"This is not your grandma's civil
rights movement"
-Tef Poe
The rate of technological progress in the past century has been exponential: record players to radio, juke boxes to iPods, stereos to wireless bluetooth speakers. As the technology of the time has changed, so have the tactics employed by each of the protest movements. Whereas the advent of the television was one of the first direct means that shed light upon the horrors of every day life for African-Americans, the democratization of the internet - the ability for anyone and everyone to share their personal anecdotes of racism they have experienced or seen - is what propelled the BLM movement to the internet sensation it is today.
The Television
For each of the respective protest movements, the Civil Rights Movement (1954–1968) and the Black Lives Matter Movement (2013-present), they had their own propellors: news that pushed each movement to the spotlight, images that headlined the papers, and videos that captivated the eyes of a nation. In the 1960s, the television set, an integral part of American culture, was a revolutionary lifeline that brought families together. Sitting in their living room, families of all racial backgrounds would witness the ironic discrepancy between the peaceful conduct of nonviolent protestors and the rage-filled attacks by police departments. They would hear the cries of pain of African-American children being hosed in the streets of Alabama and listen to King's historic speech that would be taught to elementary school children for decades to come. The timeliness of the nascent of the CRM was not so much so that the level of racism was getting worse per say, but that technological advancements had helped the issues of systematic racism gain the exposure that it had across different available forms of media (eg. newspapers, televisions..etc.), and the vocalization of the movement's goals. Lynchings, kidnappings, and other innumerable abuses of human rights were the characteristics of American society that African-Americans were all too familiar with for centuries before. However, television news coverage created a lens that the average suburban or rural, blue-collar or white-collar American was finally able to get a glimpse into: the abhorrent level of segregation in everyday life, and the encroachment on basic human rights, ultimately understanding what it was like to live in the "other" America. In other words, the nation could no longer pretend that those civil rights violations were not happening.
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Similarly to the CRM, the BLM movement's catalyst was the internet. The technological advancements of today have made the tactical approaches undertaken by the BLM movement so much more efficient and the immediate breadth of its broadcasting much more greater than that of the CRM. Technological progress has been exponential, consequently affecting the manner in which the BLM movement has mobilized legions of black people into the streets much more efficiently than could be achieved by the recruiters of Civil Rights Movement activists in the 1960s. (SNCC, SCLC, etc.) In Frederick Harris' article "The Next Civil Rights Movement," he quantitatively compares the level of efficiency that each organization was performing at: the hours that were spent utilizing hand-driven mimeograph-created copies of fliers that needed to be disseminated by hand became instantaneous 140 characters that disseminated nationally via twitter--at the touch of a fingertip. Whereas it would take a whole entire ABC film crew to video record the horrors occuring on the Edmund Pettus Bridge on Bloody Sunday, relaying the film canister across blockades of police officers, ferrying it to the Montgomery Airport to be broadcast nationally when the tv station is ready, it takes only a bystander, a phone camera, and a social media account for a witness in 2017 to convey instantly news that can generate passions for social justice.
With the widespread use of the internet, it makes it easier for BLM activists to spread their message to others. Through the BLM's website, they have contact information for every chapter readily available and a list of events on a calendar for when they have scheduled protests or rallies. |
Black Twitter
Upon examining the technology utilized for the BLM movement, it would be remiss to not discuss the role of “Black Twitter”, as it has become the primary mechanism of the movement. Being that black people are the number one demographic that uses Twitter, 28% compared to a 20% of white people according to the Pew Research Center on American Life, Black Twitter has provided a platform for African-Americans to speak about a wide array of subjects, including, and most notably, racial social injustice.
The hashtag, an integral component to Twitter and prevalent also among other social medias, is a tool that allows for users to join in on a topic that is trending widely on social media. The notable hashtag, #BlackLivesMatter, that propelled the BLM movement into popularity was actually first coined, not on Twitter, but on Facebook by user Alicia Garza following the acquittal of George Zimmerman, a man who shot an unarmed 17 year-old African-American named Trayvon Martin. Usually hashtags develop organically online; however, BLM activists have begun to deliberately create hashtags (ie. #OscarsSoWhite, #IfTheyGunnedMeDown) in order to publicize its cause.
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"The growth of the movement offline was directly linked with the online conversation."
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Based on data compiled by Pew Research, #BlackLivesMatter has appeared over 11.8 million times on the internet over the past 3 years. As seen on the histogram over on the left, there seems to be a spike in the frequency usage of the hashtag following high-profile police arrests and shootings of African-Americans and the subsequent acquittals of the officers involved: Eric Garner, Michael Brown, Tamir Rice, Freddy Gray, Sandra Bland.
As a series of retaliatory responses to the the rise in the popularity of #BlackLivesMatter alongside the violent approach of some BLM activists against law enforcement officers, individuals began tweeting with #AllLivesMatter (appearing 1.5 million times), and, with the Dallas police shooting, #BlueLivesMatter. |
As noted by both of these figures, both hashtags were not solely used to support whatever cause the hashtag was created for, as some individuals would use the hashtag critically or sarcastically, and others would use the hashtag in a way that does not pertain to the topic of racial injustice. |
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Democratization
Even though both technologies were revolutionary in the way that they helped publicize the issues the movement sought to address, there is a striking comparison in the dynamic that the technology offers between the movement and the people. Specifically, the technology available to participants in the Black Lives Matter Movement has facilitated active participation in a way that could not exist for those who witnessed the Civil Rights Movement unfold on TV.
Image citation:
- Header: http://www.capoliticalreview.com/top-stories/should-citizens-be-allowed-to-videotape-police-in-action/
- Image 1: http://theconversation.com/television-is-changing-and-viewer-metrics-need-to-change-with-it-41758
- Image 2: www.freedomworks.org
- Image 3-5: http://www.pewinternet.org/2016/08/15/the-hashtag-blacklivesmatter-emerges-social-activism-on-twitter/
- Slideshow: Twitter