FROM POLICE REFORM TO POLICE ABOLITION? HOW MINNEAPOLIS ACTIVISTS FOUGHT TO MAKE BLACK LIVES MATTER

The murder of George Floyd by Minneapolis Police Department (MPD) officers in 2020 was a watershed moment, triggering protests across the country and unprecedented promises by city leaders to “end” the MPD. We use interviews and archival materials to understand the roots of this decision, tracing the emergent split between activists fighting for police reform and police abolition in the wake of the initial Black Lives Matter (BLM) protests in Minneapolis. We compare the frames used by these two sets of movement actors, arguing that abolitionists deployed more radical frames to disrupt hegemonic understandings of policing, while other activists fought to resonate with the existing discursive structure. After years of police reform, Floyd’s death and the rebellion that followed gave abolitionist discourses more resonance. In the discussion, we consider the future of public safety in Minneapolis and its implications for understanding frame resonance in Black movements.

RACIAL CHANGE AND BLACK MOVEMENT EMERGENCE: A CASE FROM THE BLACK LIVES MOVEMENT

This article contributes to sociological understandings of race and social movements by reassessing the phenomenon of social movement emergence for Black social movements. Broadly, it addresses the possibility of organizational support for Black social movements. More narrowly, it seeks to understand the emergence of Black movements and racial change as outcomes of organizational transformation, specifically using the case of how the mixed-race prison reform organization Action for Police Reform (APR) joined the Black Lives movement. By providing a case of racial transformation and the spanning of tactical boundaries, I present two central arguments. First, it is necessary to look within organizational forms and at organizational dynamics to see how activists modify their organizations to support Black movements. Second, tailored more directly to the case of APR, sustained support for Black movements depends on organizational transformation, such as when activists repurpose an organization’s form and resources to maintain racially delimited tactics.

“BRAINWASHING FOR THE RIGHT REASONS WITH THE RIGHT MESSAGE”: IDEOLOGY AND POLITICAL SUBJECTIVITY IN BLACK ORGANIZING

Media outlets and academics often oversimplify and mischaracterize current manifestations of Black mobilization as a movement that opposes police violence against Black men, supports police reform, and desires assimilation and integration into the state. In reality, however, the movement is much more complex. We examine how Black Youth Project 100 (BYP100), a prominent organization in the Movement for Black Lives (M4BL), creates, teaches, and negotiates ideology. Drawing on fieldwork with Black organizers involved in the M4BL, in-depth interviews and conversations with Black organizers, and a content analysis of primary documents from the movement, we find that rather than promote assimilation, Black organizers use intersectional ideology to socialize members into an understanding of a racialized state. This socialization allows members to develop political subjectivity that not only challenges the state but also transforms their everyday lives and relationships.

CHANGES IN SUPPORT FOR U.S. BLACK MOVEMENTS, 1966–2016: FROM CIVIL RIGHTS TO BLACK LIVES MATTER

Black Lives Matter is often unfavorably compared to the civil rights movement based on assumptions that the earlier movement was more palatable to a white public. Available data, however, demonstrate the civil rights movement’s unpopularity with contemporaneous white audiences. In this article I ask if white public support for Black social movements has changed over time. If so, what explains these shifts in support? Using logistic regression, I compare white audience views of Black movements in 1966 and 2016. I find that white support for Black movements has increased, but this shift is not uniform. While 1966 support is correlated with education, income, and liberal attitudes, support in 2016 is driven by polarized political attitudes and increased support among youth and women. Surprisingly, the education effect disappears entirely in the 2016 analysis. The results demonstrate the fluidity of movement audiences, which are strongly impacted by changes in the broader political context.

BEYOND MOVEMENTS: THE ONTOLOGY OF BLACK LIVES MATTER

This special issue on Black Lives Matter provides insights on the choices activists and organizations are making to defend Black lives in light of various, often unsupportive, political contexts. This concluding essay takes a step back to consider how anti-blackness conditions and shapes the ongoing movement for Black lives. Whites’ refusal to see Black people as fully and irrevocably human facilitates their constant aggression against Black people, including treating Black people as socially dead and beyond the bounds of social regulation. Consequently, scholars should conceptualize the movement for Black lives as a fundamentally defensive movement for recognition as persons rather than an insurgent attempt to integrate into white society. Starting analyses with realization of global antiblackness as a fundamental context allows social movement scholars to better conceptualize race, understand relationships between competing parties, recognize the scope and goals of Black movements, understand organizations’ strategic choices, and opens new areas for inquiry and analysis.

“WE LEARNED VIOLENCE FROM YOU”: DISCURSIVE PACIFICATION AND FRAMING CONTESTS DURING THE MINNEAPOLIS UPRISING

Following the murder of George Floyd, Minneapolis became the epicenter of the largest movement in US history. Local Black Lives Matter (BLM) protests, dubbed the Minneapolis Uprising, were met by the largest civil police deployment in state history. In the week following George Floyd’s murder, state and local officials convened ten press conferences totaling over 400 minutes of discourse. We use these press conferences, in conjunction with an ethnography of protests, to analyze how state officials counterframed Black Lives Matter protests following the murder of George Floyd. Building on critical race theory, we consider how the state maneuvered to pacify Black Lives Matter protesters and maintain racial oppression and repression. Minneapolis state officials constructed their counterframe through the (re)ordering of disorder, boundary activation, co-optation, and erasure.

INTRODUCTION: BLACK LIVES MATTER IN CONTEXT

This special issue of Mobilization collects five research articles about the Black Lives Movement (BLM) plus two essays by the editors. This introductory essay provides the broad context of the BLM. It shows how the protests and movement demands of 2020 after the horrific murder of George Floyd were tied to the protests and organizing of 2014–16 which, in turn, built on at least two decades of prior organizing. Protests about police violence are central to Black movements because police repression enforces White supremacy.

PATTERNS OF DEMOBILIZATION: A QUALITATIVE COMPARATIVE ANALYSIS (QCA) OF FAR-RIGHT DEMONSTRATION CAMPAIGNS

Scholarship on social movement lifecycles has focused on mobilization processes, with relatively less attention on the ends, demobilization. The intuitive connection between origins and ends has sometimes led to a conceptualization of demobilization as simply the failure to continue mobilizing, obscuring the distinct causal processes underlying demobilization. This article adds to recent studies foregrounding demobilization by studying the negative demobilization of large, far-right, demonstration campaigns. Using a subset from this population of cases—campaigns in Germany, England, and Austria between 1990 and 2015—the article applies qualitative comparative analysis (QCA) to this causally complex phenomenon. I find that demobilizing is conjunctural, with evidence of four patterns: closing opportunity, coercive state repression, civil countermobilization, and militant anti-far-right action. This article addresses an important—and conspicuously ubiquitous—population of cases, far-right demonstration campaigns and presents findings that reflect on critical issues in the study of far-right sociopolitics.