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By Collin Atwood@collinatwood17

After George Zimmerman was acquitted of all charges for fatally shooting 17-year-old Trayvon Martin in 2012, an uproar sparked throughout the country. The death of Martin, who was unarmed, sparked a viral Twitter hashtag and a widely known organization now recognized as Black Lives Matter (BLM).

The movement was started by Alicia Garza, Patrisse Cullors and Opal Tometi in 2013. The movement and hashtag made headway in 2015, ranking at No. 8 on Twitters Top-10 News Hashtags list.

Springfield College senior Jennifer Charlera was supportive of the organizations message when she first heard about BLM in 2014.

I was all for it, she said, I felt empowered and I just like the message it was trying to portray.

BLMs mission of fighting for the rights of people of color lives through Charlera at Springfield as she currently serves as the Secretary for the Black Student Union (BSU) and the Vice President of the Student Society for Bridging Diversity (SSBD).

By August of 2017, #BlackLivesMatter was used over 41 million times. The support for this movement kept rising and spiked following the acts of injustice that occurred in 2020. The deaths of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor and Ahmaud Arbery among others increased the gap between support and opposition of Black Lives Matter.

According to a study done by Civiqs in June of 2019, 41% of registered voters supported BLM and 34% did not. A year later, weeks after the killing of Floyd, that gap was at its peak with 52% of voters supporting and 29% opposing.

The use of the hashtag also peaked in the weeks after Floyd was forcefully choked to the point where he could no longer breathe. According to Pew Research Center, #BlackLivesMatter was used around 3.7 million times per day from May 26 to June 7. The hashtag set a record on May 28 when it was used 8.8 million times.

That summer was the pinnacle of the BLM movement. Not only did tweets flood the phones of millions, but protestors all across the country made sure that their message was heard. A poll done by the Kaiser Family Foundation revealed that 26 million people protested in America from June 8-14.

Unfortunately, Black Lives Matter has not reached that level of momentum ever since even though the organizations mission to fight for Freedom, Liberation and Justice may be needed now more than ever.

People are really excited about it, especially after something has occurred that devastated the community, and then it dies out and you dont hear about it anymore, said Dr. Mark Flowers, a professor at Springfield College.

This is Dr. Flowers second semester at Springfield College and he teaches African American Religion. His claim about movements being less heard about after its initial surge is correct.

Once the summer of 2020 ended, so did the uprise of supporters. As of Jan. 31, 2022 the gap between supporters (44%) and opposers (43%) is slim. Just because there isnt a tragedy going viral on every social media platform like the ones that did in 2020, doesnt mean the mission of BLM is any less significant.

I think (BLM) is extremely important especially since whats going on right now with societya lot of Black people are suffering, Charlera said.

Charlera, an English and secondary education major, believes in educating todays youth to be aware of the Black Lives Matter movement and other social justice issues in our country. During her time as a student-teacher she took that belief into her own hands.

I did a whole social justice lesson about BLM and womens rights and I thought it was important to tell the students, especially the next generation or our generation, to keep pushing the movement, Charlera said.

Charleras mission statement for teaching is to teach for Black lives, and that is exactly what she plans to do with her future as an educator.

A common message from Black Lives Matter that gets misconstrued is that supporters believe #BlackLivesMatter means that other lives dont matter as much. Hence the start up of #AllLivesMatter.

Dr. Flowers, who has been a part of rallies that fought for Black rights before the movement became an organization in 2013, believes that the most important message coming from BLM is that it doesnt mean Black lives matter more than others.

Its not saying that other lives dont matter, because common sense would dictate that all lives matter. Its just that that common sense has stopped when it comes to Black people, Dr Flowers said.

For all lives to matter, first Black lives have to matter. It is important for people to learn the true meaning of the movement and why its mission still holds relevance today.

I just think its important, especially today, Black History Month, people should definitely go educate themselves and be a part of the movement, Charlera said.

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At the start of Black History Month: looking at the decline of BLM in the media - SC Student Media

Activist Ieshia Evans in July 2016, in Louisiana. Photo: Jonathan Bachman/REUTERS

In 1892, at the height of the lynching crisis, Ida B. Wells proclaimed that a Winchester rifle should have a place of honor in every black home, and it should be used for that protection which the law refuses to give. When the white man who is always the aggressor knows he runs as great a risk of biting the dust every time his Afro-American victim does, he will have greater respect for Afro-American life.

The critical point for me in Wellss manifesto for Black self-defense is not her overarching respect for the power of guns. It is her observation about where the aggression begins. Losing that thread of the argument, about who actually starts the fights, is the reason so much white aggression is seamlessly restyled as the right to stand ones ground, to protect and defend ones kith and kin. Conversely, Black self-defense is transposed into an act of unjustified aggression and met with fire and fury by both the state and self-deputized white citizens.

Do Black people have the right to defend themselves against acts of hostility and aggression, especially when the aggressors are white? When confronted with increasingly normalized acts of white aggression, do Black people have the right to stand our ground?

Philando Castile told the officer who pulled him over for a traffic stop that he had a firearm, which he had a permit for. The officer killed him anyway. In 2014, police killed John Crawford III inside an Ohio Walmart for aimlessly carrying an air rifle that was sold in the store, perhaps considering whether he wanted to buy it. And certainly, Tamir Rice is one of the youngest victims of our cultures excessive fear of Black men and boys with guns, even though his was a toy and he was only 12.

The answer to white aggression cannot, under these circumstances, be more guns. But the decade since Trayvon Martins death has been marked by exactly this: more guns. Firearm sales broke records in the Obama era and exceeded that pre-pandemic record last year. While African American gun ownership has increased, the vast majority of folks hyperexercising their Second Amendment rights are white people who use the language of self-defense, safety, and protection as the excuse to stockpile guns.

One wonders if they are not readying themselves for a war. Dylann Roof told officers that he wanted to start a race war when he slaughtered nine worshipping souls in a South Carolina church. One wonders if his singular attack, together with the collective attempt at insurrection on January 6, 2021, is a dress rehearsal. It seems Black people are considered the enemy. Unrest and disease are in the air. And the aggressors, the neighborhood warmongers, have restyled themselves as the ones under attack, as the ones needing protection.

And so, as has happened after every major moment of racial upheaval, African Americans have forged a politics of Black self-defense. Although the country loves to tout the nonviolent direct action of the King years, the Deacons for Defense and Justice, founded in Jonesboro, Louisiana, a small town about 20 minutes from where I grew up, rejected nonviolence as praxis. These World War II veterans carried guns and defended their homes and communities. So too did the Black Power eras most iconic group call itself the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense. In Shreveport, Louisiana, in 2020, when a group of activists gathered to peacefully protest a persisting Confederate monument in town, they were intimidated by an armed biker militia group; in response, members of an area Black gun club showed up to protect the peaceful demonstrators. These local skirmishes, often in places with long and storied Confederate histories, are becoming increasingly volatile theaters in an increasingly tactical era of the U.S. gun-culture wars.

In the broader movement, however, the language has shifted from self-defense to public safety and protection, perhaps because this language is, in a word, safer. When the Black Panther Party defended its right to armed self-defense, the U.S. government responded by characterizing the group as a threat to democracy; killing its leaders, such as Fred Hampton; and imprisoning many of its members under dubious pretenses. Committed to learning the lessons of the 1960s and 70s, Black Lives Matter has chosen less muscular taglines.

But as that movement has matured, it has tried to learn the lessons of the Black Power era, pointing a watchful, anxious, dwindling white majority to the goals, rather than the tactics that have led to such fierce protests in the streets. The goal is safety; one tactic is self-defense. The goal is demonstrating that Black lives have value; the tactic is protest.

There is an earnestness to Black Lives Matter. A kind of barefaced removing of the gloves and the pugilism. Perhaps this is an homage to Trayvon Martin, who in his last moments was meandering through his fathers girlfriends neighborhood, chatting on the phone with his friend Rachel, unconcerned, as all young people should have the freedom to be, with the monster lurking in the bushes.

To this earnestness, the aggressors, who still are almost always white, have responded with cynicism, obfuscation, and gun sales. George Zimmerman added to the chorus by successfully auctioning for $250,000 the gun he had used to kill Martin.

What, then, does public safety actually look like if youre Black? To have that conversation means we are ready to think about the inherent unsafety and aggression of whiteness, about how those who are invested in the worst iterations of white identity politics frequently create the social conditions against which Black life needs defending. It is Roof being received warmly in a Charleston church while murder plots and plans teemed in his heart. It is Kyle Rittenhouse auditioning for a gunfight and then crying when the world obliged him.

Wells understood that the law would not protect Black life. For her, guns in every Black home were the ticket to respect. I remain ambivalent, vacillating between following the legacy of my grandmother, who always kept both a rifle and a pistol at the ready, and leaning into my own intimate knowledge of the devastation guns bring, as the daughter of parents who were both victims of gun violence, my father fatally so. I dont know that I believe guns are the guarantor of respect for Black life, given how much Black life they have taken. Im fairly sure the only places more guns can lead us to are war, death, and destruction. At the same time, Im a committed member of the Dont start none, wont be none and Dont pull the thang out unless you plan to bang generation.

What continues to elude us, despite recent rejections of white vigilantism and excessive police force, is respect for Afro-American life. Over the past ten years, social-justice movements have used the streets, the courts, the voting booth, and the bully pulpit to mount a full-scale defense of Black life. But until we are able to tell the cold, hard truth about the existential threat of white racial aggression, not only to people of color but to the country as a whole, speaking of self-defense will be mere obfuscation. And the tools, the weapons, of self-defense will remain the province of those who picked the fights in the first place.

Thank you for subscribing and supporting our journalism. If you prefer to read in print, you can also find this article in the January 31, 2022, issue of New YorkMagazine.

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Standing Your Ground While Black - The Cut

The Brooklyn Liberations Protect Trans Youth rally at the Brooklyn Museum on June 13, 2021. Photo: Michael M. Santiago / GettyImages/Getty Images

Let today be the last day that you ever doubt Black trans power, I cried into a microphone in the summer of 2020. I was addressing a crowd of nearly 15,000 people dressed in varying shades of white outside the Brooklyn Museum. Our uniform paid homage to a 1917 NAACP silent march for Black lynching victims. Now, more than a century later, we had gathered to honor the Black transgender people murdered during the coronavirus pandemic and before it. We chanted the often overlooked names of folks like Layleen Polanco, Tony McDade, Nina Pop, Dominique Remmie Fells, and Riah Milton. We imagined a world where Black trans people didnt have to fight so hard to exist.

The Black Trans Lives Matter rally sprang from the unrest that followed the murder of George Floyd, but the movement is anything but new. Since the emergence of BLM, trans organizers had been building a national network to combat discrimination and violence in our communities. A month after a verdict was reached in the George Zimmerman case, New York activists mobilized around the killing of a Black trans woman named Islan Nettles on the streets of Harlem. You can find work like this happening in every corner of the country groups like the New Orleansbased House of Tulip, a collective committed to finding long-term housing for those who need it, or Atlantas Solutions NOT Punishment Collaborative, which supports the political education of trans people. In the spirit of Sylvia Rivera and Marsha P. Johnsons historic STAR House, the Knights & Orchids Society in Selma, Alabama, takes a holistic approach, helping Black trans and queer people access food and gender-affirming health care, among other basic human needs.

The past few years have been complicated. Ive never felt more connected to the Black trans community and more disconnected from the wider population, which so often ignores our struggles. With each passing year, we reach record new highs of murders in our communities. But we continue to fight. And that day in the summer of 2020 will forever serve as a bridge between the rich history of the Black trans movement and a more liberated future.

Thank you for subscribing and supporting our journalism. If you prefer to read in print, you can also find this article in the January 31, 2022, issue of New YorkMagazine.

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The Wendys where Rayshard Brooks was killed, on June 13, 2020. Photo: Joshua Rashaad McFadden/The New York Times/REDUX

Two weeks after uprisings sparked by the murder of George Floyd left Atlanta littered with ashes, protesters flooded the citys streets once more. The police had killed again, and this time the victim was an Atlantan: 27-year-old father and music lover Rayshard Brooks, shot in the back twice by Atlanta police officer Garrett Rolfe. The Wendys where Rolfe killed Brooks the day before went up in flames, lighting up the night as protesters chanted and mourned, decrying a system that disproportionately takes the lives of Black people as a matter of course.

You are disgracing our city, Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms had declared when the protests broke out two weeks earlier. Bottomss admonishment was celebrated by pundits and politicians, winning her a national profile. If you care about this city, then go home, she urged.

But protesters filled the streets precisely because they cared so deeply. Six years after the first round of Black Lives Matter uprisings, it felt to many that the system had not fundamentally shifted. The 2020 protests popularized the demand to defund the police and invest instead in community-based safety and well-being a demand that many organizers in Atlanta had been working to make reality for the previous two decades.

Despite those efforts, the citys leadership responded to the 2020 uprisings with a mix of co-option, half-measures, and brutal police repression a pattern the city has long practiced. Indeed, the reaction to Rayshard Brookss killing was in some ways predictable the result of decades of sweeping police violence under the rug and disregarding organizers demands.

In 2006, 92-year-old grandmother Kathryn Johnston was murdered by Atlanta Police Department officers in her home after officers entered under a no knock warrant, the same type of warrant police had when they killed Breonna Taylor 14 years later. In response, civil-rights leaders, including Joseph E. Lowery, a onetime confidant of Martin Luther King Jr., led the charge to revive civilian oversight of police, in the hopes of exposing the pervasive violence that the department had historically kept quiet. At the same time, community members gathered at a local church to demand consequences for the officers and broader reforms.

Following the outcry, the city established the Atlanta Citizen Review Board in 2007. Many hoped this would begin a process of accountability, but two years later, the ACRB still had little authority to address police misconduct. It could not, for instance, force officers to testify or otherwise cooperate with investigations. City leadership had purported to concede a demand but refused to cede any power.

By the time Johnstons killers were convicted, the high-profile murder of a local bartender had fueled a narrative of rising crime and calls to increase policing. In response, a group of public defenders, local organizers, service providers, and those living in police-saturated neighborhoods formed Building Locally to Organize for Community Safety. (Tiffany Roberts, who co-wrote this story, is a co-founder.) BLOCS advocates knew that the criminal convictions of officers would not change the devastation that tough-on-crime tactics continued to have on their communities, and they began working for more substantive accountability.

In 2010, BLOCS won more power for the ACRB, and the next year, the organization pushed the city to dismantle the APDs paramilitary Red Dog Unit, the source of frequent complaints of excessive force. The year before, the unit had raided the Atlanta Eagle, a gay bar in midtown Atlanta, and assaulted patrons. Red Dog had also been accused of performing unconstitutional public strip searches of predominantly Black men. Community members cheered at the news of Red Dogs dissolution, but the city quickly replaced the unit with APEX a brand-new militarized APD squad that would come to perform many of the same functions as its predecessor, conducting raids in what it called high crime areas.

In 2014, when Officer Darren Wilson murdered Michael Brown in Ferguson Atlanta protested with the rest of the nation. A year later, Atlantas official Black Lives Matter chapter was founded. By the time hundreds of protesters blocked an Atlanta interstate in 2016 leading then-Mayor Reed to ahistorically opine that Dr. King would never take a freeway the citys response to demonstrations and policy advocacy had become increasingly hostile, with officials eagerly deploying law enforcement to combat the growing movement.

Despite opposition, organizers notched crucial wins, including the creation of what is now called the Policing Alternatives & Diversion Initiative, which would reduce police contact with those criminalized for poverty; significant reforms to the citys cash-bail system; the (still unfulfilled) promise to close the city jail; and the dissolution of federal contracts with Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

At the same time, police murders in Atlanta continued apace, taking the lives of Alexia Christian in 2015, Deravis Caine Rogers in 2016, Deaundre Phillips in 2017, and organizer Oscar Cain Jr. in 2019. And efforts by regressive councilmembers, municipal judges, and APD allies to roll back key reforms began almost as soon as they were passed.

In 2020, the citys response to the uprisings was marked by brutal police repression, even as the governor of Georgia deployed the National Guard. Police were deployed to quash protests, often trapping protesters in Atlantas famous Centennial Olympic Park before shipping them off to the closest jail. Using tear gas, rubber bullets, and sheer force, police injured and arrested protesters throughout the summer. During just two weeks of demonstrations, police arrested roughly 600 people, cycling hundreds through already overcrowded jails in the middle of a deadly pandemic.

The Bottoms administrations response to Brookss death a mix of superficial proposals and police repression was more evidence that the old ways were not working. After convening an advisory council to issue emergency recommendations on use-of-force policies for the Atlanta police, the mayor cherry-picked just under half of the suggestions, generally electing to investigate or study rather than substantively address the issues that led to Brookss death. Even as the call to defund the police reached the mainstream, Bottomss administration insisted instead on the need for additional training and protocols. But as protesters in the streets made clear, these reforms as envisioned and practiced by the city had failed to stem the violence.

Rolfe, Brookss killer, was himself evidence of tepid reforms inability to resolve the crisis. Indeed, on paper, he is the ideal modern, reformed officer. He had reportedly undergone 2,000 hours of training, including sessions on de-escalation tactics, cultural-awareness training, and instruction on use of deadly force. None of this preparation stopped him from killing Rayshard Brooks.

Most recently, in 2021, Mayor Bottomss administration worked closely with the Atlanta Police Foundation one of policings fiercest defenders in Atlanta to create plans for a police training facility, named Cop City by organizers who rose up to fight it. If built, Cop City would require the partial destruction of critical green space in Atlanta and far outstrip the training facilities of the much larger L.A. and New York police departments. As one of Bottomss last major projects before leaving office, Cop City would expand the footprint of policing in Atlanta just one year after mass protests calling to defund the police.

Even still, hope remains. Organizers continue to build support for alternatives to policing, pick up electoral wins, practice mutual aid, and form creative coalitions to meet the moment, while ongoing protests send a clear message: As long as political leadership relies on policing to resist, sidestep, and quash demands for transformation, police will continue to kill, and cities will continue to burn.

Thank you for subscribing and supporting our journalism. If you prefer to read in print, you can also find this article in the January 31, 2022, issue of New YorkMagazine.

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September 1, 2016, in San Diego, California: Eric Reid (No. 35) and Colin Kaepernick (No. 7) of the San Francisco 49ers kneel on the sideline during national anthem, as free agent Nate Boyer stands, before the game with the San Diego Chargers at Qualcomm Stadium. Photo: Michael Zagaris/San Francisco 49ers/Getty Images

Unless you know what to look for, its not clear why the photo is notable, let alone historic. It shows a football field, Levis Stadium in Santa Clara, California, before the start of a game. The teams are on their respective sidelines. Nothing is happening. The playing surface is still smooth, and if anything stands out, its the 50-yard-line logo: SF, for San Francisco. If you arent looking closely for the player wearing No. 7, the only one sitting down, youll probably miss him.

But hes there, a red speck near the bottom of the frame. Colin Kaepernicks protest would soon upend the world of professional sports, though nine months earlier, his body had betrayed him. He had lost his starting-quarterback gig to a younger player and suffered a season-ending labrum tear in his shoulder that required surgery. He was 29 years old and three years removed from his Super Bowl appearance, and success had eluded him since then. Criticisms he had faced since becoming a starter that he was physically impressive but cognitively limited, uneasy in the pocket and unable to read defenses had fueled the broad impression that he was little more than a body.

So by August 2016, when a reporter named Jennifer Lee Chan photographed Kaepernicks first documented refusal to stand during the national anthem, igniting a controversy that led to his vilification by the Trumpist right and his blackballing by the leagues owners, the ailing quarterback wasnt just out for justice. He was seeking control.

A paradox of professional athletics is how mastery over ones body facilitates its surrender. Few jobs call for such exhaustive submission to the dominion of other people. Players spend years fine-tuning muscles most people dont even know exist, breaking them down and rebuilding them to perform astonishing feats under duress, only to realize that autonomy is an illusion. Team executives use athletes as assets to trade and discard as it suits them, while spectators project and process their neuroses through the players.

Kaepernicks battle raged on two fronts. A maelstrom of circumstances gave the Black Lives Matter movement its unique contours, and one of the more striking aspects was the involvement of high-profile athletes, many of whom were negotiating professional reckonings at the same time. This was not a coincidence. When LeBron James led his Miami Heat teammates in their silent protest after the killing of Trayvon Martin in 2012, he was less than two years removed from his infamous Decision to leave the Cleveland Cavaliers and join rivals Dwyane Wade and Chris Bosh in South Beach to form the NBAs first modern superteam an alliance of stars who would have, in years past, sought championships as leaders of their own franchises.

The next half-decade saw James smeared as a traitor and accused of ruining the sport. Since then, the formulation he pioneered has become the league norm, heralding a departure from the days when players settled for the hand fate dealt them when they were drafted. A new age had come, marked by greater self-determination over how and where their bodies were deployed.

Variations on this theme echoed across sports. In womens athletics, it often materialized in disputes over equal pay. The killing of Michael Brown by a Ferguson, Missouri, police officer in 2014 came months into an intensifying debate about WNBA players flying overseas for money. Brittney Griner, it was reported, earned 12 times more to play in a Chinese league during the WNBAs off-season than she received during her entire rookie campaign with the Phoenix Mercury. The resulting discontent rippled outward; after the killings of Philando Castile and Alton Sterling in 2016, WNBA players wore BLACK LIVES MATTERemblazoned shirts to their pregame warm-ups and declined to talk to reporters about anything besides police violence, resulting in fines from the league.

The U.S. womens soccer team was fresh off their victory at the 2015 World Cup when Megan Rapinoe knelt during the national anthem in solidarity with Kaepernick. They were embroiled in their own push for equal pay, premised on the absurdity of earning less money than their flailing male counterparts. Tennis star Naomi Osaka has made her support for the Black Lives Matter movement an exception to her reluctance to speak in public. Simone Biles, the most decorated gymnast in history, became an outspoken supporter of the movement as she openly assailed her professions sanctioning body, USA Gymnastics, for enabling the sexual abuse of its athletes by Dr. Larry Nassar.

For his part, Kaepernicks dilemmas werent limited to his injuries or deteriorating relationship with the 49ers. Revelations about the long-term effects of concussions among NFL players had recently turned litigious, forcing the league to admit, after years of lying and thousands of lawsuits from ex-players, that football and chronic traumatic encephalopathy were linked.

All of these conflicts dealt with a basic question how athletes might take greater control of the way their bodies are used that was coming into focus for the players long before the misuse and abuse of human bodies became a national fixation. And for many, these concerns would only get more entwined. When NBA players initiated a wildcat strike during the COVID-disrupted homestretch of the 2020 season, it was nominally about getting more league support for that summers protests. But the strike followed a series of physical attacks against their fellow players by the police. Thabo Sefolosha, then a forward for the Atlanta Hawks, had his fibula broken by cops outside a New York City nightclub in 2015. Milwaukee police officers assaulted thenBucks guard Sterling Brown in a Walgreens parking lot in 2018.

Historically, the challenge of such paradigm-shifting moments has been less about drawing attention to these outrageous injustices to energize the public than funneling that energy into lasting solutions. Just as the advantages of athlete involvement in the Black Lives Matter movement were self-evident its help in mainstreaming once-marginal ideas about racism and policing, for example so were its drawbacks. A celebrity milieu begets celebrity-driven problem-solving. The NBAs strike broke not after radical changes to how this country addresses public safety but after some players phoned Barack Obama, who advised them to establish a social-justice committee and keep playing. The banner result was the leagues making some of its arenas available as voter precincts in the 2020 election almost a cruel joke, in retrospect, given how ineffectual the subsequent Congress has been in passing police reforms.

Elsewhere, the athletes particular mix of concerns, social and professional, skewed queasily and predictably toward the latter. The glaring refusal of many NBA players to admit that the Chinese governments abuses of the countrys Uighur minority were, in fact, bad China is a huge revenue generator for the league often overwhelmed their cries for human rights in the U.S.

One thread stands out, though: the galvanizing potential of feeling precarious. The psychic bridge that links the worries of a teenager walking home in suburban St. Louis to those of a multimillionaire athlete in Santa Clara is clear once you recognize that both look in the mirror and see a body in peril. This is not to equate the two but to note their rare convergence over the past decade and to ask what its rareness says about the long-term durability of their shared response. Can precarity felt by rich and famous athletes sustain ten more years of their investment in this movement? The only certainty, for now, is that the police will give them plenty of opportunities to show us.

Thank you for subscribing and supporting our journalism. If you prefer to read in print, you can also find this article in the January 31, 2022, issue of New YorkMagazine.

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Black Athletes and the Value of a Body - New York Magazine