Capella University Black Lives Matter Organization Discussion Is Black Lives Matter an effective civil rights organization? Why or why not? Support your re

Capella University Black Lives Matter Organization Discussion Is Black Lives Matter an effective civil rights organization? Why or why not? Support your response with this week’s readings from your Taking Sides text as well as at least two scholarly journal articles published within the past 5 years.

RESPONSE GUIDELINES

Respond substantively to the posts of at least two learners by asking questions and adding comments that expand the conversation.

LEARNING COMPONENTS

This activity will help you achieve the following learning components:

Examine controversial topics related to culture, ethnicity, and diversity.
Examine various political, ideological, demographic, and social-justice perspectives on culture, ethnicity, and diversity.
Examine personal and professional views on controversial topics in culture, ethnicity, and diversity.
Apply research to the analysis of controversial topics in culture, ethnicity, and diversity.
Identify scholarly research to support positions on controversial topics. Is Black Lives Matter an Effective Civil Rights Organization?
YES: Julia Craven, Ryan J. Reilly, and Mariah Stewart, from “The Ferguson Protests
Worked,” Huffington Post (2016)
NO: Barbara Reynolds, from “I Was a Civil Rights Activist in the 1960s. But It’s Hard for Me to
Get Behind Black Lives Matter,” The Washington Post (2015)
Learning Outcomes
After reading this issue, you will be able to:
• Examine and analyze the factors, both historical and contemporary, that contributed to
the creation of Black Lives Matter.
• Identify and explain the organizational structure of Black Lives Matter and the significant
activity in which its members engage.
• Identify how Black Lives Matter differs organizationally from earlier more traditional
civil rights organizations.
• Identify and examine the significant issues and goals that are being pursued by Black
Lives Matter.
• Identify and examine the main points offered by Barbara Reynolds in her critique of
Black Lives Matter?
• Identify and examine the main points presented by Craven, Reilly, and Stewart to
support that Black Lives Matter is an effective civil rights organization.
ISSUE SUMMARY
YES: Julia Craven, Ryan Reilly, and Mariah Stewart argue that the unrest which accompanied
the Ferguson protests were necessary to begin a reform process. They cite several examples in
which they assert that militant actions by Black Lives Matter activists have had a positive impact
in moving local, state, and federal authorities to begin to implement reforms in the criminal
justice system of St. Louis County.
NO: Barbara Reynolds is former editor and columnist for USA Today who was an activist in the
civil rights movement in the 1960s. Although she is committed to the goals of Black Lives
Matter, Reynolds is troubled by certain tactics and behaviors in which movement members
engage. Reynolds’ concerns include her contention that Black Lives Matter activists have not
learned important lessons from previous civil rights struggles, especially the civil rights
movement. She is also concerned that rather than seeking insight, wisdom, and guidance from
older generations of activists, they have tended to alienate the older generation.
In an inaugural presidential lecture at Rowan University (New Jersey), Dr. Cornel West, a
distinguished African American scholar, observed that the perception of blacks among white
Americans had evolved over time. Earliest perceptions of African American people, according to
West, tended to characterize them as “troublesome property,” and over time, that perception
has changed to one in which African Americans are viewed as “troublesome people.” This
observation is critical for understanding Page 248the emphasis upon maintaining order and
establishing effective social control over African American communities throughout American
history. Initially, these concerns with order and social control reflected the desire to protect
valuable slave property. It should be noted that among the many mechanisms of control that
were employed at that time were slave codes, plantation overseers and trustees, slave patrols
and blood hounds, federal marshals, bounty hunters, and the fugitive slave laws of the 1850s.
Since the slave era, the focus has shifted to a desire to “keep the Negroes in their place.”
Among the many manifestations of order and control to which blacks were subjected included
residential segregation, discriminatory policies and practices of police departments, and
involvement with other institutions of the criminal justice system. Much of the focus of these
social institutions was directed toward keeping the segregated communities of color under a
strict regime of order and control.
The activities of police officers and other agents of the criminal justice system within minority
communities have often involved violations of civil rights and violence. So, over time, blacks,
Latinos, and other minorities who have had these interactions with law enforcement and other
criminal justice agencies have developed a significant negativity toward these institutions.
These sentiments are manifested in suspicion, distrust, resentment, and disrespect, and are
widespread among residents of America’s minority communities.
One primary response to the concerns of American minorities with law enforcement and the
criminal justice system is to organize and engage in modalities of social protest. Such protest
activity can be seen during the Slave Era when enslaved blacks engaged in various forms of
resistance and revolt in the pursuit of freedom. Black abolitionists and their allies engaged in
social protest activities that contributed significantly to the demise of slavery. The American
civil rights movement was one of the most significant social protest movements to emerge
within human history. And more recently we have witnessed the Million Man March and
related social protest aggregations. So, Black Lives Matter is the most recent example of African
Americans organizing themselves to struggle against police misconduct and brutality, and to
demand institutional reforms and social justice.
Black Lives Matter is a youth-led movement that has emerged within cities among mostly black
residents who perceive themselves to be targets of misconduct, disrespect, harassment, and
verbal and physical abuse which they experience daily. They are also motivated by the
perception that minorities do not receive justice from the criminal justice system. As a result,
one hears the slogan, “no justice, no peace.” It appears that specific incidents of police killing
unarmed citizens, largely young and black, and graphic videos of similar incidents across
America precipitated the organizing activities that led to the emergence of the Black Lives
Matter movement.
Craven, Reilly, and Stewart of the Huffington Post support the contention that the Black Lives
Matter protests and the unrest associated with this activism was effective in generating social
change and institutional reform in that area. In their article, they explore topics such as abuse
of black community residents by the police, injustices delivered by the courts, which blacks and
poor citizens experience, and the failures of officials to reform the existing criminal justice
system. To support their claim that Black Lives Matter protest activities are effective and
successful, they examine a series of reforms which they claim have resulted from the Ferguson,
Missouri protests of 2015. Among the reforms which they cite are changes in media coverage of
police violence against blacks and poor people, overhauling of municipal courts, President
Obama’s appointment of a Policing Task Force, and his provision of $20 million to purchase
body cameras for police officers. Black Lives Matter has extended the reach of its concerns to
encompass and enhance the struggles for wage equity and the closing of the income and
wealth gap in the United States. According to these commentators, attention to all these issues
has gained momentum within American society in response to the activism of Black Lives
Matter. These social protests in which Black Lives Matter have engaged have influenced
President Obama to become more frank and honest when discussing race and lingering racism
within the country.
Craven, Reilly, and Stewart are not apologists for violence. However, they have concluded and
firmly believe that the totality of the unrest that Ferguson, Missouri, and other communities
are experiencing due to BLM activism is resulting in meaningful social change and institutional
reforms.
Barbara Reynolds is an old-line civil rights activist who participated in the civil rights movement
of the 1960s. She supports the goals that Black Lives Matter is pursuing, but is troubled by some
of their methodology and behavior. Reynolds is critical of what she views as a BLM activism that
is lacking in discipline, dignity, and an innate respectability that could attract others to support
their cause. She is also concerned with the lack of involvement and influence over Black Lives
Matter by the black church or the older generation civil rights leaders and activists who still
survive. The failure of the leadership of Black Lives Matter to reach out to those elements of the
black community to seek their wisdom and insights, and Page 249to pursue their participation
in the movement is a major shortcoming of Black Lives Matter, according to Reynolds.
The critique of Black Lives Matter presented by Barbara Reynolds has exposed a generational
gap between the new generation of social activists and leaders and those of earlier generations.
It is safe to conclude that the challenge that faces both generations of civil rights activists and
leaders is to seek out and secure effective ways to close this gap in pursuit of the advancement
of African Americans and other minority groups within the United States.
Page 250
YES
Julia Craven, Ryan J. Reilly, and Mariah Stewart
The Ferguson Protests Worked
FERGUSON, Mo.—Nearly a half-century ago, a University of Missouri law professor named T.E.
Lauer issued a warning. Missouri’s network of municipal courts, he wrote, were “a modern
anomaly” generally “overlooked or ignored as the misshapen stepchildren of our judicial
system.”
It was “disgraceful,” he argued, that poor people accused of municipal ordinance violations
didn’t receive lawyers. Arresting and confining citizens for petty violations of municipal codes
was unnecessary. Many municipalities, he wrote, had clearly “conceived of their municipal
courts in terms of their revenue-raising ability,” and those financial incentives influenced
judges’ decisions. He questioned whether the term “kangaroo court” would “too often validly
apply to municipal court proceedings.”
That was 1966. The Civil Rights Act was two years old. Martin Luther King Jr. was still alive, and
Barack Obama had just turned 5. Dozens of young girls in St. Louis were treated for minor
injuries sustained at a Beatles concert. George Wallace, who had tried to prevent black
students from enrolling at a public university after promising “segregation forever,” was
governor of Alabama.
In the ensuing decades, those “kangaroo courts” enabled small towns, especially in St. Louis
County, to pad their budgets by extracting fines from people for extraordinarily minor violations
of municipal codes—under threat of jail. Arrest warrants were issued for thousands of people,
for supposed crimes like wearing baggy pants, missing a special sticker on their car, or failing to
subscribe to a designated trash service. Residents who had to endure these local courts
described them as “out of control,” “inhumane,” “crazy,” “racist,” “unprofessional” and
“sickening.”
The decades between Lauer’s warning and 2014 brought no significant reforms to Missouri’s
municipal courts. Then, on Aug. 9, a Ferguson police officer’s bullet that killed 18-year-old
Michael Brown brought an end to the inaction.
Police left Brown’s body in the street for hours, and a community that had felt abused by the
authorities for years erupted. Vandalism broke out, along with peaceful protests, and
militarized police departments aggressively cracked down. The clashes attracted international
news coverage. Riots and protests injured numerous people and caused extensive property
damage. The controversy surrounding Brown’s killing and the police response left the
community reeling.
But the protests, in many ways, worked. Those abusive municipal court practices, which many
residents said had fueled widespread disrespect for authority, are being reined in. And the
outcry spread far beyond the Midwest. In many ways, the Ferguson protests changed America.
Missouri Overhauled Its Municipal Courts
Nine months after Brown’s death, the Missouri legislature passed a bill that capped the amount
of revenue that municipalities can collect from tickets. Gov. Jay Nixon signed the legislation last
month, saying that when “the practices of municipal courts fail the basic tests of fairness and
equality—those failings reflect on our entire judicial system.” Sen. Eric Schmitt (R), a leading
supporter, said he doesn’t believe the bill would have happened without the protests in
Ferguson.
St. Louis County’s municipal courts didn’t kill Michael Brown. But they were a major contributor
to the outrage and distrust that was on display in Ferguson following Brown’s death.
“For me, after August and being from the St. Louis area and growing up in North County, I felt
the desire to try to right a wrong in how justice was playing out in our municipal courts, or the
absence of it,” Schmitt said. “The long lines outside of municipal courts next to pawn shops
shocked the conscious, and I think it compelled people—regardless of their party—to want to
do something about it.” Schmitt said the attention “brought together a broad coalition.”
Page 251Law enforcement leaders said Ferguson was a wakeup call.
“If not for the unrest, we wouldn’t have seen municipal court reform. It’s certainly a gamechanger,” said Kevin Ahlbrand, president of Missouri’s Fraternal Order of Police and a member
of the Ferguson Commission, created by the governor to correct economic and social conditions
that fueled the unrest.
St. Louis County Police Chief Jon Belmar told The Huffington Post it was “a shame that we
haven’t had the political will before 2014” to look at the municipal courts.
“If you went to a very affluent area in St. Louis County, how long do you think a program would
last where speed cameras were put up on arterial roads coming into subdivisions, and people
were given letters saying they were going to be arrested? It would last about five hours,”
Belmar said. “You know that and I know that, and that’s part of the problem. Yet in areas that
are not as affluent, and where folks really are struggling with issues of poverty and education
and crime and everything else that goes along with it—unemployment—they don’t have the
ability really to voice that opinion. They can’t leverage change. That’s a good thing that’s come
out of all this.”
Ferguson’s protests spawned at least 40 state measures aimed at improving police tactics and
use of force. The national conversation around race and policing has shifted so dramatically
that the director of the FBI said law enforcement officials historically enforced “a status quo
that was often brutally unfair to disfavored groups” and discussed how unconscious racial bias
affects police officers with no pushback from the law enforcement community.
“I don’t think there has ever been this level of attention being paid to communities all over the
country,” Vanita Gupta, head of the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division, said in a recent
interview with The Huffington Post. “As a country, it will be shame on us for missing the
opportunity . . . given the kind of elevated attention that is being paid to criminal justice.”
News Media Added Nuance to Coverage of Police Violence against Black People
If not for the arson that destroyed the Ferguson QuikTrip convenience store near where
Michael Brown was killed, national and international media would never have descended into
the small suburb, spotlighting the region’s systematic racial issues, said Rasheen Aldridge, who
at 21 is the youngest member of the Ferguson Commission.
“Who was talking about police brutality at this level before Ferguson? It wasn’t being talked
about,” Aldridge said. “It took that unrest to happen for people to understand the reality of
what is to be an African-American man and woman.” Predominantly black communities, like
Ferguson and Baltimore, have been “targeted” and harassed for a long time, he said.
“Unrest comes from people tired of being oppressed and deprived. They’re tired of being
picked at and poked at,” Aldridge said, adding that he didn’t condone the Ferguson violence.
But it did make people understand how serious the situation was, he said.
“When a baby is crying and you aren’t paying attention because you’re on the phone, it’s not
until he goes to knock something off the table or something breaks or the chair falls, that you
start to pay attention,” Aldridge continued. “That’s what the young people did. It took for
burned down property to get the attention of elected officials here, the attention of the media
and the attention of the United States.”
A shift in media behavior after a tragedy is not unusual, Sarah Oates, a journalism professor at
the University of Maryland, told The Huffington Post. Before Ferguson’s uprising, many media
outlets tended to accept police accounts as fact. Now, reporters are asking why black
communities are outraged with policing.
“What’s sad is it often takes a tragedy,” Oates said. “What happened in Ferguson wasn’t
unusual—which is awful, but true. The response was unusual, and the depth and breadth of the
protests was unusual. And you could kind of see it coming from Trayvon Martin . . . This rising
awareness [about] race and unfairness, and this real question about what was really going on.”
What made Ferguson the spark, according to Slate’s Jamelle Bouie, was St. Louis County’s
history of racism, the use of social media by activists, and the simmering undercurrent of anger
from the police killings of people like Eric Garner, who died in July 2014 after a New York City
police officer put him in a chokehold for selling loose cigarettes, and John Crawford, who was
shot dead by Ohio police four days before Michael Brown’s killing as he held a BB gun inside a
Walmart store.
With that as the backdrop, it’s no wonder that Ferguson—already troubled with inequality,
segregation, and unfair policing—was the town that eventually burned. Brown’s death was the
final spark in a summer of violence against black Americans, exacerbated by police misconduct
and the attacks on Brown’s character, meant to minimize or even excuse his death. And in turn,
this explosion inaugurated a new, more urgent phase in the national argument over racism.
Page 252Video from recent cases of police violence has forced America to look. It also has
helped shape larger narratives surrounding the state of Black America. This is, as Oates put it,
“outrage perpetrated by technology”—and each case of police brutality that gains national
attention shifts the narrative a bit more.
Edward Crawford—the man in an American flag T-shirt seen throwing a tear gas canister in an
iconic photo from Ferguson—said he’s seen a difference in how the media has covered events
since last summer. Videos “played a big role” in that change, he said in an interview.
“In some parts of the world, this is unfamiliar,” Crawford said. “The police crimes are very low,
police officers are respectable in a lot of places. Every police officer isn’t bad, there’s a lot of
good police officers out there who protect and serve. But you also have some who seem to not.
So with videos and social media, that gets the word out, so that certain situations just aren’t
thrown under the bus.”
Ferguson exposed how large the divide between the police and the community could be. John
Crawford’s death in the Ohio Walmart was a reminder that black people are instantly viewed by
police as a threat. The police killing of motorist Walter Scott during an April traffic stop in North
Charleston, South Carolina, stoked cries from the black community that cops won’t admit when
they’ve done something wrong. Freddie Gray’s severed spine and resulting death in April after a
ride in a Baltimore police van reopened Jim Crow’s wounds. Last month’s arrest of Sandra
Bland, who Texas authorities said hanged herself in a jail cell three days after she was stopped
for a traffic offense, showed how police officers could react to individuals who assert their
rights….
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