Like Selma, Black Lives Matter has Transformed Views of Systemic Racism in America
Photo Credit: Peter Pettus / Public domain
By: Logan Phillips
Date: July 7th
Fifty-five years ago, a group of ordinary Americans, heroes both known and unknown to history, began their 54-mile march from Selma, Alabama to the capitol in Montgomery to demand their constitutional right to vote. As they crossed the Edmund Pettus Bridge, they were confronted by an army of Alabama State Troopers, some on horseback, all wearing white helmets and armed with Billy Clubs. The troopers had been told by Governor George Wallace to use any means necessary to prevent the march. Major John Marshall announced over his bullhorn that “It would be detrimental to your safety to continue this march… This march will not continue.”
Nevertheless, the Marchers refused to back down, and they continue to walk, unarmed, and committed to nonviolence. They were met with brutal force: the state troopers charged amidst a cloud of tear gas, swinging their clubs at their heads as dozens of white spectators cheered from a safe distance while waving confederate flags. Some were beat within an inch of their life. The pure horror of that scene was captured on film and beamed into the homes of tens of millions of Americans watching ABC News.
John Lewis tells story of the March on Selma and how it became the center of the fight for voting rights
Years of peaceful protesting in the face of violence had made the ground fertile for change, but the March on Selma was a decisive moment that broke the camel’s back, and galvanized Americans across the country to support change. The shift was so dramatic, that when the House put the voting rights act on the floor, it passed by an overwhelming 333 to 85 votes.
Perhaps because White America was not able to grasp the full scope and evil of Jim Crow until they were able to see it with their own eyes. As Kareem Abul Jabbar wrote recently, “Racism in America is like dust in the air. It seems invisible — even if you are choking on it — until you let the sun in. Then you see it’s everywhere.”
The Black Lives Matters Movement of 2020
Triumphs in the past fifty five years since have been few and far between – and while racism in our institutions might be much weaker than in the 1950s, it’s not much better than it was in the 1980s. Across education, the criminal justice system, housing, environmental regulations, and health care, African Americans and Latinos are treated fundamental differently before the law. This is an existential threat for a nation whose founding creed is centered on the principle that all men are created equal, endowed by their creator with alienable rights.
Photo Credit: Created using Piktochart.com, Designed by Logan Phillips
For the first time in many years, 2020 is offering a promise that change might just be in the air once again. Innovations in technology have enabled systemic racism to be captured on video by anyone with a cellphone – and this has led to dozens of unjustified police shooting of unarmed black men and women to be caught on film and go viral. However, it was the brutal murder of George Floyd was the spark that unleashed a torrent of outrage and activism that has been nothing short of historic.
Amidst an America gripped by the coronavirus pandemic, millions have flooded the streets to demand an end to police violence, and an end to systemic racism at large. In just a few short weeks, the mass movement has already transformed the way so many Americans, particularly White Americans, see systemic racism. Just five years ago in 2015, only 45% of White Americans said that racial and ethnic discrimination was a big problem in the United States. Now, 71% of White Americans say it is a big problem.
Photo Credit: Logan Phillips, Designed for RacetotheWH,
This has enormous implications on the chances of ambitious and meaningful changes being passed on both a national, state, and local level. Past legislation attempting to uproot systemic racism were so difficult to achieve because such a high percentage of Americans believed that it does not even exist. A shift in public sentiment does not guarantee change by any means, but it makes it feasible, especially when combined with one of the most intense public activism campaign in decades.
One of the reasons the protest have changed public opinion more then previous movements might be the diverse makeup of the crowd. Douglas McAdam, a sociologist at Stanford who studies social movements, told the New York Times that very highly publicized death of an African-American man while in police custody brought protests, “but overwhelmingly in the black community.” Demographic surveys of the protest after Floyd’s murder have found that the protestors are made up of Americans of all races, and in many major protest like in New York City and Los Angeles were actually majority white. The protest has spread far beyond just major cities, but have been happening in small cities, suburban towns, and rural communities across America. It is one thing for White Americans to hear a news report about protestors that they’ve never met demanding change - it is another to ignore a movement that literally has your kids, friends and neighbors out there on the streets demanding change.
There have already been encouraging victories. Bans on chokeholds have been passed in Minneapolis, New York State, and Chicago. D.C. now forbids police departments from hiring officers with a history of misconduct. Individuals states, cities and towns have more power than the federal government, and they can change their laws to make a meaningful and significant difference on how the police operate. However, it remains to be seen if the protest and change in sentiment can be matched by large scale change on a federal level that will take on the larger challenges of systemic racism that plague America across our education, criminal justice, and health care systems.
Implications for the 2020 Presidential Election
President Trump had made it clear that anything beyond small, piecemeal change is unlikely to happen during his presidency, both in recent weeks and from his political history. Although he had long been a celebrity, Donald Trump first became a prominent figure in the Republican party by touting a breathtaking conspiracy that America’s first black president was somehow not born in Hawaii, as records clearly prove, but was secretly born elsewhere. He has long framed certain groups as outsiders threatening America – from the Muslims he promised to ban from coming into the United States on the campaign trail, to his daily dire warnings on the eve of the 2018 election that asylum seekers heading to the U.S.-Mexico were a “caravan of cold blooded killers.”
Some of his Republican aids had hoped that that his approach would be slightly more nuanced this time around. Perhaps their hopes were pinned on his signing of the First Step Act, which reduced mandatory minimums and ended solitary confinement among people under the age of 18. Instead, Donald Trump has firmly gone in the opposite direction, beginning with his clearing of an entirely peaceful protest in Lafayette Square directly across from the White House. In the midst of delivering a speech asserting that he would reinstate law and order, President Trump had the national guard move on the demonstrators with tear gas and rubber bullets – just so he could cross the street and have a photo op in front of a church that had been partly burned.
The reaction to his response to the protest, at large and in Lafayette Square, has been decisively negative – and its causes severe damage to his re-election bid. He had been weakened by public views of his handling of the coronavirus, but it was not until George Floyd’s death that’s Trump’s polling against Joe Biden began to truly begin to crater. He went from trailing Biden by about five percent to trailing him but over nine percent, and his chances of winning the election in the Race to the White House Forecast have almost been cut in half.
Nonetheless, Donald Trump has only gotten more resistant to the movement with time, and is now using his rallies and twitter feed to try to reframe the debate away from systemic racism at large and instead make it a debate about preserving monuments and American history. During his Tulsa Oklahoma Rally, he painted Black Lives Matters as the enemy, as violent thought police trying to suppress conservatives’ freedoms. Referring to the 100 entirely peaceful protestors outside his rally, Trump said, "You saw those protestors outside? They are thugs. They want to demolish our heritage, so they can impose their repressive regime in its place. They want to defund and dissolve our police department. These people are stone cold crazy. If you want to save your heritage, that beautiful heritage of ours, well then you’re lucky I’m your president."
No one can accuse Trump of being inauthentic in that speech, but it’s hard to see how this is the right political tactic at a time when the country is clearly moving in a different direction, to say nothing of the moral responsibility that comes with being President. By denying even the basic tenants of the movement, he is increasingly out of step with Americans at large.