Black Lives Matter officially turned 10 years old on Thursday, leaving us with an entire decade’s worth of legacy to ponder over.
Whether you like the organization or not, there is no denying the influence BLM has had on the world.
What started as a hashtag created by Alicia Garza, Patrisse Cullors and Opal Tometi, which emerged on the scene in 2013 after George Zimmerman was acquitted of murdering 17-year-old Trayvon Martin, turned into one of the largest movements in U.S. history.
Researchers have estimated that 15 million to 26 million people in the United States participated in the 2020 Black Lives Matter protests.
Since then, Black Lives Matter has become a polarizing organization that oftentimes finds itself in the crossheads of political warfare.
So how did we get here?
In this piece, we will discuss the 10-year legacy of Black Lives Matter in all of its glory as well as all of its pain. When a catalyst for change is created that change can not be controlled.
In 2018, while I was working in audience development, I came across a tool that would allow me to extract social media hashtag data to make better decisions about how and when to use certain tags. The Black Lives Matter Movement was in full swing and the hashtag was still very popular among Twitter users, but how popular was very intriguing to me. So I started digging into the research software using specific dates that centered around the movement. I soon came to realize that the hashtag #Blacklivesmatter was one of the most impactful hashtag revolutions the young platform had ever seen.
After teen Trayvon Martin was killed by George Zimmerman, who was later acquitted in 2013, many people took to Twitter to voice their frustrations using the hashtag. It grew into a social movement against violence and systemic racism toward black people.
Sadly, the analytics platform couldn’t pull data from 2013, so I put my thinking cap on and came up with other important dates…
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