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Black Lives Matter began with a social media hashtag #BlackLivesMatter after George Zimmerman was charged not guilty in the shooting death of Trayvon Martin back in 2012. https://library.law.howard.edu/civilrightshistory/BLM

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It became nationally recognized for street demonstrations following the 2014 deaths of two more African Americans, Michael Brown, resulting in protests and unrest in Ferguson, Missouri, a city near St. Louis, and Eric Garner in New York City. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Lives_Matter

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Black Lives Matter, the civil-rights protest movement that rose to prominence after Michael Brown was shot and killed by a police officer in Ferguson, Missouri, expanded its reach onto the campaign trail and college campuses. The movement forced presidential candidates to reckon with a legacy of racism and police brutality. It inspired student protests and demands.
https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2015/12/black-lives-matter/421839/

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As the protest movement evolves, activists face pushback and growing pains.

A lot changed in a year. Black Lives Matter, the civil-rights protest movement that rose to prominence after Michael Brown was shot and killed by a police officer in Ferguson, Missouri, expanded its reach onto the campaign trail and college campuses. The movement forced presidential candidates to reckon with a legacy of racism and police brutality. It inspired student protests and demands.

Along the way, the movement provoked backlash, and experienced growing pains. As protestors shout and struggle to make their voices heard, a national conversation of equal intensity is emerging over who belongs in American society-and who doesn't. When Donald Trump supporters attacked a Black Lives Matter protester at a November rally, the Republican presidential candidate responded: "Maybe he should have been roughed up."

Activists are disturbed by the dark turn the election has taken. But backlash against Black Lives Matter is virtually guaranteed to galvanize support for the movement. Videos of deadly encounters between black men and police officers have fueled calls for reform. In much the same way, reports of racial slurs at Trump rallies make it difficult to deny the problem of racism in America.

"It's terrible, but I don't think it's anything different than what's been happening in this country for a long time. This hatred has been normal for a while, it's just been in the shadows," Alicia Garza, one of the co-founders of #BlackLivesMatter, an organization that shares a name with the movement it helps support, said in an interview.

The challenge, for the movement, is to stem the tide of violence against black men and women while working to fix what activists believe is a fragmented and broken society. It's an ambition that won't be easily achieved. But as the movement evolves and expands, it has forced change.

Over the summer, activists began publicly, and unapologetically, disrupting presidential candidates at events and campaign rallies. The strategy got results. Democratic candidates Bernie Sanders and Martin O'Malley rushed to release detailed criminal-justice platforms after high-profile clashes with Black Lives Matter activists. In August, Hillary Clinton convened a meeting with activists who showed up at a New Hampshire campaign event intending to disrupt it.

The confrontations signaled the start of increasingly high-profile political engagement for the decentralized movement. They also laid bare the complicated and tense relationship between the movement and the progressive left. Liberal Americans often assume that voting Democratic and espousing a belief in equality are adequate proofs of solidarity in the fight against racism. In the past year, Black Lives Matter challenged that idea.

Some progressives questioned the logic of targeting politicians who claim to be sympathetic to the cause. What that criticism seemed to miss is that the confrontations were designed to push candidates further than they had been prepared to go. The protests were also a reminder to progressives that simply believing in something isn't sufficient to change the status quo.

"Part of what we need people to understand is that their silence, their complicity, is part of the problem," said Ashley Yates, a Black Lives Matter activist who helped plan and carry out a protest at Netroots Nation, a conference where Sanders and O'Malley were slated to speak in July. "There's an absurd quality to the idea of people telling you to be calm and controlled in your pain. To whisper quietly as you're being killed."
Simply believing in something isn't sufficient to change the status quo.
As Black Lives Matter becomes increasingly intertwined with mainstream politics, activists have found people in high places ready and willing to listen to their demands. But that creates new challenges, as activists attempt to engage with a political system they want to change without compromising or capitulating.

"It would be naive not to realize that there is some kind of desire for mutual benefit when candidates agree to sit down and speak with us," said Brittany Packnett, a protester and activist with Campaign Zero, a policy-focused group affiliated with Black Lives Matter, who has met with Sanders and Clinton. "But if we don't take the fight everywhere we won't win. It just means we have to be that much more clear about our intentions, hold that much more integrity when we engage in those spaces."

Deep distrust of established political power has made many in the movement wary of any kind of engagement with either Republicans or Democrats. Still, many activists believe that the election is important. When President Obama leaves office, it will mark the end of an era. There is a sense of urgency over what happens next.

It won't be easy to alter laws and institutions, but there has been political change in the past year. In May, Obama called for an end to transfers of certain kinds of military-style equipment from the federal government to police departments. In December, the Federal Bureau of Investigation announced a new effort to improve its tracking of fatal police shootings. Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel and Baltimore Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake fired their police chiefs amid protests over police brutality.

Student protest also reached new heights on college campuses around the country. High-profile protests at the University of Missouri and Yale University over discrimination and racial insensitivity led to resignations at both schools. Civil-rights agitation on college campuses is nothing new. But some movement leaders say the protests are proof of a fundamental shift in the mentality of a younger generation of activists.

"People used to believe that if you go to college and dress the right way, have a certain level of education, you would be spared," said Erika Totten, the cofounder of the Washington, D.C., chapter of Black Lives Matter. "Now there's a growing recognition that that's not the case. College campuses don't shield you from discrimination. Students are waking up en mass and realizing that they have to bring the fight there too."

Critics have characterized student protests as a plea for special treatment that infringes on free speech. Many activists view that as an attempt to dismiss, and shut down, what the movement is trying to achieve, and argue that the criticism operates from a premise that fails to acknowledge profound racial inequity.

"We've seen a continuation of the narrative that demanding that your life has value somehow takes value from someone else," Garza said. "At the most compassionate, it's a denial of the fact that people are not treated equally in our country. At its most nefarious, it's a deliberate distraction, a distortion of reality."

The past year also witnessed tragedy. In June, a gunman killed nine people at a black church in Charleston, South Carolina. 21-year old Dylann Roof reportedly confessed to the shooting, saying that he wanted to incite a "race war."

It was an event that echoed past atrocity. "It takes me back to the time when black churches were burned with impunity in the '60s and '70s," said Opal Tometi, a co-founder of #BlackLivesMatter and the executive director of the Black Alliance for Just Immigration. "Today we have the same type of domestic terrorism on the rise, we aren't supposed to call it that, but that is exactly what it is. We are seeing these white supremacist networks grow and become stronger."

When grand juries declined to deliver an indictment in connection with the deaths of Tamir Rice, a 12-year old who was fatally shot by a police officer while playing with a toy gun, and Sandra Bland, a 28-year old who died in jail after being pulled over for a routine traffic violation, it provoked deep disappointment and outright anger.

Yet even as the legal system has failed to yield outcomes that activists hoped for, the movement has succeeded in focusing intense scrutiny on criminal justice and policing in America.
"It does something to your idea of freedom as an American when you know you're being surveilled."
As activists confront obstacles, the movement has experienced growing pains. Social media has been a powerful tool for activists, but the public nature of the medium makes protestors uniquely vulnerable. Documents obtained by various media outlets through the Freedom of Information Act detail how the Department of Homeland Security monitors the movement on social media. And many activists believe they are under surveillance.

Police officers she has never seen before will sometimes call Ashley Yates by her full name, she says. Yates recalls one instance in which an officer grabbed her arm at a New York protest and referred to her by her Twitter handle, @brownblaze. "It does something to your idea of freedom as an American when you know you're being surveilled," Yates said. "They let you know that they know who you are and they're watching."

Tension among activists has been on display in the past year. Movements derive strength from the fact that different people play different roles-and Black Lives Matter is no exception. But as activists chart different paths, disagreements have erupted over strategy and tactics as well as demands.

One point of contention is whether the movement has adequately responded to the impact of violence against black women and girls. The #SayHerName campaign works to call attention to violent encounters between black women and police. But many activists say that far more needs to be done.

There is also a recognition that Black Lives Matter must build an increasingly sophisticated infrastructure to support its growth.

Some activists are looking to expand the ways the movement engages in politics: "The movement is evolving and there are different ways that people are working to advance that and make that happen," said Tarik Mohamed, an activist based out of New York City who recently set up a super PAC intended to advance the agenda of Black Lives Matter. "We need to continue to evolve our political voice, and that's what I'm trying to do."

Across the country, Black Lives Matter activists are investing time and effort to recruit and train a legal aid and emergency response network. For the protest movement to survive, a powerful support network will need to be in place.

"We're at a breaking point in this country right now," Yates said. "We got to this moment with people sacrificing and putting their lives on the line and we have to support each other through that. It sounds easy to remember, but sometimes it's hard."

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What Black Lives Matter Achieved In 2015

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As the protest movement evolves, activists face pushback and growing pains.

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The Black Lives Matter movement and protests of police violence played a major role in the 2016 election, according to new research led by faculty from Northeastern University, the University of Massachusetts, Northwestern University, and George Mason University. https://news.northeastern.edu/2020/06/09/the-black-lives-matter-protests-motivated-voters-in-2016-will-they-do-the-same-in-2020/

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The Black Lives Matter movement and protests of police violence played a major role in the 2016 election, according to new research led by faculty from Northeastern University, the University of Massachusetts, Northwestern University, and George Mason University.

And, the protests happening across the world sparked by the death of George Floyd, a Black man in Minnesota who was killed in police custody, may prove to have a similar effect in the 2020 election, says Kevin Drakulich, an associate professor of criminology and criminal justice at Northeastern who helped conduct the research.

The researchers, together with the American National Election Studies-one of the primary organizations that collects public opinion and political participation data from U.S. voters-surveyed a nationally representative sample of more than 3,600 U.S. citizens ages 18 and older.

They found that Black Lives Matter, a civil rights movement founded in 2013 to eradicate white supremacy and combat violence against Black people, and its subsequent backlash energized people to vote in 2016 and affected their choice of candidate.

According to the study, people who expressed concern about biased policing and support for the civil rights movement were more likely to vote for Hillary Clinton, the Democratic nominee who positioned herself as a supporter of the Black Lives Matter movement. The study also found that people who expressed support for police were connected to votes for Donald J. Trump, the Republican nominee who also repeatedly expressed support for police at his rallies and who accused the Black Lives Matter movement of "dividing America."

"The effect was substantial on both sides," Drakulich says. "There were a lot of people who were motivated by the BLM movement and the inequalities it raised, and there were a lot of people who were motivated against it."

Critically, the researchers also found that rhetoric related to "supporting police" was often coded language used by "voters concerned about the relative status of Black vs. White Americans," they wrote in their report.

They found that support for the police, in and of itself, didn't seem to have been an important motivation for voting for Trump. The researchers found that people who said they supported the police also tended to identify themselves as Republican and felt "racial resentment." The researchers define "racial resentment" as having "views [that] are primarily driven by social concerns about relative racial group positions," and that such resentment is "connected to both explicit and implicit indicators of racial animus."

Thus, the researchers found that "support for police" often served as a proxy for voters who harbor anti-black feelings and a fondness for the historic racial and class hierarchies in the U.S.

Researchers define this sort of proxy language as a "dog whistle," which they described as "speaking in code to a target audience." Such rhetoric, they wrote, "allows for politicians to speak about taboo subjects while retaining plausible deniability that they violated any social norms."

Drakulich points out that (now President) Trump tweeted "LAW & ORDER!" during the recent Black Lives Matter protests, but during protests in April and May to reopen the U.S. economy. The reopening protests, during which armed civilians shouted anti-government slogans in public spaces, came after public health measures to mitigate the spread of COVID-19 shut down non-essential businesses.

Drakulich says that the president's timing is an indication that his tweets may serve as dog whistles to voters who oppose the Black Lives Matter movement.

"The context is important," Drakulich says.

In their study of the 2016 election, researchers queried voters about their attitudes toward the Black Lives Matter movement and toward police.

They found that people who felt "warmly" toward the police saw them as unbiased, and those who felt "coldly" toward the Black Lives Matter movement were all "substantially more likely to vote for Trump than people who expressed the opposite feelings."

The differences were particularly stark when the researchers compared people based solely on their feelings toward the movement-those who felt "coldly" toward Black Lives Matter had a 78 percent likelihood of voting for Trump, whereas those who felt "warmly" toward the movement had only a 12 percent likelihood of voting for him.

The U.S. today is in a remarkably similar situation as in 2016-a pattern of extrajudicial killings of Black people has incited protests of racially biased police violence across the country, while counter-protests in support of police crop up in their wake.

Joe Biden, the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee, has positioned himself as supportive of the civil rights movement, while Trump, the presumptive Republican nominee, has considered using the U.S. military to quell protests.

It's difficult to predict whether these circumstances, coupled with more deeply entrenched political divides and a pandemic that will likely change the way U.S. citizens vote, will result in a similar outcome in November, Drakulich says. But one thing is clear: Civil rights and racial equality are going to be "really important issues again for this election," he says.

"It was a little unclear to me even a few months ago the degree to which these issues would be important factors in this election-as they were in 2016," he says. "But now it is clear that yes, they will be."

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Many people who voted in 2016 were motivated by the Black Lives Matter protests. Will the same hold true this year?

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A recent study found that the Black Lives Matter movement and its subsequent backlash not only energized people to vote in 2016, but affected which candidate they chose, as well. This year, one thing is clear: Civil rights and racial equality are going to be "really important issues again for this election," says Kevin Drakulich, a criminologist who helped conduct the study.

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Black Lives Matter has fallen off the national media attention radar since November 8. Black activists and activists from other minorities were heavily represented in the spontaneous protests in the first few days after the election, were prominent in Inauguration Day protest rallies, played a role in the big Women’s March rallies the day after the Inauguration, and continue to play a role in the ongoing protests against the Trump administration’s policies.
https://www.ssc.wisc.edu/soc/racepoliticsjustice/2017/02/08/thoughts-about-black-lives-matter-in-2017/

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As the Black Lives Matter movement marked five years, another fatal shooting of unarmed Stephon Clark sparked more protests.
https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2022/02/black-history-month-black-lives-matter/

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Rapper 21 Savage was detained by the US immigration agency in February. BLM co-founder Cullors galvanized support from celebrities and human rights organizations, with a #Free21Savage campaign, leading to him being released on bond.
https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2022/02/black-history-month-black-lives-matter/

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In 2020, the Black Lives Matter movement shook the world, mass protests erupted in Louisville, Kentucky, on May 28, one of Chanelle Helm’s biggest worries was for the young people who took to the streets.
https://www.aljazeera.com/features/2020/12/31/2020-the-year-black-lives-matter-shook-the-world

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protesters took to the streets throughout the United States to protest police brutality in response to George Floyd’s death at the hands of Minneapolis police officers. These Black Lives Matter protests were some of the largest and most sustained in the country’s history.
https://www.wellesley.edu/news/2021/stories/node/190341

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Black Lives Matter was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize in January for raising awareness and consciousness of racial injustice.
https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2022/10/10/black-lives-matter-tops-list-of-groups-that-black-americans-see-as-helping-them-most-in-recent-years/

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Demonstrators hold "Black Lives Matter" signs at the "Justice for George Floyd" march outside the Minnesota State Capitol on March 19, 2021, in St. Paul, Minnesota. (Kerem Yucel/AFP via Getty Images)

Around four-in-ten Black adults in the United States (39%) say Black Lives Matter has done the most to help Black people in recent years, far exceeding the share who say the same about other groups or organizations, according to a recent Pew Research Center survey.

By comparison, around one-in-five Black adults (17%) say the NAACP has done the most to help Black people in the U.S. in recent years and 13% say the same about Black churches or religious organizations. Smaller shares point to the Congressional Black Caucus (6%) and the National Urban League (3%), while 14% of Black adults choose someone else.

The survey provided respondents with a set of answer options and did not specify whether Black Lives Matter was the name of an organization or the broader protest movement. But regardless of how respondents interpreted the term, Black Lives Matter outranked the other entities that were asked about.

The question was part of an October 2021 survey that examined Black Americans' views of their position in U.S. society and their attitudes about social change. The survey included Black adults who are single-race, non-Hispanic; those who are multiracial, non-Hispanic; and those who indicate they are Black and Hispanic. It was conducted prior to allegations of financial mismanagement at a foundation that grew out of the Black Lives Matter protest movement.

This Pew Research Center analysis examines Black Americans' attitudes about the groups and leaders they see as most helpful and important today. It relies primarily on an online survey conducted Oct. 4-17, 2021, among 3,912 Black U.S. adults, including those who are single-race, non-Hispanic; those who are multiracial, non-Hispanic; and those who indicate they are Black and Hispanic. The survey included 1,025 Black adults on Pew Research Center's American Trends Panel (ATP) and 2,887 Black adults on Ipsos' KnowledgePanel.

Respondents on both survey panels are recruited through national, random sampling of residential addresses. Recruiting panelists by phone or mail ensures that nearly all Black U.S. adults have a chance of selection. This gives us confidence that any sample can represent the whole population. (See our Methods 101 explainer on random sampling.) Here are the questions used for the survey of Black adults, along with responses, and its methodology.

This analysis also includes additional data from other recent Pew Research Center surveys about how the broader U.S. public, including adults and teens ages 13 to 17, see the Black Lives Matter movement. Links to these surveys, including information about the field dates, sample sizes and other methodological details, are available in the text.

The survey highlighted differences of opinion among Black Americans on many questions, including - at least to some extent - the perceived importance of Black Lives Matter for helping Black people. For example, Black adults who identify with or lean toward the Democratic Party are more likely than those who identify with or lean toward the Republican Party to say Black Lives Matter has done the most to help Black people in recent years (44% vs. 26%). Similarly, almost half of Black adults who describe their political views as liberal (47%) say the same about Black Lives Matter, compared with smaller shares of Black moderates (41%) and Black conservatives (32%).

Among the broader public, a little over half of U.S. adults (56%) say they strongly or somewhat support the Black Lives Matter movement, according to a separate Pew Research Center poll conducted in March 2022. (The March 2022 survey asked about Black Lives Matter as a "movement," unlike the October 2021 survey.)

Among U.S. teens, support for the Black Lives Matter movement is higher than it is among adults. Seven-in-ten teens ages 13 to 17 say they strongly or somewhat support the movement, according to a survey conducted in April and May 2022.

Black Americans see Obama as most important Black leader today

The October 2021 survey of Black adults also asked respondents, in an open-ended format, to identify the Black leader they see as most important in the U.S. today.

Three-in-ten Black adults volunteer former President Barack Obama, the nation's first Black chief executive, while 8% name current Vice President Kamala Harris, the first Black person ever to serve in that role. Around one-in-five Black adults (19%) say they are not sure who the country's most important Black leader is, while 16% cite someone other than Obama or Harris, including small percentages who name leaders such as current Georgia gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams, the Rev. Jesse Jackson or the Rev. Al Sharpton.

As is the case in Black adults' views of Black Lives Matter, there are partisan differences in perceptions of the nation's most important Black leader. Black Democrats are about twice as likely as Black Republicans (35% vs. 16%) to volunteer Obama, while Black Republicans are more likely than Black Democrats (33% vs. 18%) to say they are not sure. Among ideological groups, four-in-ten Black liberals name Obama, compared with three-in-ten Black moderates and around a quarter of Black conservatives (23%).

While there are age differences in Black Americans' views on several questions in the Center's recent survey, there are no such differences when it comes to perceptions of Obama as the most important Black leader in the U.S. today. Black adults under 50 are just as likely as those ages 50 and older to volunteer Obama as the most important Black leader: 30% in each group name the former president.

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Black Lives Matter tops list of groups that Black Americans see as helping them most in recent years

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Around four-in-ten Black adults in the United States (39%) say Black Lives Matter has done the most to help Black people in recent years, far exceeding the share who say the same about other groups or organizations, according to a recent Pew Research Center survey.