Although the Black Lives Matter Movement has been around since 2013, it caught a lot of media attention this summer. The New York Times suggests it may be the largest movement in American History. On June 6, 2020, over 500 hundred thousand people came out to protest through demonstrations, marches, and gatherings.
The six freedoms in the first amendment are freedom of speech, assembly, from religion, of religion, press, and the right to petition the government. Many of these freedoms are utilized by the BLM movement.
The freedom of assembly was consistently exercised through the many protests throughout the years. From May 6, 2020, through the end of June 2020 there was an average of 140 demonstrations a day throughout the U.S. This powerful tool caught the mainstream media's attention, and unfortunately not always for the right reason. One exception to the first amendment is if it incites violence, and some of these protests did, making it unprotected by the first amendment. There is a fine line between an expressive action (which is protected) and an unprotected one that causes harm.
The media picked up on the little violence that was happening and focused on that when in reality over 93% of the protests from May 2020 to August 2020 were peaceful. Time magazine wrote an article about this and I'll link it below, it's very interesting. My feed on Instagram and Twitter was saying one thing, while the news was reporting and focusing on the 7% of violent protests. Unfortunately, the news tends to focus on the negative aspects of a lot of things, and I wasn't necessarily surprised about this, just disappointed.
The BLM and many of its supporters are exercising their freedom of speech through these demonstrations and are very active on social media platforms such as Twitter and Instagram. They use social media to voice their opinions and educate others on the BLM movement and what it stands for through posts and slideshows created and posted on various profiles. During the summer, I used many of the posts on my feed to further educate myself on the issue. I will link some resources below that helped me educate myself and become a better ally.
Articles mentioned/sources for education on BLM:
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/07/03/us/george-floyd-protests-crowd-size.html
https://time.com/5886348/report-peaceful-protests/
https://instagram.com/mariebeech?igshid=x9dzsvl73hk6
https://hbr.org/2020/11/be-a-better-ally
https://news.syr.edu/the-peel/2020/10/14/8-ways-to-be-a-better-ally/