Clarifying the Movement History of the Black Lives Matter Week of Action, or #BlackLivesMatterAtSchool – Black Lives Matter At School

Clarifying the Movement History of the Black Lives Matter Week of Action, or #BlackLivesMatterAtSchool – Black Lives Matter At School

Clarifying the Movement History of the Black Lives Matter Week of Action, or #BlackLivesMatterAtSchool

Collected & Edited by Tamara Anderson, Ismael Jimenez, and Christopher Rogers in dialogue with Jesse Hagopian.

We appreciate the mainstream press we have received this year from such widely read publications as TIME and yet find it necessary to reiterate the history of how we got to the 3rd Annual Black Lives Matter at School Week of Action to include a variety of significant actors, organizations, and gatherings in to the story. This is not the full story, but a timely corrective. This will be integrated into the website soon, but published here for speed.

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In September 2016, teachers at John Muir Elementary School in Seattle, Washington, organized a day of community uplift and solidarity with the Black Lives Matter movement. Aiming to convey that “Black lives matter!” at John Muir, teachers wore T-shirts reading “Black Lives Matter/We Stand Together/John Muir Elementary,” and stood alongside dozens of Black men who lined the school’s walkway “giving high-fives and praise to all the students who entered” (included in Teaching for Black Lives). With a contentious, racially charged election looming in the background, this seemingly innocuous event was met with right-wing denouncements, hate-filled emails, and a bomb threat.

It was this pushback to the Seattle educators’ open valuing of Black lives that sparked Philadelphia’s social justice union caucus, the Caucus of Working Educators (WE), to CONTINUE READING: Clarifying the Movement History of the Black Lives Matter Week of Action, or #BlackLivesMatterAtSchool – Black Lives Matter At School