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This piece was originally published on Medium by LION Publishers. It has been republished with permission. You can learn more about LION Publishers here, and while youre there, sign up for their newsletter.

As an association, our primary role atLION Publishersis to support our members in building financially sustainable, independently owned news businesses. We believe at the core of a successful news business is listening and serving your community of readers especially those whose voices are often underrepresented in the mainstream conversation.

At LION, we believe that Black lives matter heres how some of our members are taking steps to show they do, too.

This week were highlighting 13 LION members who have taken the time to listen and uplift those voices in their communities or who have thought critically about their role in ensuring media is created by more diverse voices. Weve chosen examples that go beyond reporting on whats happening, and offer more context and analysis or introspection of a publications internal practices. All of these examples are replicable or adaptable for other news organizations, and we hope they inspire the work youre doing.

CalMattersshareda breakdown of their staff demographics based on gender and race, and also offered an analysis of salary equity across the organization and their hiring practices. CEO Neil Chase, who is a white man, writes, The most obvious challenge at CalMatters is in my mirror. The organizations top executives are white. He adds that the organizations journalists are forming committees to look at the diversity of our sources, the ways we use words and phrases and labels, and our hiring process as well.

ChalkbeatCEO Elizabeth Green said the organizationadded anti-racism to their core values, which guide our work and govern our team. Shetweeted, As professor Ibram X. Kendi has written, it is not enough to be not racist. We must be anti-racist. The idea that standing against racism by adding a line to a web page might be newsworthy or even brave is a shameful commentary. But I believe (and hope) that we can do our job better by making our values transparent and clear.

Kelsey Ryan, publisher ofThe Beacon(and LIONs communications/membership manager), and her team hosted alive chatthat answered reader questions to provide an inside look into decisions our newsroom is making in real time about covering protests around police brutality. The teamalso shared with their readersthat they were participating in a three-part webinar focused on diversity, equity and inclusion to formalize their organizations stated mission around diversity, equity and inclusion.

Publisher Mukhtar Ibrahim left his reporting job at the Minneapolis Star Tribune in early 2019 to launchSahan Journal, a publication covering the states immigrant communities. Earlier this month, CNNinterviewedMukhtar, whose publication has been covering angles that national media has missed. You see young people being really frustrated and you wonder why. Why is everyone frustrated? Why do they hate the police? Why the cursing at the police? Whats causing that? Im always more curious to learn about that than just covering the latest developments. An example? Thisstoryaboutwhyyoung Minnesota Somalis are protesting.

Project Q Atlanta is for gay men, lesbians, bixsexuals, transgender people and all of those that make up our queer village, according to theirabout page. Founder Matt Hennie hosteda live virtual conversationabout how two pieces of legislation introduced in 2019 could help address police brutality and hate crimes, and how racial justice is an LGBTQ issue.

Understand how police use news coverage to surveil black communities. Dont allow police to use you, or your coverage, to do their jobs. Thats from aguideon covering protests from the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press and Racial Equity in Journalism Fund at Borealis Philanthropy. Wendi C. Thomas ofMLK50: Justice Through Journalism, said she applied these principles to our recentcoverageof a civil disobedience training that drew more than 350 people. While we know the names of the people we talked to, if participants werent comfortable using their whole name or showing their entire face, we protected their identity. Wendi alsoshared her own experienceof being surveilled by the Memphis Police Department.

Long Beach PostPublisher David Sommers created a community editorial board in response to whathe saysis his failure to build up a leadership team and corps of journalists that fully reflects the diversity of the community we cover. To accomplish that goal, hes formed a seven-person editorial board, which will include representation from his organization, though community members will hold a supermajority position. He writes, Board members will be welcomed and encouraged to write opinion columns during the year on issues and subjects in which they have a personal interest, experience or expertise. David said hes received nearly 90 applications so far, and is offering stipends to the editorial board members.

Richland Source, when approached by a black-owned barbershop, collaborated with the shop owner and other partners to launch Shop Talk, a conversation series focused on race and reconciliation in their Ohio community. Thefirst meetingwas held May 31 at a barbershop with a group of people including city employees, a sheriffs deputy, pastors, small business owners, a class of 2020 high school graduate, and a university grad student who were black and white, young and old. Publisher Jay Allred (who is on the LION board of directors) facilitated that first meeting using the 22 Questions that Complicate the Narrative framework, aguidecreated by Amanda Ripley for the Solutions Journalism Network. They hosted the second conversationlast weekand plan to continue the series.

Last summer,LAistput out a call for reader stories about race and published reader essays in response. They recentlyre-upped their calloutsaying, Our job is not to lose focus on this. We are asking for your help, both in joining the conversation and holding us accountable to keep it going. They want to continue publishing reader stories about how race and ethnicity shape their lives, so that we can all keep on talking. Because we have to.

Berkeleysidehas published two useful guides one focused on 5 things you can do to support the Black community and another updated list of Black Lives Matterdemonstrations.

The team atThe Plug, run by founder and publisher Sherrell Dorsey,trackedmore than 190 tech companies on whether they spoke up about racial injustice in response to the Black Lives Matter demonstrations, and how that squared with their total percentage of Black employees. The goal? To evaluate the companies internal commitments to supporting Black workers, Sherrell said. (P.S. If youre a LION member, dont forget toRSVP for Sherrells LION Lessonon June 25 that will emphasize best practices on diversity, equity and inclusion.)

The Devil Strippublished this page ofanti-racism resources, linked and easy to find from its homepage, in response to several readers asking what they can do to help bring about change and support our Black neighbors. Their response? One of the most important actions non-Black folks can take is to educate themselves on systemic racism and privilege. Also,Scalawags managing editor Lovey Cooper published this guide, Reckoning with white supremacy: Five fundamentals for white folks, which offers historical context and additional resources.

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How 13 local news publishers have responded to the Black Lives Matter demonstrations - Poynter

Black Lives Matter protesters in Cedar Park marched around The Parke shopping center June 19. (Taylor Girtman/Community Impact Newspaper)

The protest started at the Cedar Park Recreation Center. Calls for justice and change were made, and speeches explained the reason and goal of the event.

"No justice, no peace" and other chants led protesters in a march around The Parke shopping center. The protest was peaceful and nonviolent.

The march date coincided with Juneteenth, a holiday that celebrates a June 19, 1865, proclamation in Galveston, Texas. The proclamation announced the end of slavery in the United Statesover two years after the Emancipation Proclamation and end of the Civil War.

Juneteenth became a Texas state holiday in 1980.

On June 18, the city mayors of Cedar Park and Leander proclaimed June 19, 2020, as "CELEBRATE JUNETEENTH DAY" and "Juneteenth Celebration Day," respectively.

Organizer Ashley Thompson, a Leander resident and University of Texas at San Antonio student, said the date was an important part of the protest and march. When Thompson asked how many in the protest group were celebrating Juneteenth for the first time, a majority of hands were raised.

The Cedar Park protest and march follows local and nationwide protests against police brutality and the deaths of George Floyd, Ahmaud Arbery, Breonna Taylor, Mike Ramos and others.

Cedar Park Police Chief Mike Harmon said there were no issues at the protest or march, and officers were stationed throughout the march route for the safety of protestors.

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GALLERY: More than 150 people march in Black Lives Matter protest on Juneteenth in Cedar Park - Community Impact Newspaper

As protesters marched through Brooklyn past curfew one night in early June, the young man holding the bullhorn at the front of the crowd kept repeating one date: June 23.

It wasnt the date of George Floyds death. It was the date of the New York Democratic primary. Nothing is going to change if we just protest, explains Yahshiyah Vines, 19, who was leading the crowd. All these people out here: use your emotions in the polls, use your emotions in the voting booth.

The last few weeks have illustrated the power of the rising racial-justice movement in the wake of Floyds death. In less than a month, the protests have shifted public opinion on systemic racism, toppled high-profile executives and gathered momentum in their quest to defund police departments. The next few weeks and months will test whether the movement can translate its social and cultural might into political power.

The first test comes on June 23, when several young Black candidates who have aligned themselves with the Black Lives Matter movement are running in competitive Democratic primaries. Those races could in some ways be a preview of the presidential election in November, when presumptive Democratic nominee Joe Biden hopes to ride strong turnout among African Americans to victory. The protests could be a political bonanza for Democrats, political strategists say, galvanizing its most reliable voting bloc and boosting voter registration. But its not yet clear whether the party is poised to take advantage, especially at the national level.

Already, the movement has fired up some voters. The progressive non-profit Rock The Vote registered 150,000 new voters in the first two weeks of June, the highest tally of any two-week period in the 2020 election cycle. And despite significant obstacles at the polls, Democrats in Georgia cast more than 1 million ballots in the states June 9 primary, breaking the record set in the 2008 contest between Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton. People were in line for hours, says Nse Ufot, executive director of the New Georgia Project, which registered hundreds of voters at Black Lives Matter protests ahead of the primary. Can you imagine the strength, the resolve, the steely-eyed determination that folks are going to have when they go to the polls in November?

The New Georgia Project is among a handful of organizations actively registering voters in person at protests around the country. But so far the effort to convert the energy of the movement into votes is spontaneous, localized and disjointed, much like the protests themselves. The most expansive national efforts are digital: The Collective PAC, aimed at building Black political power, has launched a new effort to collect cell phone data from protesters in order to serve them ads about registering to vote. Michael Bloomberg has given $2 million to the Collective PACs efforts to register 250,000 Black voters in key battleground states.

It makes more sense to do it digitally, from a safety perspective, says Quentin James, co-founder of Collective PAC. We know who the unregistered African Americans are, we have their names, we have their address, we know the Black people who are purged, and we are targeting them specifically. James says that in six days, more than 1,000 people have clicked on the ads the group has run through the geo-targeting effort.

National Democratic organizations, meanwhile, have been slow to capitalize on the movements energy. The DCCC and DSCC are not coordinating national efforts to register voters at protests, and the Biden campaign has not been actively registering demonstrators, according to spokespeople. Such an effort would be logistically difficult: many actions planned by local organizers are spontaneous and vaporous, operating outside the party structure, which makes it difficult to coordinate voter-registration efforts.

Above all, the protests are both a gift and a challenge for Biden, who has supported the movements goals without embracing activists more controversial demands. This movement has politicized young Black voters in particular, says LaTosha Brown, co-founder of Black Voters Matter, which aims to register Black voters in overlooked areas. Theyre taking a much harder look at his record. And that doesnt necessarily work in his favor.

The former vice president, whose support among Black voters rescued his sinking campaign with a critical victory in South Carolina, has knelt with demonstrators, given a well-received speech about Americas long struggle against racial injustice and spoken at Floyds funeral. He has also touted his criminal justice reform plans, which include a $20 billion grant program to encourage states to move towards violence-prevention rather than incarceration, decriminalizing marijuana, ending cash bail, and using the power of the Justice Department to crack down on systemic misconduct in police departments. Since the protests, he has called for a ban on chokeholds and an end to qualified immunity as well as stopping the transfer of weapons of war to police departments. Yet he has rejected activists demands to defund the police, doubling down instead on his police reform plan that provides $300 million for community policing.

So far, the balancing act seems to be working: Trumps attempts to paint him as a radical dont appear to have stuck, while new polling has emerged suggesting that 58% of Americans oppose the call to defund the police. And Biden has maintained his solid lead in key battleground states. What we say to young people is that we hear your concerns, we share your pain, we share your enthusiasm, says Biden senior advisor Symone Sanders. We have similar goals, we want change, we want police reform in this country, and I think we all agree that this moment has given us an opportunity to do just that.

The next test of the Black Lives Matter movements political power comes June 23, when several states hold primaries featuring young black candidates. In New Yorks 16th congressional district, which stretches from the Bronx up into lower Westchester, middle-school principal Jamaal Bowman is running to unseat 16-term Democratic incumbent Eliot Engel. In New Yorks 17th district, Mondaire Jones is attempting to become the first openly gay Black member of Congress, competing in a crowded primary to replace a retiring Democrat. And in Kentucky, state Rep. Charles Booker is running against a well-funded opponent, Amy McGrath, for the Democratic nomination to take on Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell.

All three candidates have explicitly aligned themselves with the movement. Weve centered racial and economic injustice from the very beginning of our campaign, Bowman says of his bid to unseat Engel. In terms of volunteers signing up to phone bank, people making contributions to the campaign, all that stuff has increased exponentially over the last several weeks. It didnt help that Engel, the chair of the House Foreign Affairs committee, has been a scarce presence in his district and recently was caught on a hot mic at a protest, saying that if I didnt have a primary, I wouldnt care.

In May, Bowman was getting roughly 30 to 40 volunteer signups a day, according to data provided by the campaign. Floyd died on May 25. By June 4, the number of volunteers had doubled; by June 10, it had tripled. Bowman raised nearly $265,000 in three days in early Junealmost a third what hed raised in the entire previous year. After endorsements from Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Sens. Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, even more money flowed into his campaign. A week into June, hed surpassed a million dollars.

Jones, an attorney who worked in the Obama Administration, says hes also seen a significant increase in donations from the wealthier, whiter parts of his Westchester district. I think what people have to come to grips with is that if they want to see racial justice, then they have to support progressive candidates like myself, he says.

As for Booker, his family knew Breonna Taylor, the Black woman who was shot and killed in March by cops executing a no-knock warrant. Hes become a fixture at the Kentucky marches demanding justice for her death. Standing in the streets crying with people who are facing trauma, the same trauma I carry from cousins who have been murdered over the last four years, the Commonwealth has really taken note, Booker says. It has amounted to a big boost in fundraising, a big boost in support.

Before the protests began, Booker was raising roughly $100,000 a month. Hes raised roughly $2 million in the month of June, according to his campaign, enough to fund an ad accusing McGrath of skipping the protests. He says hes working to mobilize historically disenfranchised black voters in Kentucky with a volunteer network of hundreds of people across the state who hadnt been involved in politics before. Before Memorial Day, his campaign averaged about 300 phone bank shifts a week, his campaign says; now they have more than 100 a day. We get ignored, we get taken for granted, and the only time people talk to us is when they want us to vote for them and then they disappear on us, he says. Were helping redefine what it means to be involved in politics.

Polling remains scarce in Democratic congressional and Senate primaries, so its hard to tell which of these candidates is likely to prevail on the 23rd. According to one Data for Progress poll, Bowman now leads Engel by 10 points, including a 46-point lead with Black voters (the poll had a margin of error of roughly 5 points). A Public Policy Polling survey has Jones leading by more than 10 points in a crowded primary. The Booker campaign points to internal polling that shows him catching up to McGrath. But the true electoral impact of the movement wont become clear until the votes are counted.

As younger Black men, candidates like Booker, Bowman and Jones can speak personally about the scourge of systemic racism and police brutality. Biden is a different matter. While he has a strong connection with many Black voters, some Democrats worry his unwillingness to meet the movements demands could cost him enthusiasm and votes. A coalition of more than 50 progressive groups recently wrote Biden a letter urging him to adjust his positions on policing, demanding he revise his platform to ensure that the federal government permanently ends and ceases any further appropriation of funding to local law enforcement in any form.

You cannot win the election without the enthusiastic support of Black voters, and how you act in this moment of crisis will play a big role in determining how Black votersand all voters concerned with racial justicerespond to your candidacy, the groups wrote. A return to normalcy will not suffice.

Veteran organizers say that while older Black voters are loyal Democrats who delivered Biden the nomination, the young activists flooding the streets are demanding more. If Biden does not come correct, hes going to take a hit, says Brown of Black Voters Matter. He needs Black folks and young folks. He cannot win without either.

As Republican strategist Stuart Stevens points out, President Trumps chances of winning spike if Democratic voters of color stay home. Stevens, who advised GOP presidential nominee Mitt Romney in 2012, notes that Ronald Reagan got 55% of the white vote in 1980 and won, while John McCain got 55% of the white vote in 2008 and lost, largely because nonwhite voters turned up for Obama. In 2016, Hillary Clinton lost partly because of depressed Black turnout in big cities in Wisconsin and Pennsylvania.

If Biden can get nonwhite turnout up to what it was in 12, 08, or 04, he wins if everything else stays the same, Stevens says. He doesnt need to win one more white voter.

Ultimately, many activists say they plan to vote for Biden even if he doesnt meet all of their demands. A lot of people might feel disenchanted, but I also think it will make a lot of people go out and vote, because what else is there to do? says Dara Hyacinthe, a 25-year old freelancer in Brooklyn. Its a two-pronged attack, really: you protest, and then you vote.

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Write to Charlotte Alter at charlotte.alter@time.com.

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How Black Lives Matter Could Reshape the 2020 Elections - TIME

A week ago, the Bush theatre asked six writers for their dramatised responses to the killing of George Floyd in Minnesota, the global protests that followed and the state society is in now. These protest plays, curated by Daniel Bailey, are the result of that quickfire commission. Combining political theatre with digital technology, they are available across the Bushs social media platforms, including Twitter and Instagram, and on YouTube. They range in length from one to nine minutes and are honest, impactful pieces that turn life, as it is happening, into story and sometimes song.

Just as in the case of Channel Fours week-long series of short films, Take Your Knee Off My Neck, these works are by black British (or mixed-heritage) writers. Issues range from the use of the N-word to negotiating mixed-heritage identity and the emotional load of having to articulate the trauma caused by racism over and over again, the last of which is expressed in Benedict Lombes direct address, Do You Hear Us Now?

Fehinti Balogun, who appears in Michaela Coels BBC/HBO series I May Destroy You, bases his film, You Just Dont Get it And it Hurts, on a recent conversation with a friend. It is a series of text messages between Chelsea, who is white, and an unnamed black friend. They begin debating Chelseas use of the N-word while singing along to a rap song in a predominantly white crowd. Chelsea promises to listen to her friends objections open-mindedly (I wont be offended) but is unwilling to examine her values, clinging to an argument around her right to free speech. It is noxious everyday racism and their conversation, played out with the typing and erasing of words, is both intellectually engaging and emotive, right until Chelseas final, undermining text.

Roy Williamss film, Black, packs another punch at just over a minute long. Performed by Aaron Pierre, it features a man in internal, anguished dialogue with himself as he tries to fight his fear of attending a protest rally: Im scared, no word of a lie Why they have to beat us like that? It is a moving snapshot of vulnerable black masculinity in light of Floyds killing and the increased threat felt by black men in Britain. The Fire This Time is a rap by Kalungi Ssebandeke (featuring Anoushka Lucas) and a more straight-up protest song against police violence. You will no longer kill us, sings Ssebandeke against footage of street protests, riots and arrests.

In Hey Kid, Matilda Ibini speaks to a photographic montage of her younger selves: Hold on to your voice, kid, Ibini tells the child in a nursery school pinafore. People will tell you that everything about you is wrong Please do not stay silent. It is both a warning of the structural racism that awaits this child and a call to arms, with echoes of the consciousness-raising letters written by James Baldwin to his young nephew in 1962 and Ta-Nehisi Coates to his son in 2015.

Alongside the pain and anger, a sense of exhaustion is also expressed in several films at the repeated cycles of protest at white-on-black violence over the decades. Anoushka Lucas, in Your Work, which is delivered partly in song, sings: All the things Ive heard before are coming around again, while Lombe is more explicit: After black squares and hashtags and outrage, will you still show up?

It is a powerful question asked of the world and it remains unanswered.

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The Protest review superb set of dramas for the Black Lives Matter movement - The Guardian

Thousands of protesters gathered on a highway for a Justice for George Floyd rally in Ann Arbor, Mich. (Andrew Boydston / Shutterstock)

EDITORS NOTE: This article originally appeared at TomDispatch.com. To stay on top of important articles like these, sign up to receive the latest updates from TomDispatch.

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They were relegated to the protest equivalent of a ghetto. Their assigned route shunted them to the far fringes of the city. Their demonstration was destined for an ignominious demise far from any main thoroughfare, out of sight of most apartment buildings, out of earshot of most homes, best viewed from a dinghy bobbing in the Hudson River.Ad Policy

Those at the head of the march had other ideas. After a brief stop at city hall, they turned the crowd onto the main drag, Washington Street, and for the next few hours, a parade of protesters snaked through Hoboken, N.J.

Whose streets? Our streets! is a well-worn activist chant, but for a little while it was true as Hobokens motorcycle cops played catch-up and the march turned this way and thatfirst, uptown on Washington, where a conspicuous minority of businesses were boarded up, expecting trouble that never came. Then, a left onto Sixth, another onto Jackson. Monroe. Park. Finally, back to Washington and onward.

All the while, the voices of the mostly white marchers, being led in call-and-response chants mainly by people of color, rang through the streets and echoed off high-rent low-rises.

Hands up! Dont shoot!

No justice! No peace!

Say his name! George Floyd!Current Issue

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As an ever-more middle-aged white guy who, a decade ago, traded covering US protests for reporting from African war zones, I have little of substance to add to the superlative coverage of the Black Lives Matter demonstrations that have erupted across the country in the wake of the police killing of George Floyd. For that, read some of the journalists who are on the front lines innovating and elevating the craft, like the great Aviva Stahls real-time eyewitness observations, incisive interviews, and on-the-fly fact-checking, while marching for miles and miles through the streets of Brooklyn, N.Y.

Instead, bear with me while I ruminate about something I said to Tom Engelhardt, the editor of this website, TomDispatch, at the beginning of March when our lives changed forever. Instead of simply bemoaning the onslaught of the Covid-19 pandemichowever devastating and deadly it might prove to beI uncharacteristically looked on the bright side, suggesting that this could be one of those rare transformative moments that shifts the worlds axis and leads to revolutionary change.

I bring this up not to brag about my prescience, but to point out the very oppositehow little foresight I actually had. Its desperately difficult for any of us to predict the future and yet, thanks so often to the long, hard, and sometimes remarkably dangerous work of organizers and activists, even the most seemingly immutable things can change over time and under the right conditions.

Despite my comments to Tom, if you had told me that, in the span of a few months, a novel coronavirus that dates back only to last year and systemic American racism that dates back to 1619 would somehow intersect, I wouldnt have believed it. If you had told me that a man named George Floyd would survive Covid-19 only to be murdered by the police and that his brutal death would spark a worldwide movement, leading the council members of a major American city to announce their intent to defund the police and Europeans halfway across the planet to deface monuments to a murderous 19 century monarch who slaughtered Africans, I would have dismissed you. But history works in mysterious ways.

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Four hundred years of racism, systemic abuse of authority, unpunished police misconduct, white skin privilege, and a host of other evils at the dark core of America gave a white Minneapolis police officer the license to press a black mans face to the pavement and jam a knee into his neck for nearly nine minutes. For allegedly attempting to buy a pack of cigarettes with a phony $20 bill, George Floyd was killed at the intersection of 38th Street and Chicago Avenue in Minneapolis, Minn., by police officer Derek Chauvin.

At the beginning of the last century, whites could murder a black man, woman, or child in this country as part of a public celebration, memorialize it on postcards, and mail them to friends. Between 1877 and 1950, nearly 4,000 blacks were lynched in the American South, more than a death a week for 73 years. But the murders of blacks, whether at the hands of their owners in the 17th, 18th, and 19th centuries or of unaccountable fellow Americans in the latter 19th and 20th centuries never ended despite changes in some attitudes, significant federal legislation, and the notable successes of the protests, marches, and activism of the civil rights movement of the 1960s.

From 2006 to 2012, in fact, a white police officer killed a black person in America almost twice a week, according to FBI statistics. And less than a month before we watched the last moments of George Floyds life, we witnessed a modern-day version of a lynching when Ahmaud Arbery, a 25-year-old black man, was gunned down while jogging on a suburban street in Glynn County, Ga. Gregory McMichael, a 64-year-old white retired district attorney, investigator, and police detective, and his son Travis, 34, were eventually arrested and charged with his murder.

Without the Covid-19 pandemic and the Trump administrations botched response to it, without black Americans dying of the disease at three times the rate of whites, without the suddenly spotlighted health disparities that have always consigned people of color to die at elevated rates, without a confluence of so many horrors that the black community in America has suffered for so long coupled with those of a new virus, would we be in the place were in today?

If President Trump hadnt cheered on the efforts of mostly older white protesters to end pandemic shutdowns and liberate their states and then echoed a racist Miami police chief of the 1960s who promised when the looting starts, the shooting starts, essentially calling for young black protesters to be gunned down, would the present movement have taken off in such a way? And would these protests have been as powerful if people who had avoided outside contact for weeks hadnt suddenly decided to risk their own lives and those of others around them because this murder was too brazen, too likely to end in injustice for private handwringing and public hashtags?

In Minneapolis, where George Floyd drew his last embattled breath, a veto-proof majority of the city council recently announced their commitment to disbanding the citys police department. As council president Lisa Bender put it:

Were here because we hear you. We are here today because George Floyd was killed by the Minneapolis police. We are here because here in Minneapolis and in cities across the United States it is clear that our existing system of policing and public safety is not keeping our communities safe. Our efforts at incremental reform have failed. Period.

A month ago, such a statement by almost any council chief in any American citymuch less similar sentiments voiced across the nationwould have been essentially unthinkable. Only small numbers of activists working away with tiny chisels on a mountain of official intransigence could even have imagined such a thing and they would have been dismissed by the punditocracy as delusional.

But the reverberations of George Floyds death have hardly been confined to the city where he was slain or even the country whose systemic bigotry put a target on his back for 46 years. His death and Americas rampant racism have led to soul-searching across the globe, sparking protests against discrimination and police brutality from Australia to Germany, Argentina to Kenya. In Ghent, Belgium, a bust honoring King Leopold II was defaced and covered with a hood bearing Floyds dying plea: I cant breathe. In Antwerp, Leopolds statue was set on fire and later removed.

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It was Leopold, as TomDispatch regular Adam Hochschild so memorably documented in King Leopolds Ghost, who, in the late 19th century, seized the vast territory surrounding Africas Congo River, looted its rubber, brutalized its people, and presided over a fin de sicle holocaust that took the lives of as many as 10 million people, roughly half the Congos population. Belgian activists are now calling for all the countrys statues and monuments to the murderous monarch to be torn down.

Like the island off its coast, Hoboken was born of a great swindle. In 1658, the Dutch governor of Manhattan reportedly bought the tract of land that now includes that mile-square New Jersey city from the Lenape people for some wampum, cloth, kettles, blankets, six guns andfittingly enough, given Hobokens startling bars-to-area ratiohalf a barrel of beer.

In other words, the city where I covered that demonstration is part and parcel of the settler colonialism, slavery, and racism that forms the bedrock of this nation. But even in that white enclave, that bastion of 21st century gentrification, in the midst of a lethal global pandemic with no cure, 10,000 people flooded its parks and streets, carrying signs like Racism is a pandemic, too and Covid is not the only killer that would have made little sense six months ago.

There were also posters that would have been shocking in Hoboken only several weeks ago, but didnt cause anyone to bat an eye, like ACAB (an acronym for All Cops are Bastards) or

Are you a:

[ ] Killer cop

[ ] Complicit Cop

Not to mention dozens and dozens of signs reading Defund the Police or Abolish the Police. Suddenlyto most of us, at leastsuch proposals were on the table.

In reality, social change rarely occurs by accident or chance. It usually comes in the wake of years of relentless, thankless, grinding activism. It also takes a willingness to head for the barricades when history has illuminated the dangers of doing so. It requires persistence in the face of weariness and distraction, and courage in the face of abject adversity.

Where this movement goes, how it changes this nation, and what it spawns around the world will be won or lost on the streets of our tomorrows. Will it mean an America that inches closer to long-articulated but never remotely approached ideals, or usher in a backlash that leads to a wave of politicians in the Trumpian mold? In moments like this, theres no way of knowing whether youre on the cusp of a cultural renaissance or a societal Black Death.

It takes a long time, but Earths orbit and axis do change, and once they do, things are never the same again. Already, from Minneapolis to Antwerp to modest Hoboken, this world is not what it was just a short while ago. A man forced to die with his face pressed to the ground may yet shift the earth under your feet.

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The Black Lives Matter Protests Are a Tipping Point in US History - The Nation