Pamela Oliver
On September 20, 2007, tens of thousands of Black people converged on the small rural town of Jena, Louisiana to protest charging six boys with attempted murder after a school fight in which the victim, while knocked unconscious and injured, had been able to attend an event that evening. The
Read moreI’ve just submitted the draft of my piece about the Jena 6 that is a substantial extension and revision of the blog post I wrote a couple of years ago. It will need a 20% cut before publication and responses of editors and reviewers may lead me to rethink my
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My research team just posted a working paper that compares Black newspapers and mainstream newswires in their coverage of Black American protest events. In this paper we are just trying to lay out the big patterns we see in the data so we can do more work to refine the
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Although many discussions imply nothing happened between the Civil Rights Movement and Black Lives Matter, we find that Black protests in the 1990s and 2000s seem continuous with what came later.
Read moreMuch excellent work has been written about the need for systemic reform of policing in the US, the discrimination and inequalities faced by Black Americans, and the brave struggles of anti-racist protesters amidst the ongoing police repression and the unprecedented COVID-19 global pandemic. As social movements go, the ongoing mobilizations
Read moreThe huge wave of protests against police violence that is happening this week has new features tied to the current moment, but is grounded in a movement that has been building for decades. Its direct ties to the Black Lives Matter protests of 2014-2016 should be obvious, but that movement,
Read moreMost people have some rough idea of the history of “Black Lives Matter.” I use it to refer to the network of organizations now identified by the name Black Lives Matter. These organizations exist as part of a broader movement network known as the Movement for Black Lives. The founders
Read moreWhat a difference a few months makes. The Black Lives Matter movement was getting a lot of media coverage and popular support between 2014 and mid-2016. Multiple sessions at the American Sociological Association meeting were devoted to it. The Vision for Black Lives, prepared by a coalition named the Movement
Read moreSEE CORRECTION People who are not Black activists often believe that the Black movement went away after the late 1960s, either because it won or because people just gave up. And the available data certainly shows a steep decline in Black protest events as covered by the New York Times.
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EDITED June 2020 to update links in the M4BL web site. Under the name Movement for Black Lives , a coalition of contemporary Black Power organizations (including Madison’s Freedom, Inc.) have worked for a year to develop a comprehensive vision and agenda for social change. This is an exciting moment
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