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The Timeline of The Black Lives Matter Movement

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The Timeline of The Black Lives Matter Movement

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The footage of an African-American being choked to death by a police officer in May caused protests to flare across America. The Black Lives Matter movement gripped the country when protests began in the US after George Floyd's death.

Anger and resentment was already brewing due to the killing of Breonna Taylor, a medical worker. Taylor was killed on March 13, in a police raid gone wrong. The police said they had a warrant to search Taylor's apartment to investigate two men who were believed to be selling drugs from her apartment. Taylor was said to be in an on and off relationship with one of them, but had severed ties with him. Taylor's boyfriend Kenneth Walker shot an officer in the leg after the police broke the door off its hinges. The police responded by shooting Taylor five times. One of the officers, Detective Brett Hankison, who has since been fired is said to have fired ten rounds blindly into the apartment.

On May 26, hundreds out Minneapolis residents called for justice-they marched to the police precinct.

On the same day, the Minneapolis police chief, Medaria Arradondo, decided to fire all four officers involved in Floyd's death and launched an FBI investigation into the incident. Protests continue the next day-- protests erupt across the nation and fires and looting take place near the 3 rd precinct in Minneapolis.

On May 28, protests erupted in other nations like Liberia and Nigeria. France, Australia,United Kingdom and Switzerland joined in the next few days.

The 3 rd Precinct of the Minneapolis Police Department was set on fire amid intense protests on May 28.

On May 28, Fort Collins Police Services, Colorado released a statement highlighting the importance of safety with regards to law enforcement. Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey asked Minnesota Governor Tim Walz to deploy the National Guard in response to protests. 60 state troopers were sent.

On May 29, Derek Chauvin, the police officer directly responsible for killing George Floyd was charged with third degree murder and second degree manslaughter.

Two Fort Collins, Colorado residents organised a walk of solidarity on May 31.

On June 1, Denver Mayor Michael Hancock announced extension of curfew date to June 4. Hancock on May 31 had placed curfew from 8 pm to 5 am, which was supposed to last till June 1. The step was taken to quell outbreaks of property damage and violence between police and protesters.

On June 1, an independent autopsy on George Floyd, ruled his death as the result of homicide. The Hennepin County Medical Examiner's Office had ruled Floyd's death to be a result of not only compression on his neck but of heart disease and drug use of both fentanyl and methamphetamines

Protestors gather at The Oval, Washington on June 2 for an independently organised gathering at City Hall.

Protestors at Fort Collins, Colorado, on June 2 asked City Council officials for a permanent memorial space for George Floyd.

On June 3, Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison charged the three police officers who were fired-Tou Thao, J. Alexander Kueng and Thomas Lane, with aiding and abetting the murder of Floyd.

On June 3, the Senate Bill 217 was introduced in Denver, which required "body-worn cameras to their officers and requires all recordings of an incident be released to the public within 14 days after the incident."It also went on to banning chokeholds and required annual reports to Meade about each agency's use of force.

On June 4, a memorial was held for George Floyd.

On June 5, a US District Court ordered Denver police to stop use of tear gas, plastic bullets and flash grenades against protestors.

On June 7, the City Council announced to protestors that they will begin the process to disband the Minneapolis police department.

On June 14, another African-American, Rayshard Brooks was shot multiple times by the police. Brooks was found sleeping in his car in the drive-through of Wendy's, a fast food chain. After Brooks failed a sobriety test, he was shot while he was trying to flee.

Wishing hours of the shooting, Garret Rolfe, the police officer who shot Brooks was fired. On June 17 he was charged with with felony murder and aggravated assault.

On September 4, a seven Rochesters police officers involved in the killing of Daniel Purdue were suspended. And New York Attorney General Letitia James said that Purdue's death was being investigated. Purdue was suffocated by police officers in Rochester in March. Purdue, while experiencing a mental health episode, was running about naked on a street. He was restrained and a spit hood was put on him for about three minutes.Purdue was eventually taken to the hospital, where he was on life-support. Seven days later, he died when his family took him off life support.

On September 7, protestors sat outside Rochester's police headquarters. They were naked, like Purdue was, when he was suffocated. Several of them wore minimal clothing and some of them had Black Lives Matter written across their chest.

On October 26, Walter Wallace Jr, an African-American was brutally shot by police in Philadelphia. The police said that Wallace was wielding a knife and walking towards them.

Wallace Jr's shooting sparked further protests in the country and around 30 police officers were injured as protests took place on October 27. 33 people were arrested for throwing bricks, rocks at the police officers in Philadelphia.

At 1.45 am on October 27 an African-American woman named Rickia Young, who was in a car with her toddler son and a teenage nephew was attacked by two dozen police officers who hit her car with batons, shattering windows. They dragged her and her nephew out of the vehicle. The toddler was taken out of the backseat as well. The incident took place in the chaos of protests in Philadelphia.

The movement has been a historic one and here are some important outcomes from it:

New York city Mayor Bill de Blasio vowed that he would work towards moving funding from the city's police department towards youth and social services.

A database was set up to collect footage of police violence at demonstrations across the US.

The protests sparked wide-ranging conversations about racism in institutions, organisations and industries.

The co-founder of Reddit Alexis Ohanian stepped down from the company's board of directors and urged that the company replace his seat on the board with a black candidate.

The Grammy's announced that they would no longer use the word 'urban'to describe music of Black origin.

Here is what happened around the world:

On June 9, London mayor Sadiq Khan launched a 'diversity commission". The commission will investigate which statues should be retained, which ones with ties to slavery should be removed.

In Germany, graffiti artists Eme Freethinker painted a portrait of George Floyd on the last remaining sections of the Berlin Wall.

Syrian painter Aziz Asmar, along with two of his friends created an eight-food-high mural on a bombed Idlib building, featuring the words, 'I can't breathe'to show solidarity with anti-racism protests in the US.

People in nations like Amsterdam, Poland and Mexico came out to protest George Floyd's killing.

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The footage of an African-American being choked to death by a police officer in May caused protests to flare across America. The Black Lives Matter movement gripped the country when protests began in the US after George Floyd's death. Anger and resentment was already brewing due to the killing of Breonna Taylor, a medical worker.

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A Closer Look at the Violence in the Black Lives Matter Protests

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A Closer Look at the Violence in the Black Lives Matter Protests

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A protester holds a Black Lives Matter sign during a Juneteenth rally outside the Brooklyn Museum on June 19 in New York. (John Minchillo/AP)

When the Department of Homeland Security released its Homeland Threat Assessment last week, it emphasized that self-proclaimed white supremacist groups are the most dangerous threat to U.S. security. But the report misleadingly added that there had been "over 100 days of violence and destruction in our cities," referring to the anti-racism uprisings of this past summer.

In fact, the Black Lives Matter uprisings were remarkably nonviolent. When there was violence, very often police or counterprotesters were reportedly directing it at the protesters.
Here's how we did our research
Since 2017, we have been collecting data on political crowds in the United States, including the protests that surged during the summer. We have almost finished collecting data from May to June, having already documented 7,305 events in thousands of towns and cities in all 50 states and D.C., involving millions of attendees. Because most of the missing data are from small towns and cities, we do not expect the overall proportions to change significantly once we complete the data collection.

We make two assumptions. First, when politicians and officials categorize the protests as violent, they are usually envisioning property destruction or interpersonal violence in which they infer that BLM protesters are attacking police, bystanders and property.

Second, using several measures to evaluate protest behavior offers a better assessment than the blanket term "violence." For example, we disaggregate property destruction from interpersonal violence. We analyze separately the number of injuries or deaths among protesters and police. And we are thinking about how gathering even finer-grained data in the future could help further assign precise responsibility for violent acts.

After this summer's protests, Americans think differently about race. That could last for generations.
The data on those protests shows very little violence
Here is what we have found based on the 7,305 events we've collected. The overall levels of violence and property destruction were low, and most of the violence that did take place was, in fact, directed against the BLM protesters.

First, police made arrests in 5 percent of the protest events, with over 8,500 reported arrests (or possibly more). Police used tear gas or related chemical substances in 2.5 percent of these events.

Protesters or bystanders were reported injured in 1.6 percent of the protests. In total, at least three Black Lives Matter protesters and one other person were killed while protesting in Omaha, Austin and Kenosha, Wis. One anti-fascist protester killed a far-right group member during a confrontation in Portland, Ore.; law enforcement killed the alleged assailant several days later.

Police were reported injured in 1 percent of the protests. A law enforcement officer killed in California was allegedly shot by supporters of the far-right " boogaloo" movement, not anti-racism protesters. The killings in the line of duty of other law enforcement officers during this period were not related to the protests.

Only 3.7 percent of the protests involved property damage or vandalism. Some portion of these involved neither police nor protesters, but people engaging in vandalism or looting alongside the protests.

In short, our data suggest that 96.3 percent of events involved no property damage or police injuries, and in 97.7 percent of events, no injuries were reported among participants, bystanders or police.

These figures should correct the narrative that the protests were overtaken by rioting and vandalism or violence. Such claims are false. Incidents in which there was protester violence or property destruction should be regarded as exceptional - and not representative of the uprising as a whole.

In many instances, police reportedly began or escalated the violence, but some observers nevertheless blame the protesters. The claim that the protests are violent - even when the police started the violence - can help local, state and federal forces justify intentionally beating, gassing or kettling the people marching, or reinforces politicians' calls for "law and order."

Given that protesters were objecting to extrajudicial police killings of Black citizens, protesters displayed an extraordinary level of nonviolent discipline, particularly for a campaign involving hundreds of documented incidents of apparent police brutality. The protests were extraordinarily nonviolent, and extraordinarily nondestructive, given the unprecedented size of the movement's participation and geographic scope.

Why NFL owners are supporting Black players' protests - for now.
Why this matters
How the news media frame protests influences how the public perceives them. Ambiguous framings - such as those describing "clashes" between protesters and police - can convey false information about which side is violent. For instance, an extensive archive reveals that police themselves allegedly instigated a number of reported "clashes," which also likely led to more arrests, participant injuries and possibly even property damage.

This is important because public perceptions of the legitimacy of protests vs. policing have had fairly immediate effects on election outcomes and public policy. Those perceptions affect public attitudes toward movements for years.

Further, authoritarian leaders almost always try to treat protesters as criminals and to delegitimize their claims by exaggerating any incidents of violence and property destruction. These narrative techniques shore up support for broad-based repression against these groups, at little political cost to the autocrat.

In the case of Black Lives Matter, such claims are not only cynical, they are false.
Don't miss any of our smart analysis! Sign up for our newsletter. Jeremy Pressman is an associate professor of political science and author of "The sword is not enough: Arabs, Israelis, and the limits of military force" (Manchester University Press, 2020).

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Analysis | This summer's Black Lives Matter protesters were overwhelmingly peaceful, our research finds

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When the Department of Homeland Security released its Homeland Threat Assessment last week, it emphasized that self-proclaimed white supremacist groups are the most dangerous threat to U.S. security. But the report misleadingly added that there had been "over 100 days of violence and destruction in our cities," referring to the anti-racism uprisings of this past summer.

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Questioning Whether The Black Lives Matter Movement is Enough:

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Questioning Whether The Black Lives Matter Movement is Enough:

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f I hear one more white person say "Black Lives Matter" I think my head will explode. The slogan, powerful when first popularised by black people after the shooting of Trayvon Martin in 2012 in the US, has now become so ubiquitous as to have lost almost all meaning. A way for people to endlessly repeat "I hate racism" while doing nothing to actually stop it.

White people, I assume you don't like the idea of other people being treated as inferior just because of the colour of their skin. But that's such a basic sentiment that you shouldn't be giving yourself a buzz from saying it.

When even Boris Johnson can say "Black Lives Matter" - the same Boris Johnson who talks of African piccaninnies, of "bank robber" burqa wearers, who leads a party riven by Islamophobia but refuses a proper investigation into it, and who was part of a government that deported black British citizens, and continues the injustice of the hostile environment to this day - well, you know the slogan's cultural appropriation is complete.

Even racists hate racism. That's why they're always looking for ways to excuse what they do. "It's not my fault - black people are just a bit more criminal than white people." "I'm not being racist - it's just that a lot of Muslims are terrorists." "I'd love to recruit a black person - it's just that they're not quite the right fit for this role."

"It's just that ..." You won't find this chanted in a city square by thousands of protesters, but these are probably the three most powerful words in the history of institutional racism. They're the words people say in private - or don't say - when they're making the decisions that really matter. They are the words that determine whether someone gets that job, or that business contract, or that university place, or that rented room.

Over the past few days I've wondered, why now? Why,after all we've known about police brutality against black people,are people only now saying, en masse, that enough is enough? I think there are two core reasons. First, given the lockdown, there's not a lot else for young people to do. The anger is genuine, but the usual distractionsthat stop people from turning out have gone. It's the first time in months that young people have been able to be part of a group activity.

But the other factor is more fundamental: and that is, white guilt. While black people have raged about the shootings and asphyxiations, for most white people there's always been a get-out.

"It's just that [those words again] ... he was maybe being too aggressive ... maybe the officers thought they were under threat ... it was a spur-of-the-moment pull of the trigger." It's allowed white people to believe that, though the outcomes were all horrific, a white suspect in the same situation could have suffered the same fate. The George Floyd video crashed through that delusion. A subdued and incapacitated suspect; a knee pushed down on his neck as he pleaded for breath; passersby screaming for his life as it ebbed away; officer Derek Chauvin blithely ignoring it all, cocksure that he'd face no consequences for his actions; a fellow officer standing guard to prevent anyone coming to Floyd's rescue. For almost nine minutes, many of them after he had passed out. Nine minutes.

No white person could believe this could happen to them. That an officer of the law could be so callous, so unconcerned about the life of a white man.

That's why, this time, there have been unprecedented numbers of white peopledeclaring their allegiance to the antiracism cause. On the streets, even in the US, most protesters have been white.

Though many of these new activists will have only a superficial understanding of race issues, it has to be a positive thing that at last they're starting to notice. This was nowhere more apparent than in Bristol this weekend. If it had been a black-only crowd,would the statue of notorious slavemaster Edward Colston really have been allowed to topple, let alone be dragged through the streets and dumped in the River Avon?

Many British people were upset at what they saw. And I have some sympathy: mob rule is generally a bad thing, and risks getting disastrously out of hand. But what a glorious moment. It's an image that will last years in the memory, as the moment that people in one English city said the ritual humiliation of black lives was no longer acceptable. You can say "Black Lives Matter" a million times but it will change nothing. This action changed things.

When I saw Floyd's life drain slowly away, I wondered why so little had changed since the Black Lives Matter movement swept across the US in 2014. Surely all US police officers should know they will be held accountable for any transgressions, especially when caught on camera? Chauvin clearly feared no repercussions.

There are 18,000 separate police forces in the US. In the UK there are 43. If we're going to bring about change we need to find a way to get into them all, change them all, and make those changes stick. It won't be by simply calling for more black police officers. That's been tried before, and any change is glacially slow. It won't be just by rooting out "bad apples": a system that allows them in unchecked in the first place is already rotten to the core. It won't simply be by giving all officers "diversity training": a couple of weeks on the streets after completing such a course, and they're back in the old routine, acting on the instincts and stereotypes.

On the day of the first major UK Black Lives Matter protest last Wednesday, the Metropolitan police commissioner, Cressida Dick, was giving evidence to the London assembly. She was talking, coincidentally, about the disproportionate number of fines handed out to black people during the coronavirus lockdown - double the rate for white people.

This, she explained, was partly because more officers have been operating in high-crime areas. To which the response must be, what has the lockdown got to do with high-crime areas? It's just another way in which black people (more likely to live in poorer areas, which are more likely to have higher crime rates) continue to be disproportionately targeted by the police. And then Dick added, as if trying to defend this: "We've said again and again, be sensitive, be careful. And I think [our officers] have been. But I have to be honest, I haven't gone back to them to say, think about your unconscious bias."

So there it is: we have officers disproportionately targeting black people, and nothing said to them in advance about being aware of the danger of racial stereotyping.

This is where leadership really counts: the day-to-day decisions, at the most senior levels, that affect thousands of lives. To make lasting change, we ultimately have to get off the streets and into the rooms where these decision-makers operate.

Barack Obama has set out an intelligent long-term plan - "How to make this moment the turning point for real change" - which involves working locally with US mayors, district attorneys and local police chiefs.

In the UK we have to be equally thoughtful - so that every single officer, every single business chief, every head of every institution thinks every single day about the need to eradicate racism and bias. Black Lives Matter is a catchy slogan. But right now, action is what really matters.

* Joseph Harker is the deputy Opinion editor

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'Black Lives Matter' risks becoming an empty slogan. It's not enough to defeat racism | Joseph Harker

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If I hear one more white person say "Black Lives Matter" I think my head will explode. The slogan, powerful when first popularised by black people after the shooting of Trayvon Martin in 2012 in the US, has now become so ubiquitous as to have lost almost all meaning.

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Chenoweth, E. (2020, October 23). Analysis | this SUMMER'S Black Lives Matter protesters were Overwhelmingly Peaceful, our research finds. Retrieved February 27, 2021, from https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2020/10/16/this-summers-black-lives-matter-protesters-were-overwhelming-peaceful-our-research-finds/ 

Harker, J. (2020, June 11). 'Black lives Matter' risks becoming an empty SLOGAN. it's not enough to DEFEAT RACISM | Joseph Harker. Retrieved February 27, 2021, from https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/jun/11/black-lives-matter-racism-bristol-colston 

Nair, S. (2020, December 26). Black lives matter timeline. Retrieved February 27, 2021, from https://www.theweek.in/news/world/2020/12/26/black-lives-matter-timeline.html 