Trayvon Martin. Michael Brown. Eric Gardner. Freddie Gray.
They’re all black men who died while in police custody, and they’re all names that became nationally known thanks largely to the power of social media.
In many ways, the growing Black Lives Matter movement is like history repeating itself, said Carl Snowden, a longtime civil rights activist from Annapolis.
Snowden noted the sit-ins, sleep-ins and protests of the 1960s and beyond, including several that happened in the 1980s in Maryland’s capital city.
“The parallels between the Civil Rights Movement and Black Lives Matter are very similar,” he said.
But there’s one key difference.
“With Michael Brown, had it not been for social media, it would not have been a national story,” Snowden said of the teen killed in Ferguson, Missouri in 2014. “What you will also discover is that of the people involved, most are young people who are very savvy when it comes to using social media.”
And they’re angry.
“The biggest difference is patience,” Snowden said. “Black Lives Matter has run out of patience.”
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Dr. Jameta N. Barlow, an assistant professor of women’s and gender studies at Towson University who has studied Black Lives Matter, said the current movement goes beyond the issue of police brutality and also focuses on systemic issues plaguing African-Americans.
Issues including education disparities, job losses and the prison-industrial complex are not new, she said.
“In some ways, for African-Americans, there’s been a lot of progress,” she said. “In some other ways, not much has changed. This is kind of 2.0, or even 3.0, if you go back to the early 1900s.”
Watch the video with Barlow above to hear her explain the origins of both movements.
This time around, there is not a single leader, something that is intentional, Barlow said.
“I think it is a good thing,” she said, adding that what works for one community may not work for another. “You have to target your message appropriately.”
Not everyone agrees.
Dr. Kimberly Moffitt, an associate professor of American studies at the University of Maryland Baltimore County told ABC2 News last year that during the Civil Rights Movement, the message was more strategic.
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Now, Moffitt said, it’s almost as if everyone is a lead activist, which has a distinct downside.
“It makes it very difficult to figure out what the message is,” she said.
Snowden had a similar take.
“One of the biggest issues is being able to define who they are and what they are,” he said.
Looking ahead
Local historians are hoping the flood of pictures, video and social media snippets from last year’s uprising in Baltimore will help shed some light on the events in years to come.
The Maryland Historical Society is also compiling a digital archive of last year’s riots, and has collected about 9,000 items, including the emails released by the Baltimore Police.
Joe Tropea, curator of films and photographs and digital projects coordinator for the Historical Society, said people can submit anything from photographs to sound clips to blog posts.
“With the Civil Rights Movement, probably a lot of people just didn’t bother to save their photos or written materials,” Tropea said.
Last April’s riots over the police custody death of Freddie Gray came almost exactly 47 years after riots broke out over the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
Francis O’Neill, a senior reference librarian with the Maryland Historical Society, said while there are certainly connections between the riots of the 1960s and last year’s rioting, there are also some differences.
While the driving force behind both events is the same—anger over inequality and racism—the 1960s riots happened as part of the nationwide civil rights movement. After King’s assassination, riots happened in cities across the country.
“Baltimore was just one of the manifestations,” O’Neill said. “The major uprising last year, that was more out of the blue—no one thought that Baltimore would be a place where violence would erupt like that.”
Barlow said she’s optimistic about Baltimore’s future, pointing to Towson students’ recent sit-in to pressure the university president to work on a plan to improve diversity.
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There will be challenges, she said.
“But nothing that ever worked was easy,” she said.
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