As my father kept talking—about our churches, schools, and neighborhoods—I stopped him with a question. When did he, a generation earlier, and with two black parents, become aware of the reality of race in his own life?
He thought for a moment and began to tell the story of a road trip he, his three siblings, and his parents took sometime in the late 1960s or 1970s when he was not yet a teen. My father’s is an expansive black family, from a deeply religious section of North Carolina near Charlotte where pretty much any black person you encounter can be safely assumed to be some sort of cousin. And depending on how much free time you have, you can probably list the names of uncles and aunts until you can confirm that yes, this person standing in front of you is a relative. My grandmother had always been strict in general, but especially about making sure that my dad and his siblings had gone to the bathroom before getting on the road. Being a child, this time my dad had the audacity to ask “Why?” The trip was only an hour, and he didn’t have to go. Why did it matter so much if he went to the bathroom before they got in the car?
“Mark,” my grandmother said to him. “Have you ever been in the car, and you just had to go to the bathroom so bad that you would have the driver pull the car over onto the side of the road, right then? You just have to go right now!”
Of course he had, and he said so.
“Now imagine that’s you, you’ve got to go so badly, and finally, after miles and miles, you spot a rest stop, you pull over and run out of the car, but inside, the white man at the counter stops you before you can make it to the bathroom door…
“‘There’s no bathrooms for you in here,’ he says sternly. ‘Maybe a few miles down the road. Now get going.’”
My dad, he recalled to me with a laugh, wouldn’t ever complain again when his mother, who had lived most of her life in a country in which people who looked like her weren’t legally allowed to vote, harangued him to use the restroom before they set out on the road. He’d been awakened to the reality of his parents’ and grandparents’ lives and of his own. There is the pivotal moment in a black man or woman’s life from which we can never return: when you realize the threat posed to you by the color of your own skin, the humiliation and danger that could befall you or your family as the result of the most human necessity, using a restroom.
It wouldn’t be until years later—during my senior year of college—that I would have my own awakening to the reality that even with a black president in office, my shade of pigment remained a hazard. I was twenty-one and living in Athens, Ohio, as I finished my time at Ohio University, when an unarmed seventeen-year-old named Trayvon Martin was shot and killed by a neighborhood watchman in Sanford, Florida. Within days, the initial details of the shooting, and Trayvon’s face, filled my Facebook and Twitter feeds as friends from high school and college debated the case and expressed their outrage. Trayvon had been visiting his father, who lived in Sanford, to watch the NBA All-Star Game, when he ventured out to a nearby gas station to buy iced tea and Skittles. As he walked home, talking on the phone with a friend, with a sweatshirt hood over his head to shield him from the falling rain, he caught the eye of George Zimmerman.
Zimmerman, a self-appointed neighborhood watchman, was so concerned with a rash of break-ins that he had begun patrolling the subdivision, carrying a gun.
“Hey, we’ve had some break-ins in my neighborhood and there’s a real suspicious guy…,” Zimmerman told the 911 operator. “This guy looks like he’s up to no good, or he’s on drugs or something. It’s raining and he’s just walking around, looking about.”
Zimmerman and the operator talked for a few more minutes, as a police officer began to make his way to the scene.
“These assholes, they always get away,” Zimmerman said.
“Are you following him?” the operator asked.
“Yeah,” Zimmerman responded.
“Okay, we don’t need you to do that,” the operator said.
Moments later, after hanging up with the 911 operator, Zimmerman physically confronted Trayvon Martin. According to his account, Trayvon attacked him, punching him so hard that he fell to the ground. Scared for his life, Zimmerman said he reached for the gun he was carrying and shot Trayvon in the chest. The fatal bullet left Zimmerman’s gun at 7:16 p.m. By 7:30 p.m., Trayvon was pronounced dead.
There hadn’t been any direct witnesses to the confrontation, but a handful of people who saw parts of it said they believed they saw Trayvon on top of Zimmerman, punching him. Citing the lack of evidence refuting Zimmerman’s story that he had acted in self-defense, the local police let him go home.
Trayvon, a teen who looked not unlike one of my younger brothers, was vilified in the media, the same way Michael Brown and Tamir Rice and Eric Garner would be years later. Pictures of him smoking marijuana were published; media outlets dug through his tweets for profanities—seizing on rap lyrics they suggested somehow proved the teen’s propensity for violence. He shouldn’t have been wearing a hoodie, some said. He shouldn’t have been out at night, others added.
How many nights during high school had I spent wandering an unfamiliar neighborhood in one of the suburbs that surrounded my own? Probably wearing a hoodie—which I wore pretty much everywhere when I was seventeen—or maybe even those jeans that didn’t quite fit right and if I forgot to wear a belt slid down as I walked. How many times was I one overzealous neighborhood watchman away from death?
There was no news story in 2012 and 2013 that I followed as closely as the George Zimmerman trial. During the early days of the case, after Trayvon was killed and Zimmerman remained at large, I was blogging for a now-defunct website, Loop21, which focused on black issues and politics. The initial outrage that Zimmerman was not arrested and that no charges were filed stood in contrast to the picture of Zimmerman slowly losing his cool under the national scrutiny.
At one point, he went off the grid but made a concession to visibility by launching a low-budget fundraising website so that his growing legion of supporters could contribute to his legal defense. The story of the site was broken by one of my friends and mentors, Mara Schiavocampo, then a correspondent for NBC News. Since I owned a website myself—essentially a blog where I hosted my résumé as I searched for summer internships—I knew I’d be able to find the email address for whoever had registered the site. Sitting in the office I shared with three other editors at my college newspaper, I fired off an email at 5:35 p.m., describing myself as a freelance reporter who was trying to confirm the site’s authenticity. I never expected a response; in fact, I assumed hundreds of other reporters would have done the same thing and that maybe my name would show up someday during the trial if all the emails were released. That would be cool, I thought.
Eleven minutes later, I got a reply, from [email protected].
Mr. Lowery, You are correct. www.therealgeorgezimmerman.com is run by me, George Zimmerman.
Thanks,
George
I was floored. The man who was all over cable news, at the center of one of the most racially charged stories of my lifetime, was emailing with me, a twenty-one-year-old sitting in his college newsroom. I quickly responded, asking him if there was any way he could prove that it really was him.
“Certainly,” George Zimmerman replied. “You can contact Sean Hannity. I spoke with him today and he confirmed my identity. Sincerely, George Zimmerman.”
I couldn’t believe what was happening. And then it got even stranger.
“Come in here, Wesley!” my friend John Nero, a fellow editor at the paper, shouted, beckoning me into our newspaper lobby, where the television was almost always tuned to CNN.
George Zimmerman’s attorneys had called a press conference to beg him to call them. He had started a fundraising website, and apparently, they now revealed, he’d had a phone conversation with Sean Hannity of Fox News earlier that day. I had been emailing with the actual George Zimmerman.
In the coming days and weeks, thousands of people in
Florida and elsewhere took to the streets and signed online petitions demanding that Zimmerman be arrested. Eventually, he was, and was charged with second-degree murder.
The year 2012 was a major awakening point not just for me but also for other young black men and women across the country. We watched the Trayvon Martin shooting play out in real time on our Facebook pages and television screens. At the same time, the stories of Jordan Davis and Oscar Grant (a 2009 police shooting that was depicted in the film Fruitvale Station) solidified the undeniable feeling in our hearts that their deaths and those of other young black men were not isolated.
While “the movement” was born in Ferguson, it was conceived in the hearts and minds of young black Americans at different points in the preceding years. One of these moments came with the Florida jury’s decision to find George Zimmerman, the neighborhood watchman who shot and killed Trayvon Martin, “not guilty.”
On the night of that decision I was still living in Boston. The news broke on Twitter that the jury was done deliberating and that the announcement was forthcoming. Then we all saw the words: “not guilty.” I sprang into reporter mode—one that was still new to me—because I didn’t know what else to do. I had to do something even if I wasn’t an activist, or even a normal citizen. I was a reporter. I got in my Pontiac Grand Prix and drove to a nearby church that had announced it was having a vigil. If I couldn’t participate, I could at least do a few interviews and email them in to the Globe’s weekend editors. But by the time I had found a place to park, the vigil had concluded. I went back to my car and sat in silence as raindrops splattered on my windshield.
For months, some right-wing and white supremacist groups had warned of the impending “Trayvon Martin riots.” They encouraged white Americans to brace for what they predicted would surely be a round of racial unrest once Zimmerman, at this point almost a folk hero, was acquitted.
In a column titled “What If Zimmerman Walks Free?” Pat Buchanan, once an adviser to Ronald Reagan, laid the blame for racial tension at the feet of alleged race-baiters. It was the fault of Jesse Jackson, and Maxine Waters, and the New Black Panthers—an essentially nonexistent group of about half a dozen would-be radicals—and President Obama, for having the audacity to sympathize with the family of a dead teenager who had been followed and killed by Zimmerman.
“The public mind has been so poisoned that an acquittal of George Zimmerman could ignite a reaction similar to that, twenty years ago, when the Simi Valley jury acquitted the LAPD cops in the Rodney King beating case,” Buchanan declared. “Should that happen, those who fanned the flames, and those who did nothing to douse them, should themselves go on trial in the public arena.” Just moments after Zimmerman was found not guilty, former speaker of the House of Representatives Newt Gingrich further fanned the hysteria.
“I watch these protesters,” Gingrich said live on CNN. “None of whom read the transcript, none of whom sat through five weeks of the trial. All of whom were prepared, basically, to be a lynch mob.”
History, stubborn in its nuance, proved Buchanan, Gingrich, and the rest of their lot wrong. There were no large-scale Trayvon Martin riots. In their place were vigils held throughout the country—like the one I had barely missed in Boston. Peaceful black America was awakened by the Zimmerman verdict, which reminded them anew that their lives and their bodies could be abused and destroyed without consequence. Trayvon’s death epitomized the truth that the system black Americans had been told to trust was never structured to deliver justice to them.
The “not guilty” verdict prompted the creation of a round of boisterous and determined protest groups, most prominently the Dream Defenders and Million Hoodies Movement for Justice, both initially Florida-based, although the latter would eventually expand nationally.
Across the country, at a time when Twitter had yet to become the primary platform for news consumption, a then-thirty-one-year-old activist in Oakland named Alicia Garza penned a Facebook status that soon went viral.
She called the status “a love note to black people.”
“the sad part is, there’s a section of America who is cheering and celebrating right now. and that makes me sick to my stomach. we GOTTA get it together y’all,” she wrote. “stop saying we are not surprised. that’s a damn shame in itself. I continue to be surprised at how little Black lives matter. And I will continue that. stop giving up on black life.”
“black people. I love you. I love us. Our lives matter,” she concluded.
Her friend and fellow activist Patrisse Cullors found poetry in the post, extracting the phrase “black lives matter” and reposting the status. Soon the two women reached out to a third activist, Opal Tometi, who set up Tumblr and Twitter accounts under the slogan.
“Black Lives Matter is an ideological and political intervention in a world where Black lives are systematically and intentionally targeted for demise,” Garza wrote in the group’s official written history of its founding. “It is an affirmation of Black folks’ contributions to this society, our humanity, and our resilience in the face of deadly oppression.”
While the phrase is now the name of an organization and is often used to describe the broader protest and social justice movement, Black Lives Matter is best thought of as an ideology. Its tenets have matured and expanded over time, and not all of its adherents subscribe to them in exactly the same manner—much the way an Episcopalian and a Baptist, or a religious conservative and a deficit hawk, could both be described as a Christian or a conservative, yet still hold disagreements over policy, tactics, and lifestyle.
For the young black men and women entering the adult world during the Obama presidency, the ideology of Black Lives Matter, not yet an organization nor a movement, carried substance, even heft. It was a message that resonated with the young black men and women who had been so outraged and pained by the Zimmerman verdict. And the decision by Tometi to focus on Twitter and Tumblr, then second-tier social media outlets, instead of Facebook, proved a stroke of strategic genius. Both networks allow for more organic, democratic growth. Unlike Facebook, in which virality is determined by algorithms, visibility on Twitter and Tumblr is determined directly by how compelling a given message, post, or dispatch is. A phrase like #blacklivesmatter, or #ferguson, or, later on, #BaltimoreUprising, can in a matter of moments transform from a singular sentence typed on an individual user’s iPhone into an internationally trending topic. #blacklivesmatter didn’t catch on immediately, but its time would soon come.
As writer and historian Jelani Cobb wrote in the New Yorker, in what remains one of the definitive profiles of the creation of the organization now known nationally as #blacklivesmatter:
Black Lives Matter didn’t reach a wider public until the following summer, when a police officer named Darren Wilson shot and killed eighteen-year-old Michael Brown in Ferguson. Darnell Moore, a writer and an activist based in Brooklyn, who knew Cullors, coordinated “freedom rides” to Missouri from New York, Chicago, Portland, Los Angeles, Philadelphia, and Boston. Within a few weeks of Brown’s death, hundreds of people who had never participated in organized protests took to the streets, and that campaign eventually exposed Ferguson as a case study of structural racism in America and a metaphor for all that had gone wrong since the end of the civil-rights movement.
Many of the local organizers were excited to have reinforcements. They had been out in the streets for days, launching organizations such as Hands Up United and Millennial Activists United. The Black Lives Matter rides had brought fresh bodies for the protest lines and fresh voices for the megaphones. But they had also brought with them crowds of outsiders, who hadn’t been in these streets, whose eyes and tongues had yet to feel the bitter sting of tear gas.
That tension between veterans and newcomers would eventually play out not only in cities like St. Louis and Cleveland, but also on a national stage, as the media began attempting to define the contours of the protest movement and appoint leaders. Even before the out-of-town buses h
ad arrived, the Ferguson protesters had begun using the chant “Black Lives Matter,” and were punctuating the hundreds of tweets that some of them were sending each day with #blacklivesmatter.
That hashtag, linked in the minds of its creators to their group and their network, inevitably took on a life of its own—and became a mantle under which thousands of demonstrators, activists, and groups began protesting both online and in the streets. Whether they wanted or intended it, the protest movement was being identified as the “Black Lives Matter movement” by the media, myself included, before most of us appreciated the difference between the rallying cry and the organization that preceded it. This conflation became even more complicated once the #blacklivesmatter group founded by Garza, Cullors, and Tometi began spawning chapters and organizing a more formal network of allies. Black Lives Matter was now a widely adopted slogan, a “movement,” and its own organization—but that nuance and complication were lacking from nearly all media coverage, due in part to laziness but in fact more likely because at that point in the quickly moving story of the unrest in Ferguson, few reporters—myself included—could accurately grasp what exactly was happening.
This reductive media coverage became a major fault line among the activists—who began to bicker about when, exactly, this “movement” had begun, and who deserved credit for its inception: the three “founders” or the organic protesters in places like New York and Ferguson.
“This conflation was cause for concern because the project was near and dear to our hearts,” Cullors wrote in an essay on the protest movement in February 2016. “As queer Black women, we are often misremembered as contributors and creators of our work, a consequence of deep-seated patriarchy, sexism, and homophobia. But more importantly, this was cause for concern because movements don’t belong to any one person and we knew that this movement wasn’t started by us. Its roots lie in the Black organizers of centuries ago, our ancestors who, in the face of violence like chattel slavery, lynching, whipping, rape, theft and separation of our families, fought for freedom from the state. But despite intervention after intervention with the media, they continued to conflate the two, causing a fissure among some.”
They Can't Kill Us All Page 9