The Black Lives Matter: The Civil Rights Movement

As the society continues to develop, changes are inevitable. There have been movements created in order to achieve a more perfect community. One of the most influential movements recently is Black Lives Matter (BLM). BLM was created in 2012, after George Zimmerman murdered Trayvon Martin, a 17-year-old African-American, and was absolved from his blame. Dead Trayvon was instead placed on trial for his own death. As a result, three African-American women, Patrisse Cullors, Opal Tometi and Alicia Garza found Black Lives Matter to prevent this heinous crime from happening again. BLM is a national movement fighting for Black community against discrimination, brutality, racism, … Compared to other movements in U.S history, in terms of reasons, demands,

It is hard to say whether a centralized leadership will make a movement successful. “It does not have a centralized structure, and that is what I think causes some confusion and also allows this movement to live on”, Jonathan Newton, the founder and president of the National Association Against Police Brutality, said. One obvious advantage a movement without leader has is that identifying and killing the leader cannot suppress the movement. One example a movement is the case with Dr. Martin Luther King. The leader of the Civil Right Movement died believing that his mission of achieving freedom and power for African-American was far from complete. His assassination indirectly caused America to move one step closer to chaos, and one step farther from unification. The movement then lost its original strength and spirit. There has been a great deal of movements that succeeded without any specific leaders. For instance, Occupied Wall Street, Feminism (a movement during 60s-70s) and Gay Rights Activism, which had an enormous impact on American culture, were all movements without a centralized leadership. Leaderless movements have been successful at changing the orientation of American society. The feminist and gay rights movements both avoided formal leadership in favor of a decentralized decision making structure. The people no longer trust their leaders and are even starting to indict the system itself. They think we can do better. We are all leaders. Such leadership style is messy but that efficiency is not the point. Democracy is. Lack of leadership does cause some difficulties to the movement. For instance, without a centralized leadership, however, to my knowledge, without a centralized leadership, BLM would be more successful. It is all about raising awareness, so having a centralized leader would make it harder to spread out the message as people are more willing to listen to a group than to an individual.