#BlackLivesMatter

2013

Date: 13 July 2013 · Place: Oakland and New York; Facebook and Twitter · Figures: Alicia Garza, organiser · Patrisse Cullors, organiser · Opal Tometi, organiser · George Zimmerman, acquitted defendant · Trayvon Martin, killed 26 February 2012 · Tags: Hashtag, BlackTwitter, Movement 01. A Love Letter to Black People On the night of 13 July 2013 a Florida jury acquits George Zimmerman of the killing of seventeen-year-old Trayvon Martin. Alicia Garza writes a Facebook post she calls a love letter to Black people ending with the line Our lives matter, Black lives matter. Patrisse Cullors shares it with the hashtag #BlackLivesMatter. Opal Tometi builds the social infrastructure across Tumblr and Twitter the following week. The phrase exists before the hashtag; the hashtag is what makes it a movement. "Black people. I love you. I love us. Our lives matter, Black lives matter." — Alicia Garza, Facebook, 13 July 2013 02. Ferguson and After The hashtag is used roughly 5,000 times in the year after Martin's verdict. After Michael Brown is killed in Ferguson on 9 August 2014 it appears 1.7 million times in three weeks. By the end of 2016 it has been tweeted 30 million times. BLM is the case study every organiser studies next. The architecture is hashtag as masthead, distributed cell as chapter, Vine and Periscope as wire service. The state learns to track hashtags too. Sources • Alicia Garza, 'A Herstory of the #BlackLivesMatter Movement', The Feminist Wire, 7 October 2014 • Pew Research Center, 'An analysis of #BlackLivesMatter and other Twitter hashtags related to political or social issues', 11 July 2018 • Jelani Cobb, 'The Matter of Black Lives', The New Yorker, 14 March 2016