The task of gathering participants together was greatly aided by the support of Daphene McFerren and the Benjamin L. Hooks Institute for Social Change at the University of Memphis. Without your generous support, this book would not exist. We also thank the Department of Communication at the University of Memphis, particularly Sandy Sarkela and Craig Stewart, for the financial and intellectual...

In the weeks and months following the murder of seventeen-year-old Trayvon Martin at the hands of neighborhood watch vigilante George Zimmerman, social media was awash with posts both demanding justice and blaming the victim for his own death. Alongside these raw emotional reactions to Martin’s murder and...

On August 24, 2015, the Washington Post published a scathing critique of the Black Lives Matter movement from Barbara Reynolds.Barbara Reynolds, “I Was a Civil Rights Activist in the 1960s. But It’s Hard for Me to Get behind Black Lives Matter,” Washington Post, August 24, 2015,...

Derek’s (31, Black, Teacher) first contact with #ALM did not explicitly condemn BLM, question the motives or tactics of protesters, or challenge the idea...

In her important work chronicling the role of faith in the early days of the Ferguson resistance, Leah Gunning Francis argued that many of the BLM activists and protesters in...

In May 2016, we sat down to talk to Bob (50, White, Salesman). While we had spoken with eight groups of BLM advocates over two months by that point, Bob was the first to agree to speak with us about his support of #ALM, after we opened participation up to include one-on-one interviews. During Bob’s interview, and in the others that followed, it became very clear why discussions of #ALM...

In late October 2016, The Washington Post published an op-ed by Erika Christakis. A year previous, Christakis found herself at the center of a student and media firestorm. Following Yale’s proposal to limit acceptable student Halloween costumes, including those that used racial and ethnic identities as cosplay, Christakis suggested that the policy had a laudable goal but...

We began this book by tracing the deeply felt tragedy of Trayvon Martin’s murder, followed two and a half years later by Michael Brown’s murder. While these two unjust deaths mark moments of traction for BLM, they...

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Andre E. Johnson is assistant professor of communication at the University of Memphis where he teaches classes in African American public address, rhetoric, race, and religion. Dr. Johnson is currently collecting the writings of nineteenth-century AME Bishop Henry McNeal Turner and directs the Digital Archive of the Henry McNeal Turner Project. He...

Series Editor: Andre E. Johnson, University of Memphis