Though Trayvon’s murder awakened Kendrick and Black America at large, it was just the latest in a long line of savagery against unarmed people of color. In 1999, New York City police officers Kenneth Boss, Richard Murphy, Edward McMellon, and Sean Carroll fired forty-one shots at a twenty-two-year-old West African immigrant named Amadou Diallo in the Soundview section of the Bronx. Diallo had been in the U.S. for two years from his native Guinea, and when he died at the scene—from sixteen bullet wounds—there was no gun near him, just a pager and his wallet. The officers had mistaken Diallo for a serial rape suspect they’d been looking for. When Diallo had reached into his jacket to pull out his wallet, Carroll thought it was a gun and started firing; the other three officers followed suit. A year later, the four officers were acquitted of second-degree murder charges.
Then, in 2009, Bay Area Rapid Transit officer Johannes Mehserle shot Oscar Grant III, a twenty-two-year-old black man, on the platform of BART’s Fruitvale station in Oakland. Grant was pinned to the ground with his hands restrained behind his back when Mehserle stood up in a panic and fired his weapon. The bullet entered Grant’s back, exited his front side, ricocheted off the platform, and punctured his lung. “You shot me,” Grant lamented, looking at Mehserle in disbelief. He died at Highland Hospital in Oakland seven hours later. In 2010, Mehserle was convicted of involuntary manslaughter, but wasn’t found guilty of second-degree murder. He was sentenced to two years in prison; BART reached a number of multimillion-dollar settlements with Grant’s family.
The same words arise in cases like these: fear, intimidation, suspicion, panic. The police somehow felt afraid of Amadou’s wallet, panicked by what Oscar could do facedown with his hands restrained. George Zimmerman claimed Trayvon looked suspicious, and that was enough reason to follow him through the rain and pull the trigger at point-blank range. Regardless, Trayvon’s parents sought a peaceful resolution to that incident, and if they did demonstrate, it was at an event like the Million Hoodie March, where hundreds of supporters donned hooded sweatshirts at Union Square in New York City and asked a Florida jury to convict Zimmerman. Sadly, though, there’s another word that often arises in cases like these: acquitted. In July 2013, Zimmerman was found not guilty of second-degree murder and manslaughter, and as of this writing, he was still free to walk the streets of Florida. It was as if—despite all the news coverage and activism—Trayvon’s life still didn’t matter. “Even though I am broken-hearted,” Tracy Martin tweeted, “my faith is unshattered.” George Zimmerman’s brother, Robert, tweeted that he was “proud to be an American.”
After the verdict, on the same day, three black women—Patrisse Khan-Cullors, Alicia Garza, and Opal Tometi—founded a new civil rights group called Black Lives Matter (BLM) as a direct response to Zimmerman’s acquittal. Garza wrote a post on Facebook called “A Love Letter to Black People” that sought to allay fellow people of color who felt dejected by the state of race relations in America. Brimming with anger, despondence, and real talk, Garza urged readers to keep fighting injustice. “Stop saying we are not surprised,” she declared in the post. “I continue to be surprised at how little Black lives matter.… Black people. I love you. I love us. Our lives matter.” Cullors saw Garza’s post and put it on Twitter with the hashtag #BlackLivesMatter; Tometi constructed the websites on which they and the public could see what was next about the Trayvon incident and others. A movement was born. But this wasn’t your grandfather’s activist group; while Khan-Cullors, Garza, and Tometi took their fight to the street, they also took advantage of Twitter’s growing popularity, where users reacted to Zimmerman’s acquittal in real time.
Social media changed the way news was consumed; no longer did viewers need to wait for the evening headlines, or for the newspaper to plop on their doorstep the next morning. The news was in their pockets; all they had to do was scroll and watch the outrage unfold.
The early days of Black Lives Matter were fairly quiet; its online presence lay dormant until 2014, when another two black men died during encounters with the police over a two-month span, which sent Black America—still raw from the death of Trayvon Martin—into a heightened state of unrest, the likes of which hadn’t been seen since the civil rights era of the 1950s and ’60s.
In mid-July of 2014, Eric Garner was standing outside a storefront in Staten Island, New York, when police officers accused him of selling loose, untaxed cigarettes on the street. It wasn’t the first time the cops had harassed Garner; just a few weeks prior, plainclothes officers in an unmarked car had pulled up on the forty-three-year-old as he walked down Bay Street near Tompkinsville Park, where locals sell cheap wares and try to avoid police pursuits. But according to the New York Times, which cited two witnesses, Garner refused to be frisked or detained, which might have raised the ire of police officers. He “shouted at them to back off,” they reported. “He flailed his arms.” Perhaps seeking retribution, the police encountered Garner later that month—on July 17—and questioned him after he broke up a fight on the block. Again, Garner was incredulous, pleading with the police to simply leave him alone. “I didn’t do nothin’!” he can be heard saying outside the storefront. “What did I do?! I’m standing here
