Louis, now have the ability to frame events and direct the actions of hundreds of thousands of people across the nation at their fingertips. As a recent New York Times Magazine spread noted, through Twitter, core Black Lives Matter activists like Johnetta Elzie and DeRay Mckesson, who are based in St. Today, social media-particularly Twitter-can reach individuals throughout the nation and across the world in milliseconds, drastically slashing the time it takes to organize protests. Jo Ann Robinson of the all-black Women’s Political Council in Montgomery, for instance, spent hours using a hand-driven mimeograph machine to crank out over 52,000 leaflets that announced a mass protest after Rosa Parks’s arrest in 1955. The movement’s use of technology to mobilize hundreds of thousands of people through social media is light years away from the labor that was once required to mobilize black people and their allies during the 1960s or even a few years ago. In a purely tactical sense, that assessment is correct. But while there is a great deal of nostalgia in these comparisons, core activists of the Black Lives Matter movement have been quick to remind us that this current wave of protest “is not your grandmamma’s civil rights movement.” Each periodic wave of activism for the last half century-whether centered on electoral politics or protests-has traced its lineage to the “golden age” of the 1960s.

The upsurge in anti-racist organizing is a break from what we normally consider black activism in the United States. The police brutality and killings are not, to be sure, new the emerging movement against them, however, is. Seemingly out of nowhere, a multiracial, multigenerational movement asserting black humanity in response to racist police killings and vigilante violence has ripped across the country. The protests that have erupted since the deaths of Brown and other casualties of police brutality have been extraordinary. This is how he-along with legions of people across the country-was transformed into an activist, not just concerned with civil and political rights but with black humanity. It was a photograph of Brown’s stepfather holding up a hand-written sign that read simply, “My unarmed child has been murdered by the Ferguson police.” As he watched the wave of anger, disgust, and disbelief mount on his social media feed within hours of the shooting, Tef Poe knew he had to go to Ferguson. One day, while checking his Instagram account, Poe noticed a post that shook him. He was a struggling hip-hop artist who occasionally wrote a column for the Riverfront Times, an independent newspaper in St. Tef Poe had not been directly involved in politics until Brown’s death. What the Black Lives Matter protests have done, however, is not only put police reform on the policy agenda but demanded that American society reconsider how it values black lives. Though the 1960s movement addressed the civil and political rights that were denied to black people-access and use of public accommodations, the right to vote, and ensuring fair employment and housing opportunities-it did not directly confront the racialized degradation black people endured, and many continue to endure, at the hands of the police. A leader in the organization Hands Up United, which was founded in the wake of Michael Brown’s murder, Poe explained: “One of the negligent areas of the civil rights movement is that we did not move the moral compass of racism to the right direction.”

Louis hip-hop artist who goes by the name Tef Poe, was interviewed this February by a BBC talk show host about why the Black Lives Matter movement was necessary. Peaceful protests in Baltimore, April 28, 2015. The Black Lives Matter movement’s appeal to human rights has deep roots in the history of the black freedom struggle.

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