The Highlander Research and Education Center is one of the unsung mileposts of the struggle for civil rights. People like Rosa Parks, John Lewis, and Ralph Abernathy refined their organizing skills at Highlander. It was there, in 1957, that a young Martin Luther King Jr. first heard Pete Seeger sing “We Shall Overcome.” On his way to the airport after the anniversary of what was then known as the Highlander Folk School, King proclaimed, “There’s something about that song that haunts you.” Highlander has since moved farther east, but its mission remains the same.
That’s why shortly after the 2016 election, on November 18, several dozen Black Lives Matter leaders selected it as the place to gather.
Top activists in the movement — like Alicia Garza, cofounder of the Black Lives Matter network of organizations (a namesake group), Charlene Carruthers of the Black Youth Project 100, and others — met to privately discuss how to move forward in Trump’s America. Protests had already dominated the news for days. This would be the time for decisive action, undergirded by a clear strategy. Here, in the hills of Tennessee, the activists would come together for a meeting of groups involved in the Movement for Black Lives, an umbrella group of organizations that want the same things, and devise a plan to address the new president, the shock of his election, the law and order he had promised during the campaign, and the devastating blow it all had delivered to generational movements about race and criminal justice policy in the United States. They would devise a plan — like the heroes of the civil rights movement once had decades before.
That good feeling didn’t last long. Few people want to talk about exactly what went wrong — how exactly the meeting devolved. But one problem, according to people who attended or were briefed on the meeting, was pretty simple: The ideas weren’t that good.
Some activists pitched things that had been pitched before. Someone pitched a plan that would require the recruitment of new groups into the fold, and leadership of the so-called resistance. And someone pitched a grand vision: the organization of 1 million black people. This last idea in particular infuriated people inside and outside the meeting. After years of organizing, local activists were cash-strapped, trying to keep their people motivated, and struggling to coordinate with other groups nationally while staying relevant at home. One million black people organized? Organized by whom? Organized for what? And this was the plan?
One million black people organized? Organized by whom? Organized for what? And this was the plan?
On top of that — people fumed over this — the meeting had done little to address the structural problems that had dragged down the movement since its meteoric rise from dispersed beginnings to national political influence. Many local activists felt they couldn’t get access to funding, and didn’t know who to take it up with. Organizers felt like they’d been lured in before by the promise of greater collaboration, the sharing of resources, and cultivation of a social community — only to feel left out, especially when it came to the Movement for Black Lives, an umbrella group of organizations that want the same things. Many chafed at the tenet, repeated by the press, that Black Lives Matter was free from hierarchy and instead began to question the existence of tight control exercised by a small group of activists. “The hierarchy was clearer than ever, even though folks are sure there isn’t one on the outside,” said one person briefed on the meeting. For months during the campaign last year, key progressives had watched Black Lives Matter and kept wondering two things many activists on the inside were starting to wonder themselves: What is the movement’s strategy? What is the end goal?
Nobody resolved the structural issues at Highlander. There was no one big plan.
Since then, amid the daily chaos inside the White House, the Trump administration has begun quietly rolling back progressive, Obama-era recommendations on sentencing and policing. In response to mounting opioid overdoses, President Trump and Attorney General Jeff Sessions seem intent on reigniting the war on drugs, which put into motion many of the elements, like heavily armed police and mandatory sentences, that sparked Black Lives Matter and a larger generational response. It’s an uncertain time in America, and many of the avenues once open to the movement — such as a president sensitive to the moral authority of young black activists — have closed. This is a new moment, with different challenges. Outside Washington, the left has been revitalized; protesters have organized some of the biggest demonstrations in US history.
Inside Black Lives Matter, some activists have argued that their lowered visibility on the national scene is because the movement is focused on policy. In response to questions for this story, Shanelle Matthews, the director of communications for the Global Black Lives Matter Network and the representative for Garza, wrote as part of a larger statement to BuzzFeed News, “We are committed [to] keeping our people safe and building our power. We are also committed to building movements with more integrity, dignity, and inclusiveness than ever.”
Some groups are internally questioning whether working in tandem with the Movement for Black Lives is a useful way to spend their time, though. Asked whether the Million Hoodies Movement for Justice plans to leave the larger coalition of groups — which one source had indicated — the group's executive director, Dante Barry, neither confirmed nor denied that in an email, but wrote that his group is seeking to "clarify our direction and focus as an organization." He said the group would remain focused on its priorities, which include sanctuary-city and community-safety efforts. “Million Hoodies will always work to improve the conditions of black and brown people and we are currently focused on how our members want to show up in this moment in light of Trump because our communities are on the front lines and are at stake," he wrote. "We are aware that many alliances are forming and we will continue to partner where needed and prioritize supporting the development of next generation human rights leaders that are participating in various social movements for transformation.”
Inside the larger movement, many of the movement’s young activists — some of whom had never organized before joining — lack experience in dealing with the realities and challenges of a national effort, and the tricky alliances and factions involved in many political movements. Some have also come up against the hard reality of full-time activism and don’t know what to do: There are no tactics for helping organizers feed themselves. In the civil rights movement of the early 1960s, during a drawn-out confrontation in Birmingham, leaders turned to children to lead demonstrations, in large part because the adults couldn’t afford to take time off work, let alone stay in jail for days at a time in defiance of segregation. Questions over how unsalaried activists are supposed to lead, oftentimes in a full-time capacity, without a job, has become an unresolved conflict inside the movement.
“Does the talent to meet those challenges exist in the Black Lives Matter organization? Absolutely it does. Problems that arise are an opportunity to get things right,” said Donna Davis, an organizer and activist in Tampa, Florida. “But we can’t pretend that we’re not plagued by some of the issues and concerns that have taken down the movements in the past. We’re not immune to it.”
Black Lives Matter is still here. Its groups are still organizing. But Black Lives Matter is on the verge of losing the traction and momentum that sparked a national shift on criminal justice policy.
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Students gather at the University of North Carolina in Charlotte on September 21, 2016, for a protest against police brutality following the shooting of Keith Lamont Scott nearby.
Nicholas Kamm / AFP / Getty Images
It’s helpful to describe what “the movement” is in the most basic terms: There’s no way to tell how many people call themselves Black Lives Matter activists in the United States. Activists, largely dispersed across the country but concentrated in some cities or regions more than others, largely communicate online. There is a large coalition of groups called the Movement for Black Lives; some of the activists whose names you might recognize (like Garza) lead that coalition, but others (like Campaign Zero’s DeRay Mckesson, Brittany Packnett, Samuel Sinyangwe, and its army of loyalists) aren’t involved in it. There are no universal meetings. There is no centralized, national organization called Black Lives Matter.
Some activists believe that while the internal conflicts are indeed real, they are no different from what other long-lasting groups faced, and they do not portend the movement’s end. Discord and disagreement are part of the natural evolution of all political movements. In her statement to BuzzFeed News, Matthews noted that “it’s healthy for people building movements not always to agree, and while we don’t always get along, what keeps us going through this hard work together is our shared desire for justice.”
But identity battles can be different. In interviews with 36 people inside and allied with the movement — both the optimists and the disillusioned — activists largely agreed that the identity of the movement, its existential purpose and aim, remains unresolved. “If I want to get involved with the NAACP, I feel clear about where they are as an [organization],” said Ashley Yates, a Ferguson, Missouri, protester who has since relocated to the West Coast. “Even if you look at the black Greek letter organizations, they have certain structures so that if something strays too far, there’s something to rein it in. That hasn’t happened with Black Lives Matter or the Movement for Black Lives. It’s not to say it has to happen, but people are unclear about what they are coming to these organizations for.”
That’s partly a product of how the movement came to be. People went outside of their house because they were angry with the state of affairs, and a movement followed from there.
“People are unclear about what they are coming to these organizations for.”
The broad contours are well known. Black Lives Matter was born sometime after George Zimmerman shot and killed Trayvon Martin in 2012, was charged with murder, and was then acquitted in 2013. Protests started in Florida and in other cities, against how law enforcement handles violence against black people; against mass incarceration, over-criminalization, police militarization; against the way police sometimes commit violence against black people, especially young black men and women. The August 2014 shooting of Michael Brown, an 18-year-old in Missouri, turned those protests into a national cause and obsession — especially as the aftermath became a complicated, at times toxic mix of media, violence, and ineffective or even absent official leadership at the local and state levels. To young black people all over the country, Ferguson, and the way Brown’s death seemed just one piece in a larger pattern of violence, demanded more protests.
Dozens of organizations sprouted up under the Black Lives Matter banner. Twitter became the staging ground, but these were real protests in real places. In the summer of 2015, the Movement for Black Lives launched a conference on the campus of Cleveland State University where, one evening, the families of multiple young people who had been killed by the police shared personal testimony recounting the tragedy in their lives.
Around then, the debates had begun to intensify about what exactly the movement would do, what it stood for. Different schools sprang up. Some preached a policy-driven approach that would require collaboration with existing power structures, like Mckesson, who started a Washington-style public policy group. Campaign Zero outlined specific policies on a targeted set of criminal justice issues. But unlike the Latino immigration activists who rose to prominence during a similar time period, Black Lives Matter activists faced the challenge of having no particularly obvious target: The US president has immense discretionary power over immigration policy; policing and sentencing laws can vary from state to state, municipality to municipality. Some preached a hyperlocal entry into politics: Activists from the Black Youth Project 100 led the ouster of a state’s attorney in Chicago, Anita Alvarez, who couldn’t be bothered with a case concerning the shooting of an unarmed teen, Laquan McDonald, and the subsequent handling of evidence by police. Some preached the primacy of demonstration: Only by staying on the outside, only by making people in power uncomfortable through protest, could the movement succeed. Some were just happy to finally have a movement that affirmed that their struggles were real.
Around then, the debates had begun to intensify about what exactly the movement would do, what it stood for.
It was also around this time of uncertainty in the movement, though, that activists began interrupting Democratic candidates, launching Black Lives Matter into the nuclear stratosphere of presidential politics. The interruptions weren’t part of a nationally coordinated campaign — it was mostly individuals here and there who seized an opportunity. When activists confronted Bernie Sanders (Phoenix, Seattle) and Hillary Clinton (New Hampshire, Minnesota, South Carolina), tense, explosive exchanges followed. The words “black lives matter” were applied to each video, then discussed in debates, in the New York Times, on CNN, on Fox News (where a single clip of some isolated protesters chanting “Pigs in a blanket, fry ‘em like bacon” often played). Now everybody thought they knew what Black Lives Matter was: It was a political movement. The striking, often misunderstood phrase at the center, by turns an affirmation and a movement, was being flattened into a single entity, even if nobody really had a handle on what that meant. “If you think about the lies and false narratives in the movement,” said one activist, “and why they exist in the first place, you'll go crazy.”
In that vortex, the fights over resources, direction, and ownership of the movement intensified, much of it swirling around the largest national group: the Movement for Black Lives.
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From left: Alicia Garza, Patrisse Cullors, and Opal Tometi, cofounders of the Black Lives Matter movement, November 14, 2016, in Los Angeles.
Jordan Strauss / AP Photo
