The Rise and Fall of Black Lives Matter

Exactly 10 years ago, Black Lives Matter was born from "a love letter" to Black people that Alicia Garza penned on Facebook.

Responding to the the acquittal of George Zimmerman, who fatally shot 17-year-old Trayvon Martin a year earlier, on July 13, 2013, Garza wrote: "We don't deserve to be killed with impunity. We need to love ourselves and fight for a world where black lives matter. Black people, I love you. I love us. We matter. Our lives matter."

Patrisse Cullors responded to Garza's post with the hashtag #BlackLivesMatter.

That hashtag began to circulate on social media, and the pair teamed up with activist Ayo Tometi to built a network fighting for racial justice.

Although the phrase was coined in 2013, it was not until after the August 2014 shooting of 18-year-old Michael Brown by police in Ferguson, Missouri, that it became a potent rallying cry against the police killings of unarmed Black people.

A review of Google Trends data by Newsweek shows online search for "Black Lives Matter" saw a large spike in the summer of 2016 and reached an all-time high in the summer of 2020.

But as the movement marks a decade of activism three years on, the data shows search for "Black Lives Matter" is almost as low as when the movement was birthed in 2013.

Nasar Meer, a professor at the University of Edinburgh in Scotland and the author of The Cruel Optimism of Racial Justice, told Newsweek that while "we should be cautious about assuming that interest and activity on search engines is a proxy for interest and activity in society, there clearly has been a drop-off in mass public interest and [from] key institutions."

Mass public attention is "often-times fleeting between 'events' that propel racial injustice back into the news," he said.

Shalomyah Bowers, Black Lives Matter Global Network Foundation Board member, told Newsweek that Google searches were not a fair representation of the support the movement has.

"The Black parents who can't hug their son anymore because of an extrajudicial murder by the police do not care about what Google Trends says — or about what a data report may or may not indicate.

"What they do care about is ending state-sanctioned violence. What they do care about is eliminating policies that exacerbate the harms of the shameful police and prison systems. These systems continue to perpetuate a history of structural racism and anti-Blackness around the world.

"In 10 short years, we have become the largest social justice movement in the history of the United States. That is a reflection of the millions of activists, organizers, strategists and community members across the globe that agree with our vision of the world."

Backlash to 'Black Lives Matter' since 2020

Protesters took to the streets after police killed two Black men on consecutive days in 2016.

Alton Sterling was pinned down and shot in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, on July 5. The following day, police in Minnesota shot Philando Castile during a traffic stop. The shooting got widespread attention as his girlfriend, who was in the car with her young daughter, livestreamed the shooting's aftermath on Facebook. And then, a Black Lives Matter protest in Dallas on July 7 turned deadly when a gunman shot dead five police officers.

In the summer of 2020, Black Lives Matter saw a massive surge in support and donations after Minneapolis police officers killed George Floyd and triggered a reckoning on race and policing, as well as protests, across the U.S. and beyond.

The data "matches what we have been experiencing when there was a brief moment where racism and BLM was being discussed, with governments, corporations and institutions making empty promises," Kehinde Andrews, a professor of Black Studies at Birmingham City University in the U.K., told Newsweek. "But nothing changed and we are back to where we were before."

Andrews says, in many ways, things are now worse because of the backlash to Black Lives Matter. "People think we have talked too much about race at the expense of other issues," he said.

The movement's three founders are no longer involved in the Black Lives Matter Global Network Foundation, which has been steward over a charitable endowment worth tens of millions of dollars.

Cullors stepped down after almost six years at the helm in 2021, after controversy over the foundation's finances and her personal wealth. Cullors said her resignation had nothing to do with the personal attacks on her, which she described as a smear campaign by a right-wing group.

And support for the movement overall has declined, according to recent surveys.

A poll by the Pew Research Center found support has dropped considerably from its peak of 67 percent in 2020. The survey, conducted in April, found just over half of U.S. adults (51 percent) say they support the movement, a drop from 56 percent a year ago.

Meer also noted that there is "a very real and concerted rhetorical and policy opposition" to Black Lives Matter in the U.S. and abroad, pointing to Republican efforts to restrict how race can be taught in public schools, and target diversity and equity efforts in higher education and workplaces.

"Over the time BLM has decreased in public interest, caricatures of 'woke' have increased in public interest, and in ways that seek to undermine the focus on systemic racism that BLM brought," he said.

Black Lives Matter activists mark 10-year anniversary

Black Lives Matter activists and organizations are planning to mark the movement's 10-year anniversary with in-person and virtual events, and have renewed calls to defund police departments and reinvest in Black communities.

The foundation this week launched a campaign it's calling Defund the Police Week of Action.

On Monday, it released a digital ad renewing the 2020 calls for defunding police departments. The organization is also urging supporters to ask elected officials to introduce a draft proclamation that would establish July 13 as "Black Lives Matter Day."

"As we continue our push to defund the police, invest in Black communities and reimagine safety in our communities, we need our elected officials to focus on the people, not police," BLM foundation board member D'Zhane Parker said in a statement.

"The safest places around the world don't have more police, more jails, more prisons, or harsher sentences. They have better access to economic opportunities, quality education, stable housing, and health care."

The need for BLM's existence couldn't be clearer in the wake of Supreme Court decisions that blocked relief from student loan debt held disproportionately by Black borrowers and banned affirmative action in higher education, said Melina Abdullah, a director of BLM Grassroots Inc, a collective of organizers across the country that operates separately from the foundation.

"What this movement moment means is that we have to absolutely redouble our efforts and redouble our commitment to making Black lives matter," Abdullah told the Associated Press.

"Ten years in, we're getting a glimpse at what would happen if there were no Black Lives Matter. We're not just going to fight when it's popular, but we're going to fight because we need to fight."