks’ sentiment: “This isn’t your grandparents’ civil rights movement.” Our study showed us that Ferguson, Missouri birthed Black Lives Matter. It told us that Twitter named Michael Brown for the world. Traditional news media outlets were a day late, and when they did arrive, Twitter was their primary source for information. It afforded a 24-hour glimpse into a radical new way of making news, of telling stories—giving unfiltered voice to those whose voices are traditionally unheard, ignored, or silenced.
Digital media—social networking platforms, blogging platforms, the open web, user-generated and circulated images—all afforded Ferguson citizens, racial justice activists, organizers, young people, and others a powerful way to counter the Hollywood and newsmaker image machine—one that historically and continuously casts African Americans as criminal, intellectually deficient, and culturally deviant.
Trayvon Martin, Renisha McBride, Eric Garner, Mike Brown, Sandra Bland, and many more women and men like them did not become the usual footnotes in the thick annals of Black, violent, drug-ridden CONTINUE READING: Before #BlackLivesMatter: The Roots of Black Digital Activism - Yes! Magazine
