From #Blacklivesmatter to Black Liberation

Barack Obama (1961-Present) was the 44th President of the United States. He made history as the first Black president elected in the United States in 2008, and he was in office from 2009 to 2017. Obama is central to Taylor’s discussion because she raises the question of why the Black Lives Matter movement emerged during his presidency. Throughout the book, Taylor notes Obama’s reluctance to articulate or offer support to an agenda that addressed “any of the systemic issues facing Black communities” (10). He exemplifies the gap between the Black elite and ordinary Black citizens, a gap that is further exacerbated by “colorblind” politics; the political establishment’s commitment to maintaining capitalism; rhetoric that blames the conditions of poor and working-class Black life on deficits in personal responsibility, behavior, and culture; and the turn to “law and order” as a response to Black protest movements.

In Chapter 1, Taylor demonstrates Obama’s use of personal responsibility rhetoric as a part of her argument on the individual and cultural blame that underscores the racist political economy of the United States. In the concluding section of Chapter 4, she notes that he “hastily organized” the Task Force on Twenty-First-Century Policing in 2015 so that the federal government appeared to be responsive to the demands of Black protestors. She also notes that the task force was “a way to get demonstrators off the streets” (131). Taylor fully fleshes out her analysis of Obama’s presidency and response to the movement against police brutality in Chapter 5, and she concludes that “[t]he Black political establishment, led by President Obama, had shown over and over again that it was not capable” (152) of addressing systemic racism or the inequities of capitalism. The chapter also includes discussion of Black people’s initial optimism at a Black presidency and ultimate resignation at the recognition of the limits of the Black political establishment.

Lyndon B. Johnson (1908-1973) was the 36th President of the United States from 1963 to 1969. He is central to Taylor’s argument as his presidency coincided with the civil rights and Black resistance movements of the 1960s. He exemplifies how the liberal political establishment responds to Black movement. While there may be some responsiveness and attempts to address the demands of Black activists, the commitment to maintaining “law and order” and capitalism remains the primary political agenda.

For example, in Chapter 1, Taylor acknowledges that Johnson’s administration responded to the Black liberation movement by expanding the welfare state through his War on Poverty and Great Society programs. He also impaneled the Kerner Commission to investigate the cause of Black rebellions. Taylor opens the chapter with a passage from his famous Howard University commencement speech in 1965, where he acknowledges that Black poverty is rooted in historical injustices. However, along with his call for massive investment in social welfare and structural critiques of poverty came cultural critiques that located the causes of Black poverty in Black families. In addition, Taylor notes in Chapter 2 that Johnson passed legislation that conflated Black protest with criminality and called for the expansion of the police state. In Chapter 4, she discusses how the Johnson administration’s response to the antagonistic relationship between law enforcement and the Black community was not to eliminate police presence or address systemic issues, but rather to professionalize and diversify the police force.

Richard Nixon (1913-1994) was the 37th President of the United States from 1969 to 1974. He exemplifies the conservative shift in the political establishment as the Black movement of the 1960s receded. Taylor refers to his first term as “a bridge between the civil rights era and burgeoning period of postracial, colorblind political paradigms” (63). Taylor discusses Nixon and his administration most extensively in Chapter 2.

The discussion focuses on several defining features of his presidency. One is the strategy to re-establish the Republican Party as the home of conservatives, namely by appealing to poor and working-class whites and the business elite based on racism. Another is the use of colorblind rhetoric and coded language to demonize the Black poor and provide justification for gutting social welfare programs and withdrawing the federal government from attending to the problems of poor and working-class communities. Another feature is the use of the legal apparatus to attack the organized left and the Black population through the expansion of police surveillance and presence. Taylor asserts that Nixon “prepared the ideological groundwork for the massive assault on social welfare” (73) that defined the Reagan era in the 1980s.

Ronald Reagan (1911-2004) was the 40th President of the United States from 1981-1989. His presidency was characterized by extreme conservatism, an attack on social welfare, and policies that boosted the mass incarceration of people from Black communities. Taylor opens Chapter 2 by noting Reagan’s use of coded language to promote stereotypes about Black welfare recipients that painted them as undeserving and taking advantage of the social welfare system. She also mentions him in Chapter 4 as she identifies his “War on Drugs” as one of the distinct periods of post-civil rights policing that brought about mass incarceration.

Taylor discusses Reagan’s policies and impact regarding cuts to social welfare most extensively in Chapter 3. He made reductions to unemployment insurance, food stamps, Aid to Dependent Families, and the federal school lunch program; eliminated federal jobs; cut the Medicaid budget and tightened eligibility standards; raised rent prices by federally subsidizing housing units; and raised the price of school lunches (94-95). Taylor discusses Reagan’s draconian cuts to contextualize the economic situation that Black politicians inherited in the 1980s.

Bill Clinton (1946-Present) was the 44th President of the United States from 1993 to 2001. His presidency and policies are a point of discussion in Chapter 4 regarding post-civil rights era modern policing. Taylor identifies his crime regime as one of the distinct periods that culminated in mass incarceration and increased policing of the working class, especially African Americans.

The Clinton administration passed the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act of 1994, which expanded the police force and the death penalty, created the “three-strikes” rule, and ended education for inmates. The administration also provided financial incentives for states to imprison more people and keep them in prison for longer periods of time. In addition, he supported anti-terrorism legislation that contributed to the militarization of the police and increased the police’s powers of surveillance and scrutiny over American communities.

Al Sharpton (1954-Present) is a civil rights activist and politician. Discussed extensively in Chapter 6, Sharpton exemplifies the differences in focus and strategy between older activists from the civil rights era and the younger generation of BLM activists. He also demonstrates the ways that Black politicians operate “under a cloak of imagined racial solidarity” (79) while wielding power over and harming ordinary Black citizens in line with the larger political establishment.

Taylor’s discussion of Sharpton centers around his arrival in Ferguson as representative of the NAACP, who was not on the ground protesting with the youth activists but sought to establish itself as a leader in the BLM movement. This points to the contrast between the male-led, leader-centered pattern of civil rights era organization and the decentralized organization of BLM driven by Black queer and female activists. In addition, while Sharpton and his cohorts aimed to keep the resistance movement narrowly centered on local issues, BLM organizers seek to connect police brutality to a larger matrix of overlapping systemic oppressions. Furthermore, Sharpton communicated his disdain for the young protestors by characterizing them as criminals and agitators, in addition to working alongside the DOJ to re-establish “law and order” among the protestors. Taylor’s discussion of Sharpton’s admonishment and condescension demonstrates the extent to which the Black political establishment is so deeply embedded in the project of Black oppression that they invoke stereotypes to bolster the legitimacy of the political establishment’s response to Black rebellion and absolve the state of culpability for the conditions in Black communities.

Carl Stokes (1927-1996) was the first Black mayor of a major city. In Chapter 3, Taylor discusses Stokes’s campaign and policies while in office. The discussion illustrates the “logical” and “pragmatic” turn from protests to electoral politics and the relationship of the Black political elite to ordinary Black citizens. Stokes’s campaign leading up to his election in 1967 received support from civil rights organizations, the Democratic Party, philanthropic donors, and local industrialists and capitalists. Taylor argues that his success was “heralded as a victory for all of Black America” (87) and “seemed to indicate a new direction for Black politics” (87).

Stokes’s campaign also included his emphasis on being the mayor of all the people of Cleveland, not just Black people, in addition to promises to all sectors of the Cleveland population. Alongside the slogan “Keep It Cool for Carl,” these were the first signs of his commitment to a political agenda that aligned with the larger political establishment and maintained institutional oppression of poor and working-class people, including his Black constituency. He supported and expanded the police state, repressed Black uprisings against police violence, invoked Black stereotypes to gain support for re-election, and backed a public-private redevelopment project that empowered the business class.

Martin Luther King, Jr. (1929-1968) was a minister and civil rights activist. He was one of the most visible leaders of the civil rights movement with Southern roots and national appeal. He plays a prominent role in Taylor’s book as she opens and closes her argument with discussion of his 1968 essay, “A Testament of Hope,” to draw parallels between King’s articulation of the American problem and the articulation put forth by the BLM movement. That is, the interrelated inequities of American society that Black rebellion illuminates and the need for radical reconstruction of society.

In Chapter 1, Taylor cites King’s “I Have A Dream” speech where he speaks to the relationship between economic and racial injustice. She also notes in Chapter 2 that Johnson passed his 1968 crime bill that expanded the police state and conflated protest with the criminality in the weeks after King’s assassination and the riots that followed. King’s ideas play an integral role in Taylor’s analysis, and Taylor also illustrates how King’s activism was received and responded to by the political establishment.

Malcolm X (1925-1965) was a minister, civil rights activist, and human rights activist. He is a key figure in Taylor’s analysis because, like King, he exemplifies Black activists’ awareness of the interrelated nature of racial oppression and economic oppression. In Chapter 1, Taylor cites Malcolm X’s 1964 speech to the Organization of Afro-American Unity, in which he describes “the political economy of Black poverty in the North” (38).

Malcolm X also plays a key role in Chapter 7 where Taylor discusses the centrality of socialism to Black liberation movements. Malcolm X was amongst the Black activists who articulated the relationship between the Black American movement and the independence movements of colonized people. She includes the quote where he asserts that there was a “global rebellion of the oppressed against the oppressor, the exploited against the exploiter” (196). In addition, she cites passages from his 1964 speech where he names capitalism as the problem plaguing the Black community.

Stokely Carmichael (1941-1998) and Charles Hamilton (1929-Present) were civil rights activists and co-authors of Black Power: The Politics of Liberation. They are key figures in Taylor’s discussion because they coined the term “institutional racism.” Taylor identifies institutional racism as the best framework for understanding Black poverty in the United States because it refutes the idea that Black hardship is a matter of personal responsibility in favor of a structural critique that locates the source of Black inequality in public and private institutions. She returns to Carmichael and Hamilton’s book in Chapter 7 to illustrate the popularity of the idea among Black revolutionaries of the 1960s that Black people in the United States were a colonized people, which gave rise to the re-emergence of socialism in the Black liberation movement.

Michael Brown (1996-2014) was an 18-year-old unarmed Black man shot and killed by Ferguson police officer, Darren Wilson, on August 9, 2014. Brown’s murder ignited the Ferguson rebellion and nationwide protests against police brutality. In the Introduction, Taylor writes that “[t]he explosion in Ferguson and the nationwide protests have deepened the political crisis, shattered the ‘postracial’ proclamations, and inspired others to rise up against a worsening epidemic of police harassment, brutality, corruption, and murder” (13). A St. Louis County grand jury chose not to indict Wilson, and the DOJ concluded that Wilson shot Brown in self-defense, despite evidence to the contrary.

In Chapter 1, Taylor discusses tactics used by the Ferguson Police Department and mainstream media to villainize Brown by depicting him as a thief, marijuana smoker, and fan of rap music. She connects this to a long history in the US of justifying institutional racism against Black Americans by conflating Blackness with criminality and using coded language to imply personal and cultural defects that “explain” Black inequality. In Chapter 6, Taylor devotes an extensive discussion to the Ferguson protests, noting responses from the political establishment and the police, as well as the findings of investigations into policing prompted by the Ferguson rebellion.

Freddie Gray (1989-2015) was an unarmed 25-year-old Black man who sustained fatal injuries to his spinal cord after six Baltimore police officers—Caesar Goodson, Garrett Miller, Edward Nero, William Porter, Brian Rice, and Alicia White—arrested and brutally beat Gray while he was being transported in a police van. The arrest and beating took place on April 12, 2015, and Gray died on April 19, 2015, with “his spinal cord cut almost in half” (76). The six officers were initially placed on administrative leave during an investigation of the incident. Prosecutors brought charges against the six officers after a medical examiner ruled the death a homicide. However, the charges against the officers were dropped after the separate trials resulted in one mistrial and three acquittals. The DOJ decided not to bring federal charges against the six officers.

As Taylor notes in Chapter 3, Gray’s death ignited the Baltimore rebellion that resulted in “$9 million worth of damage including the destruction of 144 cars and the incineration of fifteen buildings” (76), as well as more than 200 arrests. Freddie Gray’s death contextualizes Chapter 3’s discussion of the Black political establishment and its complicity in Black oppression. She notes that unlike the other cities where well-known murders of unarmed Black men have taken place, Baltimore is distinguished by the fact “that the Black political establishment runs the city” (76). Gray’s death comes up again in Chapter 7 to exemplify “the gap between formal equality before the law and the self-determination and self-possession inherent in actual freedom” (192).

Oscar Grant (1986-2009) was a 22-year-old unarmed Black man killed by Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART) police officer, Johannes Mehserle, in Oakland on January 1, 2009. Mehserle shot Grant, “who lay face down in handcuffs on a public transportation platform” (141). Mehserle was charged with second-degree murder, to which he plead not guilty. He was found guilty of involuntary manslaughter and sentenced to two years in a private cell, and he was released on parole after serving 11 months. The murder as well as the jury verdict ignited protests in Oakland. Grant’s murder was memorialized in Ryan Coogler’s 2013 film, Fruitvale Station.

Grant’s death and the protests thereafter were an important precursor to the BLM movement. In Chapter 5, Taylor describes the murder as “a shock of cold water” (141), coming just after the election of the first Black president and nation’s supposed entrance into a “postracial parallel universe” (141). She notes the local movement organized in the Bay Area, which forced local officials to charge Mehserle, “foreshadowed events to come” (142), referencing the emergence of the BLM movement a few years later.

Troy Davis (1968-2011) was a Black security guard officer in Savannah, Georgia who was convicted of murdering police officer Mark McPhail, in 1989. The state of Georgia sentenced him to execution in 1991. Davis maintained his innocence up until the day of his execution. Despite widespread belief that he was wrongfully convicted, and a 2009 order from the Supreme Court that a new evidentiary hearing take place, the US District Court for the Southern District of Georgia upheld the conviction and the sentencing. Davis was executed on September 21, 2011.

Davis is a point of discussion in Chapter 5 where Taylor describes his execution as “the one moment when Black America collectively came to terms with Barack Obama’s refusal to use his position as president to intervene on behalf of African Americans” (144). Davis’s case gained national and international attention from anti-death-penalty activists. Amnesty International, the EU, the governments of Germany and France, former FBI director William Sessions, Democratic senator Vincent Fort, and domestic and international activists called on Obama to intervene, but he did not. The execution ignited a “Day of Outrage” protest that converged with the Occupy Wall Street encampment in 2011. The convergence of the two protest groups “highlighted the entanglement of racial and economic inequality” (146). Thus, Taylor sees the Davis/Occupy convergence and the continued involvement of Black activists in the Occupy movement as another important precursor to BLM.

Trayvon Martin (1995-2012) was a 17-year-old unarmed Black teenager shot and killed in Sanford, Florida by Florida resident, George Zimmerman on February 26, 2012. Zimmerman’s racial profiling of Martin led to an altercation in which Zimmerman shot Martin in what he claimed was an act of self-defense. Florida’s stand-your-ground law prevented law enforcement from arresting and charging Zimmerman, but over a month of protests and national media attention led to his eventual arrest and indictment. A jury acquitted Zimmerman of second-degree murder and manslaughter.

Taylor discusses Martin’s death in Chapter 5, linking the protests that followed his murder to the impact of the Occupy movement, namely the relegitimization of “street protests, occupations, and direct action” (148) in response to injustice. She also notes that took Obama over a month to publicly speak on the case, and when he finally did, it was to signal that the federal government would not get involved. However, she acknowledges that his eventual response was “evidence of the growing momentum of the street protests” (148). In addition, she calls attention to the complicity of Zimmerman, the court, and the media in the invocation of racist stereotypes to paint the teenager as a thug and aggressor and to deflect the role of racial profiling in the murder. Martin’s death and Zimmerman’s acquittal constituted a turning point in American society, and it prompted Alicia Garza’s creation of the #blacklivesmatter hashtag that turned into the international movement of the same name.

Alicia Garza (1981-Present) is a civil rights activist, writer, and co-founder of the BLM movement. Taylor first mentions Garza in Chapter 5 where she notes that Garza posted the #blacklivesmatter hashtag in the aftermath of George Zimmerman’s acquittal. In collaboration with Patrisse Cullors and Opal Tometi, Garza turned the hashtag into an international movement against police brutality. Taylor includes a quote from Garza in Chapter 5 where Garza articulates what BLM is.

Garza, along with Tometi, Cullors, and Charlene Carruthers, exemplifies the contemporary Black female-led resistance movement that places police brutality within a wider context of intersecting and interlocking oppressions that characterize the American social structure and disproportionately affect Black poor and working-class communities. In Chapter 6, Taylor notes that the women “articulate most clearly the overlapping oppressions confronting Black people in the struggle to end police violence and win justice” (166). She also includes an excerpt from Garza’s writing that emphasizes the movement’s intersectional approach to state violence.

Chapter 6 also includes a quote from an interview in which Garza clarifies that BLM and the younger generation of activists have respect for and learn from the older generation of civil rights activists but are also committed to “having courageous conversations about the world we want to build and how we think we can get there, and calling people out when we see things that are problematic” (172). In addition, she emphasizes that BLM activists are “exercising new forms of leadership, new tactics, and learning lessons from our elders” (173-74).

Charlene Carruthers (1985-Present) is a Black queer feminist activist, writer, and founding member of Black Youth Project 100 (BYP 100). Like Garza, she exemplifies the Black female and queer leadership of the new Black liberation movement and their intersectional focus. She is first mentioned in Chapter 5 where Taylor discusses the activist outcomes of the Zimmerman acquittal, including the formation of BYP 100 with Carruthers as its national coordinator. The discussion includes a quote from Carruthers where she describes Zimmerman’s acquittal as unsurprising, but “yet another example […] of an injustice being validated by the state” (151).

Taylor also includes a quote from Carruthers in Chapter 6 to illustrate Black women’s “deliberate intervention to expose police brutality as part of a much larger system of oppression in the lives of all Black working-class and poor people” (166). In addition, Taylor identifies BYP 100 as one of the organizations that have embraced organization-building and coordination, in contrast to some of the new activists who have instead emphasized decentralization and social media activism as the primary strategy for forward movement.