"#BlackLivesMatter: the birth of a new civil rights movement"

"The jury had been deliberating for 16 hours on Zimmerman’s fate. When the verdict was announced, she learned of it first through Facebook: not guilty of second degree murder and acquitted of manslaughter.

“Everything went quiet, everything and everyone,” Garza says now. “And then people started to leave en masse. The one thing I remember from that evening, other than crying myself to sleep that night, was the way in which as a black person, I felt incredibly vulnerable, incredibly exposed and incredibly enraged. Seeing these black people leaving the bar, and it was like we couldn’t look at each other. We were carrying this burden around with us every day: of racism and white supremacy. It was a verdict that said: black people are not safe in America.”

Garza logged on to Facebook. She wrote an impassioned online message, “essentially a love note to black people”, and posted it on her page. It ended with: “Black people. I love you. I love us. Our lives matter.”

Garza’s close friend, Patrisse Cullors, read the post in a motel room 300 miles away from Oakland that same night. Cullors, also a community organiser working in prison reform, started sharing Garza’s words with her friends online. She used a hashtag each time she reposted: #blacklivesmatter. The following day, Garza and Cullors spoke about how they could organise a campaign around these sentiments...

Along with Cullors and Tometi, she organised a “freedom ride” to Ferguson under the auspices of the #blacklivesmatter campaign. More than 500 people signed up from 18 different cities across America. When they reached Ferguson, Garza was astonished to see her own phrase mirrored back at her on protest banners and shouted in unison by people she had never met...  There are now over 26 Black Lives Matter chapters across the United States. From one heartfelt Facebook post, it has spawned a new civil rights movement...

The most notable difference is that, in 2015, there are no leaders in the conventional sense: no Martin Luther King or Malcolm X, no single charismatic voice that claims to speak for the many. Several people I interview insist this is a strength: they make the bleak point that, historically, single leaders of civil rights movements have almost always been assassinated. They have also been male.

“We have a lot of leaders,” insists Garza, “just not where you might be looking for them. If you’re only looking for the straight black man who is a preacher, you’re not going to find it.”...

“Social media’s significance is that it is recognising different incidents that might have gone unnoticed and sewing them together as a coherent whole,” says Ethan Zuckerman, the director of the MIT Center for Civic Media and the author of Rewire: Digital Cosmopolitans in the Age of Connection. “And that means we’re forced to recognise very serious structural issues.”"
http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/jul/19/blacklivesmatter-birth-civil-rights-movement

Reading this, it occurs to me how frustrating it must have been for Arab Springs activists to hear Twitter, etc... take credit for their movements .

We have this highly mythologized narrative about civil rights movements, and I worry that in the absence of the signifiers that are part of that story, people will start inserting social media companies as saviors.

Lastly - is there a definition of a "civil rights movement"? Because this has always been bigger than civil rights, and this is about anti-racism/racial equality. So what are we saying?

Related: A great essay on leadership in the 60s civil rights movement, and in today's #BlackLivesMatter;

The New York Magazine article on the twitter movement