BLM’s War Within

BLM global vs BLM grassroots

Photo by Johann Walter Bantz on Unsplash

Black Lives Matter captured national attention when civil unrest sparked in Ferguson, MO, after an unarmed black teenager was fatally shot by a white police officer in 2014. A host of opinion writers immediately supported the slogan “Black Lives Matter”, but admitted they didn’t know what the umbrella organization was about.

Then BLM released six core demands.

Their first demand was “end the war on black people.” The rest was a condensed version of the 1966 Ten Point Program written by the founders of the Black Panther Party. In other words, it was high-minded idealism that no one could implement with the best of intentions. That made BLM an organization that “imagined a better society” without any serious plans to make it one.

Nevertheless, opinion writers made the bold claim that BLM was the new Civil Rights Movement. But which Civil Rights Movement? The Civil Rights Movement is divided between two eras, the MLK-Era and the Post-MLK Era.

The MLK-Era is the time period between the 1954 Supreme Court school desegregation decision and the passage of the 1965 Voting Rights Act. The MLK-era or the traditional Civil Rights Movement also consisted of multiple organizations working simultaneously to achieve similar objectives.