1 gen 2014 anni - Shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri

Descrizione:

In a reminder of the Vietnam era, violence abroad seemed to echo at home. Despite the gains of the civil rights era, African Americans continued to endure police brutality, with painful regularity. Protests against police violence have risen periodically in the United States since the late nineteenth century, and one such cycle began in 2014 after a police officer shot and killed an unarmed black teenager named Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri. Weeks of demonstrations followed, as black activists, joined by many white and Latino supporters, converged on Ferguson from around the country. Many protesters articulated calls for police reform and a renewed struggle against racism.

At the Ferguson demonstrations, an organization called Black Lives Matter (BLM) moved to the fore of an emerging movement. Formed two years earlier, in response to the 2012 killing of Trayvon Martin, an unarmed black teenager, by a civilian neighborhood watch captain in the city of Sanford, Florida, BLM put forth a comprehensive agenda of police reform, economic justice, political empowerment, and, echoing Black Power activists from the 1960s, black community control. Between 2014 and 2016, BLM and other activists staged protests in more than one hundred American cities, as police violence against African Americans came to increased public attention as a result of cell phones, surveillance, and police videos. Many activists stressed that the ongoing crisis disproved the notion that the election of a black president represented a fundamental shift in American racial history. Indeed, credible claims were made that the Tea Party’s opposition to the president carried a barely disguised racial animosity. “Go back to Kenya” signs directed at Obama appeared at Tea Party rallies, and the so-called birther movement — which insisted the president was born in Indonesia — cast baseless doubts on the president’s U.S. citizenship.

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