LibGuides: Black Lives Matter Movement: Articles

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Black Lives Matter Black Lives Matter (BLM) is a civil rights movement and activist network that originated from a hashtag campaign on social media in 2013. The #BlackLivesMatter campaign gained momentum online in the wake of a Florida jury finding George Zimmerman not guilty of the second-degree murder of Trayvon Martin, an unarmed Black high school student whom Zimmerman shot and killed. Zimmerman claimed self-defense, but many people saw his acquittal by a jury as racially biased. As a social movement, BLM has focused largely on the lack of accountability for state violence committed against Black Americans, particularly police violence.
Police Brutality and Reform: Does Policing in the United States Need to Fundamentally Change? In May 2020, protests and riots broke out in cities across the United States following the killing of George Floyd, a 46-year-old Black man who died after Derek Chauvin, a Minneapolis police officer, kneeled on his neck for more than nine minutes, even though Floyd was handcuffed, unarmed, and repeatedly crying out that he could not breathe. Nearly a year later, in April 2021, while Chauvin was standing trial for murder, another Minnesota police officer mistook her gun for her Taser and shot and killed Daunte Wright, a 20-year-old Black man, at a traffic stop in Brooklyn Center, Minnesota, not far from where Floyd had died. Wright, like Floyd, was also unarmed. Both killings, just two of many high-profile instances in which unarmed Black men have died at the hands of law enforcement over the past decade, sparked protests and added to an increasingly urgent debate about the state of policing in the United States.
Police Under Scrutiny: Can law enforcement restore public trust? Police officers fatally shoot an average of nearly 1,000 people annually in the United States, and Blacks, Hispanics, the mentally ill and the poor are more likely to be stopped by police than whites. Increasingly, violent encounters with minorities are being captured on camera and igniting racial justice protests across the country.

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