Significance and Effectiveness of Black Lives Matter Movement (Essay Sample)

Community Policing and the Black Lives Matter Movement
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Community Policing and the Black Lives Matter Movement
Black Lives Matter refers to an international activist movement that that begun from the African-American community. The movement is meant to campaign against violence on the black people. The Black Lives Matter organizes protests on a regular basis around black people against deaths and killings that involve law enforcement officers as well as broader issues related to police brutality, racial profiling, and racial inequality within the criminal justice system in the United States.
The movement was started in 2013 and used the title ‘BlackLivesMatter” mostly on the social media following the George Zimmerman acquittal in the shooting that involved Trayvon Martin, who was an African-American teen. Black Lives Movement was recognized nationally after its demonstration on the street after the two African Americans were killed in 2014. The death of the two African Americans gave rise to unrest and protests in Eric Garner and Ferguson in New York City (Garza, 2010).
After the protest in Ferguson, those who took part in the movement have occasionally demonstrated against the killing of several other African Americans in police custody or by the police some of them including Walter Scott, Eric Harris, Tamir Rice, Sandra Bland, Jonathan Ferrell, Freddie Gray, and Samuel Du Bose (Garza, 2010).
In 2015, during summer, the movement started to challenge politicians publicly, and that included politicians who took part in the presidential election in the United States in 2016. The aim of the movement was to put across their issues. In general, the Black Lives Matter movement is a decentralized network and does not have a formal structure or hierarchy.
The movement has been attributed as to have done something that is so rare during these times in the way it has escaped the ruling establishment control. Neither the Democrats nor the police repression has managed to stop this movement which has gone as far as confounding the news media and politicians, as they are accustomed to using the same script in discussing protest and race without challenge. City governments have been forced to accept the disruption by the movement of business as usual a good example being when the Black Youth Project activists occupied the City Hall in Chicago on 26th November and marchers witnessed repeatedly in New York that led to the shutdown of most major tunnels and bridges in and out of Manhattan while the police looked hopeless (Garza, 2010).
The movement has a strong beginning as within weeks; it had shattered what was remaining of the “post-racial” notion in America and also reoriented the whole country anti-Black racism conversation. The Black Lives Movement has been seen to follow the Black struggles tradition in the United States whose impacts have exceeded the people involved and way beyond the point of origin. For example, the civil rights movement cracked open the conversation on the Cold War of the McCarthy era as well as inspired a mass social struggle that lasted for more than a decade on many other fronts.
The strength of the movement is enjoying today largely inspired by Ferguson can be measured in many ways. One of the indicators of its strength is that the movement has remained militant form the time it was started. One of the most common refrains of the movement in social media and street protests in “shut it down”. Beyond just being a rhetorical slogan, it is used in the real world with activities in many cities who have marched into highways disrupting traffic by sitting down in intersections in urban centers, linking arms across railroad tracks with the intention of stopping trains, delaying sporting events, and occupying shopping mass, city halls, and major retail stores temporarily. Activists have come to the conclusion that anti-Black racism has proved to be a systematic issue that has to be confronted with the disruption of commuter travel, work, commerce, and several other circuits of the day to day functions of the United States society.
The movement sheer breath also shows the power of the movement and the chord that it has managed to strike since it started. There have been protests staged by the movement in most of the major cities within across the nation. There have also been protests witnessed in town involving few Black residents a good example being the solidarity rally that was organized by white girl who was only eleven years old in Westford, Massachusetts in January 7 (Garza, 2010)
Despite the fact that the Black activists being the driving force of Black Lives Matter since the Ferguson rebellion, the protests by the movement of most of the major cities and streets have been multiracial in nature. Elementary school, middle school, as well as high school students across the nation, have participated and initiated the protest. College students from different campuses of different kinds have taken part in the movement, and there has been even an action day that was organized by medical students. The protest termed as “White Coats for Black Live” attracted students from approximately seventy medical schools across the nation (Garza, 2010).
The Black Lives Matter connected quickly with and inspired several other movements. The Palestine solidarity activists have in the recent past had contingents that are visible in several protests, with organizations indicating an extensive relationship between the Israel state and the urban police departments in the United States. A discussion involving Black activists in the movement was prominently featured at the Students about Justice within the Palestine national conference in the fall that was held in Boston.
There was also a Native Lives Matter protest on December 19th in South Dakota mainly inspired by Ferguson protesting violence by the police against the Indigenous people in America. Low-wage workers who were active in the 15 campaign Fight took part in some of the earliest Ferguson protests. Solidarity within the movement has also extended outside the United States including activists in the prodemocracy marches in Hong Kong who used the gesture of “hands up, don’t shoot” to Palestinians to convey messages of solidarity on Twitter.
Some of the other notable aspects of this movement have been witnessed in sense of its history, the way it is committed to associating police racism with other pressing issues such as its inclusiveness and economic inequality. Black Lives Matter has emphasized on both the need to have a new generation of able leaders who are in a position to fight for the liberation of the Blacks and the leadership role that remain crucial being played by the LGBTQ folks and women within the movement (Garza, 2010).
What can be considered as perhaps the greatest marker of the strength of the movement as well as the best indicator of the start of another chapter of the Black struggle and not a phenomenon that is short-lived, is that the movement has already overcome several major obstacles. Among the obstacles was the brutal repression of the state against the resistance witnessed in August 2014 in Ferguson itself (Solomon, 2014).
Protest continued to persist regardless of the presence of state police departments and multiple local departments as well as the Missouri National Guard deployment. The racism in the state and that witnessed in the news media especially when covering protests involving both gang members and institution disparaging Black marchers, paved way for far-right terrorists.
The Ku Klux Klan rallied openly in St. Louis supporting Darren Wilson (Solomon, 2014). Wilson was the officer who was alleged to have murdered Michael Brown as well as threatened lethal forces to gang against Black protesters. Arsonists burned the makeshift street memorial of Michael Brown. Jay Nixon; Missouri governor, in anticipation that the decision by the jury was not likely to indict Wilson; he declared a state of emergency as well as mobilized the National Guard.
The FBI alerted every police department in the nation before the grand jury decision alarming them that the protesters are likely to target law enforcement and critical infrastructure. The message that was passed across was that the police forces were to gear up for repression along the Ferguson streets lines in August, and if the protesters decided to march, they were to be stopped by the state authorities.
Despite all these warnings, protests still erupted as they responded to the decision by the grand jury. Also, following another failure by the grand jury the week that followed this protests to indict the NYPD Eric Garner killer, the protests increased and took a stronger national character. In these weeks of protests in November, it was the police who stood down and not the protesters.
The main challenge that faced the movement was in New York following the incident in which two police officers were killed by Ismaaiyl Brinsley in late December. A backlash led by the police was unleashed to fight the protest movement. Mayor Bill de Blasio, who was sympathetic to Black Lives Matter movement, requested for a suspension on protests (Solomon, 2014).
This appeal offered credibility to the argument forwarded by the Patrolman Benevolent Association in New York to the media that was right-winged claiming the movement to some level bore responsibility for murdering the two police officers. The motive of the police backlash remained clear the way the motive of the activists were not in any way derailed or slowed down by the backlash.
The justice resolutely movement crossed the boundary that had been set by the establishment drew in New Yo...