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 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.
Movements across America confronting the crisis of foreclosure, gentrification and displacement, need to have black leaders who help define the vision for our right to the city.
The future of our nation depends on our building a society that ensures everyone has an opportunity to thrive, regardless of race. Philanthropy has an important role to play in the coming months and years to help the movement bring about lasting progress.
A hub of information, made by protesters for protesters, to help activists advance the movement for justice and equity.
We've mapped 302 black people killed by police in 2014, disaggregated the data by race/gender/age/place.
We need to fund more teachers and social workers, not police officers, in our schools. We need doctors, not cops, to deal with drug addiction and mental illness. We need full employment not the criminalization of poverty. We need organized and powerful communities not federal tank giveaways. We need to fund stronger, healthier neighborhoods, not bigger police departments.
Nat Chioke Williams, Executive Director, Hill-Snowdon Foundation: The Black Lives Matter movement has allowed the country to approach having honest, clear and urgent dialogue on structural racism by punching holes in the cone of silence that typically suffocates meaningful dialogue on racism with a sea of deeply cynical memes like political correctness, reverse racism, and color blindness.
Our Quality Policing Initiative makes all five phases of policing authority—(1) recruitment, (2) training, (3) deployment, (4) accountability and (5) advancement—responsive to the communities that they are policing and to the elected officials who regulate and deploy them.
Young people of color are demonstrating a readiness to organize that has not been seen in many years. For funders and others who care about youth leadership and social and racial justice, it is an important time to support the actions taking place across the country to help them coalesce into a sustained movement. For funders who care about young people, education, health and host of other issues, now is the time to invest not just in direct youth services, but also in the leadership of young people to address the roots of inequality.
