Allison Brown, Open Society Foundations: On Mother’s Day, I watch Samaria Rice beg for some closure five months after her son, Tamir, was shot to death by police officers within moments of encountering him in a Cleveland park. I think of Gloria Darden and the shock she must have experienced at discovering that her son, Freddie Gray, was killed so senselessly and so violently by police.
Julie Quiroz, The Movement Strategy Center: I’m always glad when I get asked, “Is there anything that could really make a difference?” because there is so much coming from the movement for Black lives.
The tragedies of Eric Garner, Mike Brown, John Crawford, Jessie [...]
#BlackLivesMatter has infiltrated America’s modern vocabulary. It’s the rallying cry for a movement that began getting a lot of national attention after the police killing of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri. But #BlackLivesMatter began before Ferguson.
On the evening of April 25 at the corner of Pratt and Light Streets, in Baltimore’s revitalized downtown district, more than 100 police officers in riot gear stood shoulder to shoulder, shields up. Six officers on horseback fidgeted behind them, staring down at a crowd of about 40, an odd mixture of protesters, journalists and protester-journalists.
The Criminal Justice Initiative (CJI) is a cross-class funding circle made up of community organizers and activist donors. Together we identify, fund, and nurture grassroots activism led by formerly incarcerated people working to transform the criminal justice system in the United States.
Baltimore is rising up to protest the police killing of Freddie Gray, the long history of over policing and police brutality, and the severe under-resourcing of Black communities in Baltimore.
However, the visibility, or lack thereof, of black women in the protest narrative has also been problematic; early in the week, religious leaders explicitly called for men to march in front of women, for the purpose of protection, which the women in the crowd largely ignored in favor of a more egalitarian marching formation.
The incident was all too familiar. An apparently unarmed black man was fatally shot by a white police officer, in a predominately African American community with a predominately Caucasian police force. And yet there were meaningful differences between the April 7 shooting of Walter Scott in North Charleston, South Carolina, and several similar tragedies—including Michael Brown’s death in Ferguson, Missouri—that stirred nationwide protests last fall.
Arizona is a testing ground for conservative legislation that targets and harms communities of color and sets precedent for other states to follow suit, as seen with SB1070.
