Black Lives Matter Movement

From slavery to today, the black freedom struggle has been a progression; movements may end but the struggle learns from its successes and failures and continues. The current Black Lives Matter movement has learned much from its predecessors, notably the Civil Rights and Black Power movements of the 1950s and 1960s. After watching the centralized leadership in the Civil Rights and Black Power movements, Black Lives Matter adopted a leader-full approach. From the Black Power movement’s list of demands, Black Lives Matter adopted both the style of issuing demands and the ideas behind some of them. From both movements, Black Lives Matter has adopted a strategy of grassroots organizing as well as methods of protest, primarily non-violent.

In the

During the Civil Right and Black Power movements, organizations like the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), the Black Panthers, the NAACP, the Mississippi Democratic Freedom Party (MDFP), the National Urban League (NUL), the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), and more worked together to advocate for black lives on federal, state, and local levels. A key example of grassroots organizing, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), was founded in 1960 at Shaw University and quickly grew into the one of the largest and most consequential organizations in the Civil Rights movement. The SNCC played important roles in the sit-ins and freedom rides, the 1963 March on Washington, and the Mississippi Freedom Summer and made major progress in its field work with voter registration drives in the South. These organizations reached out to local people with efforts like the SNCC voter registration drives and the Black Panther Party’s free community health clinics and also worked together, coordinating larger events and efforts such as the 1963 March on Washington, in which the SNCC, SCLC, NAACP, CORE, and NUL all played a major

Multiple organizations contribute to the black freedom struggle today, many of which still exist from the Civil Rights and Black Power movements like the NAACP, SCLC, and NUL. According to The Movement for Black Lives, hundreds of organizations are working on policy that intersects with the Black Lives Matter movement. Additionally, the three founders of the movement - Alicia Garza, Patrisse Cullors, and Opal Tometi - come from backgrounds of grassroots organizing on issues such as criminal justice reform, immigration, health, student services and rights, rights for domestic workers, ending police brutality, anti-racism, and violence against trans and gender non-conforming people of color which have shaped the organization of the movement. Since its inception, Black Lives Matter has already seen numerous examples of organizing: when students at Yale University and University of Missouri experienced racism, students from schools across the country protested to stand in solidarity as well as numerous other Black Lives Matter protests, marches, die-ins, and teach-in have been held by organizers on all different levels. The organizing and protest techniques of Black Lives Matter have been inspired by and built upon those of the Civil Rights movement and the Black Power