Social Movements

"No real social change has ever come about without a revolution."

"Direct action enables people to develop a new sense of self-confidence and an awareness of their individual and collective power. Direct action is founded on the idea that people can develop the ability for self-rule only through practice, and proposes that all persons directly decide the important issues facing them. Direct action is not just a tactic, it is individuals asserting their ability to control their own lives and to participate in social life without the need for mediation or control by bureaucrats or professional politicians. Direct action encompasses a whole range of activities, from organising coops to engaging in resistance to authority. Direct action places moral commitment above positive law. Direct action is not a last resort when other methods have failed, but the preferred way of doing things."

"Right now, there’s a very serious conversation around the country about defunding police departments. We need to divert funds from police departments and put them to other areas within city budgets, to make sure we can provide those services to communities and people that need them...Defunding the police is a critical first step, but that’s definitely not going to fix racism and people’s biases against black people."

"When people say “abolish the police,” what they mean is scaling it back. We have used law enforcement to confront a variety of social issues where it was inappropriate. We’ve used them to confront addiction. We’ve used them to confront homelessness. We’ve used them to confront mental health. These are morally bankrupt and practically failed policies."

"For years, community groups have advocated for defunding law enforcement – taking money away from police and prisons – and reinvesting those funds in services...In fact, police in America kill more people in days than many countries do in years.... aggressive policing on the streets for petty matters can ultimately cause social disruption and lead to more crime. Policing that punishes poverty, such as hefty traffic tickets and debts, can also create conditions where crime is more likely."

"American policing has never been a neutral institution. The first U.S. city police department was a slave patrol, and modern police forces have directed oppression and violence at Black people to enforce Jim Crow, wage the War on Drugs, and crack down on protests...The idea of defunding...the basic premise is simple: We must cut the astronomical amount of money that our governments spend on law enforcement and give that money to more helpful services like job training, counseling, and violence-prevention programs."

"Defund does not mean abolish policing. And, even some who say abolish, do not necessarily mean to do away with law enforcement altogether. Rather, they want to see the rotten trees of policing chopped down and fresh roots replanted anew."

"The Right Is Scared of the Protests. Defunding the police? Dethroning Confederate monuments? What’s next, a better tomorrow?"

"The call to defund the police is, I think, an abolitionist demand, but it reflects only one aspect of the process represented by the demand. Defunding the police is not simply about withdrawing funding for law enforcement and doing nothing else......It’s about learning that safety, safeguarded by violence, is not really safety."

"High school students have organized protests in California, Maryland and Michigan. In one Texas suburb, three teenagers led hundreds of people in a march, and they say they aren’t done organizing. In early June, as outrage over racism and police brutality erupted nationwide, three teenagers from Katy, Texas, grew frustrated by a void of activism in their affluent Houston suburb. They banded together under the name Katy4Justice. Over four days, through text messages and video chats, they organized a protest at a neighborhood park, leading hundreds of people in a march through soccer fields and picnic areas in the summer heat... “Katy loves to think it’s progressive and stuff, but nothing ever happens,” said Erika Alvarez, 17, one of the three organizers, all of whom will start their senior year in the fall. Jeffrey Jin, 17, concurred. “It’s very all talk and no do... There’s a lot of white silence.”...The youth-led protest in Katy is representative of the way the nationwide demonstrations after George Floyd’s death have energized a diverse cohort of the youngest generation. In recent weeks, high school students have led protests in Greenville, Mich.; Laurel, Md.; and Berkeley, Calif. Several teenagers, including those in Katy, said that it was the first time they had organized any sort of demonstration — and that it would not be the last. In Katy, the students’ activism was years in the making, they said, shaped by their own experiences with racism."

"People have begun to engage in mutual aid and support for their neighbours. Even if people didn't have much, they were still looking out for each other. Through this, we began to see the ways in which new webs were being constructed. When you're sitting at home or living at a slower pace and you see that Black folks in your community are attacked, killed, murdered by vigilantes and by the police, you wake up, you rise to action, and you rise quickly."

"We are finally achieving a mass consciousness. We're seeing a widespread awareness and commitment to anti-racism that we have long needed. People are now alert and active because the pandemic demonstrated how interconnected our lives are. We finally had time to sit at home and reflect on how our society functions and whether or not it's functioning well for all of us. The overwhelming consensus was that it is not, it is insufficient – in fact, it's been unsustainable for decades, if not generations."

"We are now in a moment where people have no excuses to deny the injustice that's happening in the middle of a global pandemic. Things feel different this time because we were able to tap into a sense of our own agency, our own power and our genuine love for each other."

"Voices on the left, voices on the right... What I’ve not heard is a unanimous commitment to atone for the sins of this country. ... It was an 18-year fight to (make) Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.'s birthday a national holiday. ... Systemic racism can have an ending. Police brutality can have an ending. Economic repression of Black and brown people can have an ending. ... A movement without action is a movement standing still. To those who say they care: Move more than your mouth. ... Black lives do matter. And this is not another digital, viral trend, moment or hashtag. ... Yes, all lives do matter, but they only matter when black lives matter too."

"When we first started Black Lives Matter, I always knew that this needed to be a global movement and that we needed more people to participate. The issues of police brutality, extrajudicial killings and anti-Black racism requires everybody to pay attention."

"I think about issues like climate change, and how six of the 10 worst impacted nations by climate change are actually on the continent of Africa... in Haiti is that they were actually facing a number of challenges that even preceded this hurricane. They were reeling from the earthquake, they were reeling from cholera that was brought in by UN peacekeepers and still hasn't been eradicated. This is unconscionable. And this would not happen if this nation didn't have a population that was black, and we have to be real about that."

"Antiblack racism is not only happening in the United States. It's actually happening all across the globe. And what we need now more than ever is a human rights movement that challenges systemic racism in every single context. ... We need this because the global reality is that black people are subject to all sorts of disparities in most of our most challenging issues of our day."

"I absolutely think people are concerned with police brutality. Let me make that absolutely clear. We have been fighting and advocating to stop a war on black lives. And that is how we see it—this is a war on black life."

"Civil-rights organizers Alicia Garza, Patrisse Cullors, and Opal Tometi put those three words into our minds and hearts seven years ago, when they began to change the country. The sweeping calls for change we see today are not sudden, but the fruits of the labor of activists like them. Their work has given us room to demand more, because black lives don’t truly matter just because people simply say so. This year alone, a white father and son carried out the modern-day lynching of 25-year-old Ahmaud Arbery near Brunswick, Georgia. If black lives mattered by now, we wouldn’t have to say the name of Breonna Taylor, lost to a hail of police bullets in her own home in Louisville in March. Or chant the name of Floyd, killed for allegedly spending a counterfeit twenty-dollar bill at a corner grocery... Accountability after the fact used to be the most that I once hoped for, as a black man just living and trying to survive. Wishing for the cops not to target me indiscriminately felt almost like too much to ask. But I must be honest: If this era of Black Lives Matter activism has not resulted in the kinds of changes to America that would ensure my safety, then it has made me feel more secure in demanding those concessions from my country."

"If black lives matter, then it should matter all the time. You should never let somebody get killed. That's somebody's son, That's somebody's brother; that's somebody's friend. So you should always keep that in mind."

"In 2016 the Black Lives Matter movement has consolidated this sense of a leaderless movement with foot soldiers in every corner of the land. Some of them are indeed sitting in and marching and campaigning, but it's my sense that many more have taken the message and applied it in disparate ways to their daily practice. I see black hair, in its natural state-free of endpapers-springing out of all the scalps of my friends and students and myself. I see kids expanding the old strictures of the hip-hop aesthetic into Afro-punk and Afro-weird and black-girl-magic and every kind of hyphenated existence. And I see the walk. I see folks making a lot of a little."

"One thing I just want to underscore is that the world is watching us. We see these rallies in solidarity emerging all across the globe. ... I think they have been not O.K. for so many years, and they are finally saying, “Hey, we are going to take it to the streets and say we are going to show up in solidarity with you.”"

"Across the nation, people from all walks of life have poured into the streets to protest the deaths of unarmed Black men and women at the hands of the police."

"An early objection to the Black Lives Matter movement was that, unlike the traditional civil-rights organizations, it was “leaderless.” This view reflects a certain sexism, overlooking the many black women who have spearheaded the movement since its inception. But yes, the movement’s leaders have made a deliberate effort to decentralize power. This is in no small part a response to the stark reality that past black leaders—King, Malcolm X, Fred Hampton—were targeted and killed, leaving their movements in turmoil. A report last summer from the FBI’s counterterrorism division alleged the rise of “black identity extremists,” a category previously unheard of. The report was reminiscent of the agency’s cointelpro program that undermined black activists, including King, in the 1960s."

"The aim should be to reshape our society as a whole. We are not doing nearly enough to address the root causes of poverty, addiction, homelessness, and mental-health crises. Instead, we criminalize poverty through harsh fines and debt regulation; criminalize addiction through drug laws; criminalize homelessness by conducting sweeps of people sleeping in parks; and criminalize mental illness by turning prisons into de facto psychiatric hospitals. Why do we focus on these symptoms instead of the true diseases? ... The Black Lives Matter movement and the pandemic has taught us that we’re all in this together, opening up the opportunity to explore building a new, care-based reality. We need a vision of a future in which vital needs like housing, education, and healthcare are met, allowing people to live big, beautiful, fulfilled lives—with not a prison in sight."

"Without gainsaying the reality and significance of generalized white support for the movement in the early 1960s, the number of whites who were active in a sustained way in the struggle were comparatively few, and certainly nothing like the percentages we have seen taking part in recent weeks. ... It looks, for all the world, like these protests are achieving what very few do: setting in motion a period of significant, sustained, and widespread social, political change. ... We appear to be experiencing a social change tipping point — that is as rare in society as it is potentially consequential."

"The Black Lives Matter Global Network Foundation has established a fund worth more than $12 million to aid organizations fighting institutional racism, in the wake of the George Floyd protests. On Wednesday, the foundation, which has been influential in the emergence of the broader Black Lives Matter movement, said it was setting aside $6 million in donations to support black-led grassroots organizing groups. Last week, it unveiled a separate $6.5 million fund for its network of affiliate chapters. Beginning July 1, affiliated chapters can apply for unrestricted funding of up to $500,000 in multi-year grants, the foundation announced. The foundation told the AP it has received more than 1.1 million individual donations at an average of $33 per gift since the death of Floyd, a black man who died May 25 pleading for air as a white Minneapolis police officer held a knee to his neck for nearly eight minutes. The surge of financial support adds to roughly $3.4 million in net assets the BLM Global Network had on hand last year, according to a 2019 financial statement of Thousand Currents, the fiscal sponsor which receives donations on the network’s behalf and then releases money to the group."

"Remove the word black and say 'lives matter'. ... Stop sending mothers back home empty. You can never replace a mother's child. If we want black lives matter, let's make it matter to us. That's the new call."

"In the aftermath of the Ferguson protests, it was fashionable to speak of a "new civil-rights movement." But it is perhaps more illuminating to see Black Lives Matter as a new banner raised on the same field of battle, stained by the blood of generations who came before. The fighters are new, but the conflict is the same one that Frederick Douglass and George Ruby fought, one that goes far beyond policing. (p 302)"

"There [was] a lot of rage, a lot of pain, a lot of cynicism. But her (Garza's) post resonated with me, for a number of reasons. I think it being explicitly black, it being a message rooted in love, and it just felt very hopeful."

"What we are seeing now in America is about so much more than people just being sick of the police murdering innocent people. It is a generational and class revolt. ... Look at what the Congressional Black Caucus is doing. They are repeating the same kind of tired clichés about police reform we have heard for years. Most people participating in the George Floyd protests know that such reforms are useless. Empty symbolism. The mayor of Washington, D.C., Muriel Bowser, paints "Black Lives Matter" in 35-foot-tall letters on a street near the White House. But at the same time, she's pushing for a $45 million increase in the police budget and the construction of a $500 million new jail. I don't think people are buying such a performance. I also don't believe that people are buying Pelosi's little kente-cloth, "take a knee in solidarity with Black Lives Matter" trick either."

"We know that young people are the present and the future, but what inspires me are older people who are becoming transformed in the service of this movement. ... I'm inspired by seeing older people step into their own power and leadership and say, "I'm not passing a torch, I'm helping you light the fire.""

"I'm more optimistic because I see the resistance in the streets, which wasn't there a few weeks and months ago. That's where hope lies. It lies in the streets. And I have got to acknowledge these people. They're mostly young, incredibly courageous, they are out there braving economic misery, arrests, indiscriminate, brutal and often lethal police violence and COVID-19, and they're fighting against injustice and the elites anyway. They're all heroes in my book."

"We have to invest in black leadership. That's what I've learned the most in the last few years. ... I think our work as movement leaders isn't just about our own visibility but rather how do we make the whole visible. How do we not just fight for our individual selves but fight for everybody? And I also think leadership looks like everybody in this audience showing up for black lives. ... The movement for black lives isn't just for us, but it's for everybody."

"[One] example of narrative takeover is the Black Lives Matter movement. This is a life-affirming accountability movement to call attention to the violence being perpetrated against Black people. But rather than listening, learning, and believing the stories of injustice, systemic racism, and pain, groups of white people centered themselves with “all lives matter” and “blue lives matter.” There was never a narrative of “white lives and police lives don’t matter” in this movement. This was an attempt to, once again, decenter Black lives and take over the narrative."

"Republicans have racialized poverty, and Democrats have run from poverty. And we’re forcing them to deal with the reality. We are very political, but we’re not partisan... There is not some separation between Jesus and justice; to be Christian is to be concerned with what’s going on in the world. ... It's better to die having fought for justice than to live and stay on the sidelines and to watch injustice have it's way without a challenge."

"I was mostly thinking about building a mass movement that people can be a part of and feel an identity around. I was interested in giving folks like black, poor people who’ve been marginalized, brutalized, an opportunity to have more visibility. Before seven years ago, we could barely get the news to talk about police violence, let alone police death."

"Racism is integrally linked to capitalism... it’s a mistake to assume that we can combat racism by leaving capitalism in place. ... The Industrial Revolution, which pivoted around the production of capital, was enabled by slave labor in the U.S... we have a long way to go before we can begin to talk about an economic system that is not based on exploitation and on the super-exploitation of Black people, Latinx people and other racialized populations."

"In order to have a legal arrest, you need probable cause to believe that the person committed a crime. ... There is nothing in the law that allows “proactive arrest.”.. It’s the power of the people, and people are in the streets—hundreds of thousands of people in the streets in US cities, and in cities around the world—in support of the Movement for Black Lives, and against police brutality.. ... We can’t rely on the legal system, but it’s a tool that we have to use. ... There is an ACLU lawsuit ... asking for an injunction against these federal agents targeting legal observers, and targeting journalists as well, because the last thing in the world that the Trump administration and his goons want are witnesses, are media that are witnessing what’s happening ... there are lawsuits being filed in support of the real power, and that is the power of the people."

"Black Lives Matter is our call to action. It is a tool to reimagine a world where black people are free to exist, free to live. It is a tool for our allies to show up differently for us. I grew up in a neighborhood that was heavily policed. I witnessed my brothers and my siblings continuously stopped and frisked by law enforcement. I remember my home being raided. And one of my questions as a child was, why? Why us? Black Lives Matter offers answers to the why. It offers a new vision for young black girls around the world that we deserve to be fought for, that we deserve to call on local governments to show up for us."

"I’m really proud of the work we’ve been able to do in the last seven years... What is clear is that Black Lives Matter shares a name with a much larger movement and there are literally hundreds of organizations that do impactful racial and gender justice work who make up the fabric of this broader movement.”"

"When someone like Roger Goodell says “Black lives matter,” even though he did not mention Colin Kaepernick, and even though he may have — he probably did not really mean it, what that means is that the NFL recognizes that it has to begin a new process, that there is a further expansion of popular consciousness."

"Black people. I love you. I love us. Our lives matter. Black Lives Matter. We see black death all the time, and I don’t know what it was about this, but I know I went home and then I woke up in the middle of the night crying. And I picked up my phone and I started clickety-clacking, right? ... Patrisse and I, we started talking about building an organizing project around state violence."

"An 11-year-old boy is doing a small part to make a big change when it comes to social justice. Jack Powers recently started mowing lawns around his neighborhood to raise money, but the sixth-grader from Missouri isn't using the extra cash to buy the latest video game or gadget. Instead, he's donating it to the Black Lives Matter movement, which has been behind the nationwide protests following the death of George Floyd on May 25. “I just wanted to make a change and I didn't like how people were being treated,” Jack told KMOV. “I saw what happened to George Floyd and saw how people were being treated, and I decided to make a change,” he told the news station."

"Black Lives Matter has meant so much everywhere, including in Haiti and Palestine, and it strengthens other movements for justice against murder by the state—the human rights defenders in Honduras and Thailand who are being assassinated by corporate agents for defending Indigenous and small farmers’ right to land, for example."

"I was struck again by the importance of language and of words that need to be spoken. Our best teachers, including Audre Lorde among others, have imparted this truth. In the last few months, weeks, and days, I have found myself saying #BlackLivesMatter out loud at various times. It's not that I don't already know that they do. I think that I am trying to speak the words into existence."

"The protests are colliding with... the country’s most devastating pandemic in modern history. “With being home and not being able to do as much, that might be amplifying something that is already sort of critical, something that’s already a powerful catalyst, and that is the video,” said Daniel Q. Gillion, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania... “If you aren’t moved by the George Floyd video, you have nothing in you,” he said. “And that catalyst can now be amplified by the fact that individuals probably have more time to engage in protest activity.”"

"Besides the spike in demonstrations on Juneteeth, the number of protests has fallen considerably over the last two weeks according to the Crowd Counting Consortium. But the amount of change that the protests have been able to produce in such a short period of time is significant. In Minneapolis, the City Council pledged to dismantle its police department. In New York, lawmakers repealed a law that kept police disciplinary records secret. Cities and states across the country passed new laws banning chokeholds. Mississippi lawmakers voted to retire their state flag, which prominently includes a Confederate battle emblem."

"Then, as now, getting arrested or jailed or associated with criminality in any fashion, whether in a hoodie or a suit and tie, was bound to upset the political establishment. When Black Lives Matter activists blocked traffic and engaged in other acts of mass civil disobedience, many white liberals and older black activists charged that King wouldn’t have approved of the type of disruption these protests caused. While the likes of King and Rosa Parks are now celebrated for their acts of defiance, their protests were no less controversial at the time, even within the civil-rights movement."

"Despite warnings from public health officials, new research suggests Black Lives Matter protests across the country have not led to a jump in coronavirus cases. ... A new study, published this month by the National Bureau of Economic Research, used data on protests from more than 300 of the largest US cities, and found no evidence that coronavirus cases grew in the weeks following the beginning of the protests."