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Written by Devyani Onial | New Delhi | Updated: June 5, 2020 7:39:49 am Martin Luther King Jr leads a march in Alabama on March 9, 1965.

On March 7, 1965, civil rights activists, in response to the police killing of fellow-activist Jimmie Lee Jackson the previous month, were marching from Selma in Alabama to state capital Montgomery when they were attacked by state troopers. The crackdown came to be famously known as Bloody Sunday in US civil rights annals.

Undeterred, two days later, Martin Luther King Jr led another march along the same path. This time, when they encountered state troopers, the marchers took a knee. They knelt and prayed before turning back.

Fifty-five years later, as a new set of American marchers common people, students, occasional policemen even take a knee following the killing of George Floyd by a white police officer that was caught on camera, could this mark the beginning of something new?

In the days that followed Bloody Sunday, King spoke stirringly of their aim to achieve a society that can live with its conscience because, he believed, the arc of the moral universe is long but it bends towards justice. Today, as protestors across American cities march in protest over Floyds death, they are willing the arc to bend towards justice.

The road to Floyds murder has been littered by incidences of violence against African Americans, many becoming catalysts in the countrys civil rights movement and turning points in its knotted history. Martin Luther Kings memorable observation that a riot is the language of the unheard applies as much today as it did back then, said Daniel Letwin, associate professor of history at the Penn State College of the Liberal Arts, and author of The Challenge of Interracial Unionism.

This is certainly a historic moment, he adds, Not since the 1960s have we seen black street protests of such scope and magnitude, across the country. In essential ways, the dynamics are familiar Now, as then, black unrest also drew upon a variety of underlying causes from a persisting culture of white racism, to the disproportionate experience of run-down urban conditions, inadequate schools, poor healthcare, low pay, unemployment, unresponsive government, mass incarceration, and the like.

Data by statista.com reveals a skewed pattern of African American killings by police. Of 1,000 fatal shootings by police in 2019, more than 23 per cent of the victims were blacks, a high proportion given that they made up less than 14 per cent of the population.

Connie Hasset-Walker, assistant professor of Justice Studies and Sociology at Norwich University, believes that the roots of racism in American policing, planted centuries ago, still stand strong. I personally see the US history of slavery (about 250 years long) and then Jim Crow laws (about 80 years long) as very connected to whats happening now. To my knowledge, there has never been a reckoning for policings slave-patrol origins. When an institution starts off with systematic racism and violence as part of its core mission, how far can it evolve from that if there is never a reckoning/commitment to change? she said.

At the time of the American Civil War (1861-1865), said Hasset-Walker, of the 34 states then, 15 were slave states, which created patrols to nip slave revolts and escapes. The state of South Carolina was the first to create slave patrols in 1704. By the end of the 1700s, every American slave state had slave patrols. They lasted for about 150 years, ending with the Souths loss in the Civil War and the passage of the 13th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which outlawed slavery. After that, the former southern slave patrols morphed into police departments that technically were different from slave patrols, but were basically still charged with controlling the freed former slaves, she said.

About 20 years after the end of the Civil War, America saw the passage of the Jim Crow laws, which dictated a policy of segregation, enforced by police, and which persisted as recently as 1964. It was during this period of segregation that in 1955, 14-year-old Emmett Till from Chicago, visiting relatives in Mississippi, was accused of making a flirtatious remark to a white woman at a grocery store. Three days later, Till was kidnapped and killed, his body thrown in the river. The accused the womans husband and his half-brother were later acquitted by an all-white jury.

The civil rights movement gathered steam after this. Montgomery saw a city-wide bus boycott when, on December 1, an African American woman, Rosa Parks, refused to give up her seat for a white man and was arrested for it. The Montgomery Improvement Association, led by a young Luther King Jr, called a boycott of the citys municipal bus company. It was eventually called off on December 20, 1956, after the segregation seating policy was held unconstitutional.

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The years that followed were a time of great turbulence in America, as riots swept city after city. The Watts riots in 1965 in Los Angeles (that started after Marquette Frye, an African American, was pulled over for suspected drunk-driving and roughed up by the police), the Detroit and Newark riots the same year and the unrest in a number of cities following Kings assassination in 1968, were all fuelled in large part by economic and social disparity, prejudiced policing and general disaffection, that continues today.

On March 3, 1991, Rodney King, a black motorist, was beaten by LAPD officers after a high-speed chase. A man called George Holliday, who witnessed the beating from his balcony, videotaped the incident and gave it to a local TV station. From then on, it went, what we would now call, viral. On April 29, 1992, the four LAPD officers were acquitted, sparking outrage and triggering one of the worst race riots in LA, that lasted six days and left over 50 dead, 2,300 injured.

King was certainly not the first black man to be beaten up by the police, but it was the first time that someone video-recorded the beating. That video validated what many African Americans knew at that time that Los Angeles police were very brutal towards black people, said Hasset-Walker.

Also read | Daddy changed the world, says George Floyds 6-year-old daughter in viral video

More than 15 years after the LA riots, came a moment in American history that many had dreamt of but few had imagined. Barack Obama winning the presidential election in November 2008 was a moment that was both a rupture and a healing. But did it fundamentally change anything for the community? For many, it was the execution of Troy Davis that showed that nothing had changed.

Davis was a black man on death row in Georgia, who many believed had been wrongfully convicted for the murder of a police officer. Wrong convictions havent been rare. In 2002, convictions against the Central Park Five teenagers (four blacks and one Latino), accused of raping and grievously assaulting a jogger in Central Park in 1989 were vacated and the charges withdrawn after over 10 years. The Central Park case many would remember it from the Netflix series When They See Us had made national news with the current President Donald Trump buying full-page ads in New York newspapers calling for the state to bring back the death penalty. Even after they were exonerated, Trump insisted they were guilty.

Editorial | Death of George Floyd may or may not be a turning point for America. But protests show wound has cut deeper and wider

For Davis, thousands rallied, appealing to the countrys first Black President to stay the execution. Davis was executed on September 21, 2011, and the night after as protestors filed into Union Square in Manhattan, they merged with another group Occupy Wall Street. As Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor wrote in The Guardian, the convergence of the two groups underlined the economic disparity in America and showed the connections between racism and black poverty.

But it was the shooting of Trayvon Martin, a 17-year-old African American high-school student in Sanford, Florida on February 26, 2012 that started another round of conversation around racial profiling, prompting even President Obama to say, If I had a son, hed look like Trayvon. George Zimmerman, a neighbourhood watch volunteer who claimed he had shot Trayvon in self-defence, was acquitted a year later. The prosecution had contended that Zimmermann had followed the hoodie-clad boy because he assumed he was a criminal but the six-women jury rejected it. It was Zimmermans acquittal that gave rise to a hashtag and a movement.

#BlackLivesMatter, started in 2013 by Alicia Garza, Patrisse Cullors and Opal Tometi, has now grown into a global network whose members organise and build local power to intervene in violence inflicted on black communities by the state and vigilantes. The BLM movement has been at the forefront of subsequent street demonstrations, most notably following the death of Michael Brown in Ferguson near St Louis and of Eric Garner in New York City.

Cornel West, a public intellectual and a fearless voice in left-wing politics, traces the current unrest to the failures of Obama. West, who had once shared the stage with Obama, is now one of the most vocal critics of many of his policies. In a recent interview to CNN, he said, The Black Lives Matter movement emerged under a black president, black attorney general, and black homeland security and they couldnt deliver. Black faces in high places, he said, succumbed to the capitalist economy and militarised nation-state.

Read | 8:46: A number becomes a potent symbol of police brutality

The shooting of 12-year-old Tamir Rice in 2014 by a police officer (Rice was carrying a replica toy Airsoft gun), of Ahmaud Aubrey, who was tagged and killed by armed white residents while jogging in his Georgia neighbourhood and of Breonna Taylor in Louisville this March by plainclothes policemen, who barged into her apartment looking for someone else, all brought about a cycle of debate and protests. Could the current uprising be a crack, however slight, that will let in the light?

In the early days of the Floyd protests, Trump had tweeted in support of using military force to quell the riots. Law-and-order demagogues seek to discredit black rebellion as a mindless orgy of violence committed by thugs and criminals, encouraged by radical agitators and spineless, liberal officials, said Letwin. But there are signs that this time things could be different: For one, street protests appear much more diverse, with a higher participation of whites and Hispanics alongside African Americans. The unrest is no longer so confined as it once was to black neighbourhoods. Certainly, the ease with which acts of police violence can be recorded and publicised has changed the picture as well.

Hasset-Walker, too, pointed at a crucial difference. What is different about the murder of George Floyd is how quickly the police officer, Derek Chauvin, who kneeled on Floyds neck, was charged with third degree murder.

On Wednesday, the former Minneapolis Police officer was charged with a fresh count of second-degree murder, and the three other officers with him were charged with aiding and abetting second-degree murder. Whether he will ultimately be convicted, well see. But the swift arrest and issuing of a charge thats important, and unusual, she said.

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Explained: George Floyds America in black & white - The Indian Express

We were somewhere in Crown Heights when we heard the shouting on Monday night. My friend, a reporter for The New York Times, and I raced toward the gathering on a pair of bicycles. I lived in this neighborhood when I first moved to Brooklyn and am familiar with its streets. It was much quieter then. Happier, too. As June dawned, it was engulfed, as were so many neighborhoods in so many cities across the nation, in protestanother concrete oasis evolved and outfitted for outrage.

The protests were for George Floyd, a black man killed by police in Minneapolis last week after a white officer, Derek Chauvin, held his knee on Floyds neck for nearly nine minutes. I cant breathe, Floyd cried. Millions of people worldwide have since viewed his death via a cellphone video recording taken by Darnella Frazier, a bystander. Four days later, Chauvin was charged with third-degree murder and second-degree manslaughter. Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison upgraded Chauvins charge to second-degree murder on Wednesday, and charged the three other officers on the scene with aiding and abetting. The protests were also for Breonna Taylor, a black woman killed by police in Louisville in March, after plainclothes officers entered her home in the middle of the night and exchanged gunfire with her boyfriend, Kenneth Walker. Eight bullets struck Taylor; no charges have been filed against the officers who killed her. There have been many more horrors inflicted on black Americans during the previous decade of protest, since massive dissent against police brutality and the extrajudicial killings of black people sprouted robustly following Trayvon Martins slaying in 2012 by George Zimmerman. Its an inexhaustible list of transgressions, too deflating to rehash.

What did brother Huey [Newton] say?! an organizer asked from a megaphone in Crown Heights.

All power to the people! the crowd responded.

We are talking about a system that criminalizes, he said. But theres more of us than there is of them. And where we gotta be?!

In these streets! the crowd cheered.

And we aint goin he said.

Nowhere!

The surrounding streets were quieter. Police vehicles gathered near Myrtle Avenue, where the protestors met, a foreboding presence keeping watch over a peaceful gathering. Not far from the protest, life resumed as normal, or as normal as is expected during the coronavirus pandemic: families walked, rode their bikes, and pushed strollers with what seemed like a trained ambivalence. A borough was preparing for another night of demonstrations, yet here they were in a bubble of their own peace.

As we moved with the protestors, the Brooklyn I remember came back into focus. The sounds of Pop Smoke and Casanova rained down from high-rise windows. People sold homemade T-shirts on Nostrand Avenue with End White Supremacy printed on them. An hour or so later, protestors marched on Marcus Garvey Boulevard, yelling into the evening: No Justice. No Peace. Fuck These Racist-Ass Police.

Thousands had gathered that evening in Brooklyn for demonstrations led by mostly black faces, marching up and down Fulton Avenue, near the murals of black laureates, poets, and rappers on Tompkins Street, in the streets, their streets, our streets. Protestors held signs with George Floyds face and Breonna Taylors name strewn across cardboard while blue-and-red lights flickered behind them. They shouted from the steps of the Applebees on Fulton, a melody in their mouths: Bed-Stuy! Do or die!

When the protests first began in New York after Floyds killing, it felt like the first unpausing of the year. Brooklyns residents, like everyone else, have been confined to their homes because of the coronavirus. The disease has disproportionately ravaged the borough, laying bare a different kind of systemic racism, one that leaves black bodies vulnerable to the worst health outcomes possible. The multiple killings of black citizens by police in recent weeks became a flashpoint for mandatory action. The need to protest injustice was enough to override the urgency of social distancing measures. Fighting racism became the primary concern, the virus be damned.

A lot of people I know have lost their lives to COVID-19, and this is just another rung, Branda Brumaire, a Canarsie resident, told me. Every year, she said, its the same shit. The risk of police is greater than the risk of a pandemic. Id rather support this cause than stay home.

It isnt lost on me that this unpausing serves to refocus the nations energy toward ending Americas original sin. On Monday, officials enacted New York Citys first curfew since 1943; that, too, was in response to civil unrestan uprising in Harlem had broken out after a white officer shot a black soldier. Now, New York is following the example of so many other major cities by forcing its residents off the streets, a controlling attempt to impede peaceful gatherings decrying a system of policing in the United States that was born from slave patrols in the Northeast and can kill black people with impunity. The same city fumbled its attempt to assuage the fears of its citizens in the throes of a pandemic during an unprecedented moment of economic instability. But these protests? This consistent fight to defang the monstrosity of American racism? It has always been here. In some ways, the context of this moment is ironic: We wear masks to prevent the spread of the coronavirus, but maybe black people should have always worn masks to protect ourselves from this national disease that so many people have finally decided is worth fighting.

As the crowd moved toward the Barclays Center in downtown Brooklyn a few miles away, I spoke with a 28-year-old Brooklyn resident who prefers to go by Dottie. He was frazzled as he tried to make sense of the recent spate of police violence. He says hes out here marching because he fears for his son.

We need respect. Justice. Its hard. I dont know how I explain this to my son, he told me. He went on: How do I explain how we have to be careful because we wont make it home sometimes? I wish this wasnt needed. But these dicks, he said, referring to police, aint giving us no respect.

Its crushing to think of how rough this year has been, and its only June. Or how rough the week already felt, when it was only Monday. This is the reality of racism for the black American. It cannot be limited only to conscious hate when it has evolved into a complex institution with levers in social and political outcomes perpetuated by generations of white neglect, hate, and supremacy. I wish it was only the visceral malice of individuals that we had to combat. That would be easier. But racism has so many rungs: animosity, privilege, access, apathy, bigotry, a dastardly set activated by countless interactions. It is as present as the air around us: You cant live if you dont breathe it in.

The protestors continued their march to Flatbush Avenue, a major thoroughfare in downtown Brooklyn. Black children raised black power salutes from the back seats of navy blue sedans. Every few blocks, people banged pots and pans as if this flock were anointed, as if these black lives were essential citizens on the front lines fighting an insidious disease, the pandemic within the pandemic, as Brumaire called it. It was as though these folks marching were as important to saving the world as our doctors and nurses.

New York is familiar with these kinds of protests because the citys residents have felt this pain before. Amadou Diallo, a 23-year-old Guinean immigrant, was killed by four officers in 1999 who mistook him for a rape suspect with no evidence and fired 41 shots at him in the Bronx until he died. In 2006, plainclothes and undercover officers shot Sean Bell 50 times in Queens on his wedding day. Eric Garner was choked to death by an officer, Daniel Pantaleo, as his colleagues watched. Garner cried as he uttered the same words in 2014 that George Floyd said last week: I cant breathe.

The people here have never forgotten that.

Dont forget what the fuck happens to us right here in New York! a man in the crowd said around 10 p.m., as the crowd chanted the names of victims of police brutality. A few people began weeping. We love yall, he continued. We just want yall to love us back! When he was finished speaking, a woman turned her portable speaker on to play Mercy, Mercy, Me by Marvin Gaye.

Randy Rude Boy Brown, a Jamaican American and a professional MMA welterweight fighter in the UFC, stood nearby, holding a flag that read Stop Racist Killer Cops Fuck The Police. He said he was out here to stand for justice with my brothers and sisters, one of the many black athletes whove turned up at protests to fight racism, including Jaylen Brown and Malcolm Brogdon in Atlanta, and Deshaun Watson in Houston.

We want them to arrest those other cops and charge the other cops and we will disperse after that happens, Randy Brown told me on Monday, referring to the Minneapolis officers who stood by as Chauvin kept his knee on Floyds neck. But until then its fuck their curfew. Nothing has changed. This is just the tipping point. This has to happen for change to happen.

That pain and that rage were palpable at Mondays protests. Yes, for the last week, fires have spread, and the nation has burned as rebellion turned America from a powder keg to a lit explosion, but so many of us have lived in this land, with this weight and these burdens, for our entire lives. Revolution has been an inextricable piece of American history, from plantations to the Boston Tea Party. Protests are raging in American cities because the extrajudicial killings of black people by agents of the state are unbearable. Criticism of how those protests are carried out misses the point: When police officers kill black people and are rarely punished, we must remember that change cannot come without resistance; when justice is not an option, other avenues of discord must become ones.

Mpanja Rwakibale, a 22-year-old Ugandan American living in Bed-Stuy, says police have been a terror in this nation for far too long. I asked her if something shifted in the last week, if these recent police killings actually moved the needle.

It feels like something is changing this time, she said. When Ferguson happened, the people commenting and saying bad things was such a large group. Now when I get on social media I see more people I wouldnt expect to start to care.

Like who, I ask her.

Like white people, she says.

Recent research seems to support that sentiment. This week, Monmouth University released a study that found that 57 percent of Americans believe that police officers in difficult situations are more likely to use excessive force against black people. Its a 23-percentage-point increase from 2016, when registered voters were asked the same question after Alton Sterling was killed in Baton Rouge, and a 24-point increase after a grand jury didnt indict Pantaleo for killing Garner in New York.

Some of that essence was tangible when the crowd made its way back to Barclays Center on Monday after curfew hit. They knelt in protest, like Colin Kaepernick. They bawled with the rage that James Baldwin detailed. They chanted and hugged and cried. Together. White hands holding black ones and shielding them from police. Black ones gripping brown ones as they sang the names of the fallen. On this night, the police didnt appear to care as much about the protestors as they did guarding the shopping centers and the basketball arena on each side of the crowd in the middle of Atlantic Avenueeven as black boys bounced through downtown on dirt bikes as the crowds cheered. It was serene. It was a dream, and felt even more like one a night later when police trapped protesters on the Manhattan Bridge. Mondays gathering was a rebuke with a smile, a protest and a declaration of love, a respite from the violent clashes happening nationally in previous and subsequent nights, both in New York and elsewhere. The reality of racism in this country so rarely allows me to think that peace is on the horizon. But, for a few hours, at least there was tranquility in Brooklyn and, perhaps, possibility.

As my friend and I peeled off from the crowd near midnight on an empty Myrtle Avenue, a bus driver stood outside his vehicle. You at the protests tonight? he asked her. I was the guy honking! He beamed as he held up a video on his phone of the march. I like this, he said, smiling down at it. I like this right here.

The crowd continued to march and sing into the darkness, rage and peace collected together like a dancing flame. The police followed them, close. And as I turned my back, fearful over what could happen, I also felt a smile creep across my face. My ears perked up to a wondrous hum sweeping across the Brooklyn night.

The blare of Black Lives Matter! blazed through the air, louder than the whirs of the following helicopters, skids of police tires, and thump of black-issued boots. Magic moved from the streets to the sky. If only for a New York minute, Black Lives mattered more than the police who were sworn to protect them, and have so often failed.

Continue reading here:
A Night of Protest, Pain, and Peace in Brooklyn - The Ringer

Black Lives Matter placards have been commonplace in recent days (Getty Images)

George Floyd a 46-year-old black mandied in Minneapolis when a policeman knelt on his neck for over eight minutes, despite the victims cries of I cant breathe.

Footage of the incident has sparked protests across the United States and the globe, with demonstrators saying that this was another example of black people being targeted by authorities because of their race.

Protestors have stood off with police since the incident on May 25, chanting I cant breathe, dont shoot, and Black Lives Matter.

What is the#BlackLivesMatter movement?

The #BlackLivesMatter movement was founded in 2013 following the acquittal of George Zimmerman.

Zimmerman was accused of murdering Trayvon Martin, a 17-year-old African American boy. Zimmerman had called the police telling them that Martin was behaving suspicious before confronting him and shooting him after a struggle. Zimmerman claimed that he was acting in self-defence.

Black Lives Matter campaigns against violence and systemic racism aimed at black people through protests and digital activism.

In their own words the movement was founded with the aim oferadicating white supremacy and buildinglocal power to intervene in violence inflicted on Black communities by the state and vigilantes.

The movement was founded by black community organisers Alicia Garza,Patrisse Cullors, andOpal Tometi, though they have highlighted the need for locally led movements rather than national leadership

#BlackLivesMattergained momentum and support as a movement following the deaths of Eric Garner in New Yorkand Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri in 2014.

#BlackLivesMatter cites the civil rights movement, the Black Power movement, the 1980s Black feminist movement, Pan-Africanism, the Anti-Apartheid Movement, LGBTQ social movements, and Occupy Wall Street as inspiration for their activism.

What does Black Lives Matter mean?

The term Black Lives Matter can now be used in reference to the movement, the slogan, twitter hashtag and assemblage of groups campaigning for racial equality.

Critics of the slogan have described it as exclusionary, however Columbia Law Professor Kimberle Crenshaw explained that the term Black Lives Matter as aspirational.

Writing for Harpers Bazaar in 2019 Rachel Elizabeth Cargle said that Black Lives Matter isa rallying cry for a shift in statistical numbers that show that people who are black are twice as likely to be killed by a police officer while unarmed, compared to a white individual.

Why saying All Lives Matter is wrong

Opposition of Black Lives Matter have taken to responding by saying All Lives Matter.

Use of All Lives Matter downplays the disproportionate racism and police brutalityexperienced by black people.

Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor of Princeton Universitytold the New York Times that the idea that All Lives Matter has always been an assumption.

He adds: The entire point of Black Lives Matter is to illustrate the extent to which black lives have not mattered in this country.

Cargle used an analogy to highlight the issue of saying All Lives Matter.

She wrote: If a patient being rushed to the ER after an accident were to point to their mangled leg and say, This is what matters right now, and the doctor saw the scrapes and bruises of other areas and countered, but all of you matters, wouldnt there be a question as to why he doesn't show urgency in aiding that what is most at risk?

What is the meaning of the clenched fist symbol?

Protestors holding up closed fists has been a regular sight at #BlackLivesMatter demonstrations and protests in recent days.

The clenched fist has a long history, originally used by marginalised groups worldwide experiencing oppression. Its viewed as a rejection of unjust authority and a show of resistance.

When the Black Panther Party was founded in 1966 by Huey P. NewtonandBobby Seale to challenge police brutality against the African American community, the black power fist was repeatedly used as a symbol of black liberation.

The black power salute was famously used byAmerican sprinters Tommie Smith and John Carlos at the 1968 Mexico City Olympics Gameswho both received medals. Donning black gloves theyraised their fists while the national anthem played during the medal ceremony.

Anti-apartheid activist Nelson Mandela raised a fist in triumph when he was released from prison in 1990.

The clenched fistwas adopted by #BlackLivesMatter following the death of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri in August 2014.

White police shot the unarmed black teenager dead by, with witnesses alleging that Brown had raised his handsbefore being shot. The black power fist was then used to represent the "hands up, don't shoot" pose.

See more here:
Here's what the Black Lives Matter movement represents - and why it's offensive to say All Lives Matter - News Post Leader

Nearly every year our Instagram and Twitter feeds are filled with crude images of black death from somewhere in the US. Its the same alarming cycle: theres an unarmed black man, the police or their fellow citizen murder them, a video of the incident is found, pressure is needed to bring their killers to justice, theyre acquitted, the news moves on, we all forget. The death of Ahmaud Abrey is yet another tragic tale of American racism that has shocked the world.

This time the world must not look away. We cant let the news cycle move on. We cant let this kind of tragic injustice continue. I'm a 17-year-old black teenager from London. Ive never even been to America. But still the death of Ahmaud Abrey should concern us all. Hes our brother -- he had a mother, father, family and friends. He was human. No one, anywhere, in any country should suffer such a needless, brutal, unjust death. Even when the powerful across the world turn a blind eye we must speak louder and demand better.

In 2012 Trayvon Martin, aged 17, was gunned down by George Zimmerman in Florida. Zimmerman was acquitted. In 2014 Eric Garner was choked to death by an NYPD officer during an arrest, uttering the words I can't breathe. No charges were brought against the officer. In 2015 Walter Scott, who was unarmed, was fatally shot as he ran away from a police officer. In 2016 Alton sterling was shot dead by two police officers at close range. In 2018 the 23-year-old Stephon Clark was on the phone in his grandmother's garden, when he was shot and killed by two police officers. In 2019 Bothham Jean was fatally shot by his neighbour, an off-duty Dallas police officer. And thats just scratching the surface. There are countless other names not included in this list.

On February 23, as Abrey jogged through a small neighborhood in Brunswick, Georgia, his life was taken by murderous hatred. For being a black man in America he paid the ultimate price. His life was ended by 34-year-old Travis McMicheal and his father George McMicheal, and in doing so, they extinguished the potential of the young 25-year-old. His memories yet to be made, dreams yet to be realised, life yet to be lived. All taken away in the flash of an eye. The sadness, rage and anger we feel at the video has to be transferred into action, demanding justice for Abrey and an end to the racism that allows this to happen.

The video is horrific to watch. Imagine how distressing it must have been for Abrey. To know that you went out for a run, never committed a crime, never hurt anyone, only to be hunted down and killed. Words cant describe the pain, suffering and anguish he must have experienced. He should've never died. He shouldve lived to see his dreams realised. He should be alive. Thankfully, his two killers have now been arrested and charged with his murder. But that isn't proper justice. Justice would be dismantling the racist system that made them feel like they could take his life.

We as humans are far too complacent. We think progress is won far too soon. An entire system exists which allows racist injustice to continue. The racism we thought was confined to the dusty pages of history still haunts us today. The American court system locks up African Americans for non-violent drug offenses for a long period while the killers of people like Trayvon Martin walk free. The police departments often dont properly investigate the deaths of African Americans like Abrey. Police officers shoot unarmed African Americans often with very little consequence.

In his 1963 letter from Birmingham jail, Martin Luther King Jr. famously said: a threat to justice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We must enter a new day where we are united against all forms of oppression. Where we challenge the powerful, give voice to the voiceless and justice for all. We owe it to Abrey, and those who wrongfully suffered a similar fate, to ensure the brutal crime committed against him never happens again. Progress doesn't fall from the sky, its won by uniting, participating in activism and organising our communities.

Maybe Im too young to understand what the world should be. How the economy should be structured. How we can get better politicians. How to stop so much needless suffering. But it cant be this.

Excerpt from:
The death of Ahmaud Arbery concerns us all - i-D

The writer is professor of sociology at Manchester university

Every Thursday night at home in London, around 7.55pm, its the same. I tell myself not to overthink it. I go to the kitchen cupboard, pull out a saucepan and a wooden spoon, take them to the front door. Then I wait until the clock strikes eight, step out and start whacking the pan. My wife claps beside me. Occasionally the kids join in.

The street comes out; people I havent seen since last week. My daughters piano teacher across the road; the downstairs neighbour. Wewave, chat, clap and cheer for the workers in the National Health Service who are fighting Covid-19 on our behalf. Then we go back inside. And I ask myself: What, precisely, was that about?

Many countries have developed rituals for celebrating their medical workers during this pandemic. But very few of them have nationalised health services. As a nation, the UK ismore proud of the NHS than the monarchy.

So when people come out en masse and cheer for the NHS the one issue that vied with Brexit as a priority during last Decembers general election it is, by definition, a political act. Quite what those politics amount to is, of course, deeply contested. The experts keep saying the UK is just a few weeks behind Italy, where there have beensignificant protests over the effects of the lockdown for a month now. If British politics are keeping stride with our pandemic then a backlash is overdue.

I am clapping for the NHS and the people who work in it, as my mother did; for the disproportionately black and brown migrant and low-paid labourers who keep the institution going, have done so since its inception and are nowdisproportionately vulnerable to both the disease and lockdowns challenges. Im clapping with pride that I live in a nation that has created and sustained this, but also with rage that they still do not all have the protective equipment or testing they need, and with hope that one day soon theyll get the pay they deserve and the service the investment it needs. When I see the prime minister, Boris Johnson, or Prince Charles out on the doorstep I think: Well clearly were not all clapping for the same thing. You can evoke national unity but you cannot enforce it.

As public trust in the governments abilityto handle the pandemic plummets and the death toll, particularly of health workers, rises, the Thursday outing feels less like just a consensual display of gratitude than the closest thing you can get to a national demonstration with social distancing.

It feels like an exemplar of the modern social movement par excellence: an inadequate, if popular, gesture that highlights an issue it is not equipped to solve. Born as a callout on the internet, it owes its spread to social media. It has no leader, centre or organisational structure. It emerged from a sentiment that was broadly felt but essentially latent a colourless gas in search of a spark, a meme in pursuit of meaning.

Like #BlackLivesMatter or #MeToo, it may well find that meaning in one moment, only to find its biggest audience in another. The #BlackLivesMatter hashtag was coined in 2013 following the acquittal of George Zimmerman for killing an unarmed black teenager, Trayvon Martin, in Orlando, Florida. But it became globally popular a year later, after the fatal police shooting of Michael Brown, 1,000 miles away in Ferguson, Missouri.

The MeToo movement was the 2006 MySpace invention of a Bronx-based community organiser seeking to advance empowerment through empathy among women of colour who had been sexually abused. It was not until the revelations of Hollywood producerHarvey Weinsteins serial sexual abuse and rape, more than a decade later, that it became global phenomenon.

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What they lack in form and structure these movements have no meetings or minutes they partly compensate for in scale and flexibility. They can respond quickly; but they can fade fast too. Whatever we would like to believe, clicking, sending, retweeting and liking is not the modern day equivalent of marching, picketing or sitting-in. Activism demands, at the very least, activity.

Still, people can be rallied on an unprecedented scale and with a new speed. Absent a definite target, these movements raise consciousness but not demands. That makes it difficult to gauge what success would look like even as they have impact. No one can claim a causal connection between #MeToo and the historic number of women that were elected to the US Congress a year later. But the contextual relationship between the two is hard to dismiss.

Similarly, Occupy Wall Street did not lead to reforms of the financial industry; but Barack Obamas communications director has said that it had a significant effect on the former US presidents re-election prospects because it gave people permission to openly discuss something that had not really been openly discussed which was the growing inequalities and the unfairness.

So, come Thursday, I will once again try not to overthink it. I will step out and make some noise with the vague hope that, somewhere along the line, it might help make change of some kind.

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Gary Younge: What, precisely, are we making noise for? | Free to read - Financial Times