#blacklivesmatter and the hashtag as a symbol of resistance
Every movement has its icons. Black Power had the panther, women’s rights the Venus symbol, gay liberation, the pink triangle. People say the hippies got their peace sign from Civil Rights leaders, who borrowed it for an antinuclear campaign in England. And just about every political upheaval in modern American history has at some point, raised a fist in protest. Whether a fixed reminder of a specific moment in history, like the Black Panther, or an ever-evolving sign of uprising, like the clenched fist, these mostly simple graphics -- often consisting of no more than a few lines -- have become powerful agents of change.
Some are conceived for a defined movement, others reappropriated or repurposed, evolving over decades or even centuries. Whatever their origins, their power is as old as the systems of oppression they are designed to confront. It’s in moments of revolt, when the marginalized rise up en masse, that these symbols ascend from their place on the page or a screen, to a place in the collective consciousness.
Case in point this unassuming collection of four lines: #
Over the past few years, the hashtag has emerged as an icon of resistance, solidifying its place in the pantheon of protest symbolism, thanks in large part to three women: Alicia Garza, Patrisse Cullors, and Opal Tometi, the founding members of #BlackLivesMatter.
What we now know as the hashtag (aka pound sign, aka number sign), started as shorthand for a Roman unit of weight and enjoyed a relatively quiet existence as a prefix for winning numbers for hundreds of years before morphing into a shortcut on touch tone phones. The # took on new utility in the early days of the internet as a way of organizing topics and channels in internet relay chat (IRC). But it wasn’t until 2009, when Twitter embraced the hashtag as a search tool, that # became a tool for organizing people.
If you follow the Black Lives Matter hashtag to its inception, you’ll find it in the Twitter timeline of UCLA sociology professor, Marcus Anthony Hunter. In August 2012, Hunter used the otherwise utilitarian symbol in front of the words “black lives matter” in a Tweet referencing the works of two colleagues: one, an article about civil rights hero Rosa Parks, the other about the lives of second generation North Africans in France.
#blacklivesmatter would lay mostly dormant just short of a year. Then, on July 13th, 2013, George Zimmerman, a mixed race neighborhood watch coordinator from Standford, Florida, was acquitted on murder charges after shooting and killing Trayvon Martin, an unarmed, black 17-year-old high school student.
In response, Alicia Garza, an Oakland, California-based organizer, posted what she calls “a love note to black people,” on her Facebook page. The status update ended simply:
“Black people. I love you. I love us. Our lives matter.”
“Alicia writes a Facebook post. I reached out to her. I didn’t know Patrisse at the time, but she puts a hashtag on it. I buy the domain name. And we start to use this hashtag as our umbrella language, and we share it with other community organizers in our network.”
Her friend and fellow organizer, Patrisse Cullors, responded in the comments with the most powerful rallying cry of the 21st century: #blacklivesmatter. The organizations co-founder, Opal Tometi, recalled the spontaneous action of those initial days in an interview with The New Yorker:
“Alicia writes a Facebook post. I reached out to her. I didn’t know Patrisse at the time, but she puts a hashtag on it. I buy the domain name. And we start to use this hashtag as our umbrella language, and we share it with other community organizers in our network.”
The seeds had been planted but the roots of the movement wouldn’t take hold for at least another year. In a 2018 UCLA talk on the origins of Black Lives Matter, Funmilola Fagbamila, one of the organization’s earliest members, points out that BLM founders originally organized under the name “Justice for Trayvon Martin LA,” using #blacklivesmatter as a “rallying cry”.
As the murder of black people at the hands of police and vigilantes continued, and the hashtag spread, the organization took up the rallying cry as its moniker.
In 2014, when Darren Wilson, a white Ferguson, Missouri police officer shot and killed Michael Brown, an unarmed, black 18-year-old, the power of the hashtag became apparent. Fagbamila points to Brown’s death as a catalyst for organizing under the BLM banner, saying that, “We did not set out to start a movement. We set out to uplift Trayvon Martin’s name, and his humanity and to demand justice for him.”
“Black people. I love you. I love us. Our lives matter.”
With each death the hashtag spread, and the decentralized movement, now called Black Lives Matter, grew. A 2016 Pew Research study found that #blacklivesmatter was shared on Twitter an average of 58,747 times per day in the weeks following Brown’s murder. An even larger, more sustained spike hit three months later, when a grand jury decided not to indict Wilson. In the three weeks after that decision #blacklivesmatter was shared 1.7 million times. The hashtag would continue to see surges of activity around incidents of police brutality over the coming years, but the death of one man would ignite the movement both online and IRL.
George Floyd, a 46-year-old black man, died in police custody on May 25th, 2020 after Derek Chauvin, a white Minneapolis, Minnesota police officer pinned him to the ground. Chauvin kept his knee on Floyd’s neck for 8 minutes and 46 seconds despite Floyd’s pleas and those of bystanders. The following day protests began in Minneapolis and by the next night, the city was in flames, as crowds of protestors clashed with heavily armed police. Over the course of the next week, unrest would turn to upheaval in city’s across the US and eventually the world, with the humble hashtag carrying the message of resistance.
On May 28th, three days after George Floyd’s murder, Jenna Wortham of The New York Times says Twitter counted more than 8 million tweets containing #blacklivesmatter. A Pew Research study found that the hashtag was shared an estimated 47.8 million times on Twitter from May 26th to June 7th.
For anyone who’s witnessed the growth of Black Lives Matter, online or off, there is no denying the force of this previously dispassionate mark. Yes, the hashtag – just four strokes of a pen or a Shift+3 on the keyboard – is relatively unremarkable on its own, but in conjunction with the right set of words at the right time, and in the hands of the right people, it has the power to transform a solitary outpouring of emotion into collective action.
The hashtag is more than just a powerful symbol, it’s a rallying cry, a virtual bullhorn, and a tool for IRL organization. As the world watches four lines and three words evolve into a global movement, we’re taking a look back at the origins of some earlier icons of resistance.
The Raised Fist
Though it’s been repurposed and redesigned to fit social movements dating back at least 100 years, the power of the clenched fist is still undiluted. In 1917, the Industrial Workers of the World published a cartoon by Ralph Chaplin showing a group of laborers collectively raising a giant fist, with the slogan “The Hand That Will Rule the World -- One Big Union,” emblazoned below. Since then, the symbol has been employed by anti-fascists, women’s liberationists, the Black Panther Party, and Black Lives Matter among other groups. The raised or clenched fist isn’t just a 2D icon, though. As a well-placed gesture of protest, it can spark a global conversation, as Olympic gold medalist Tommie Smith and bronze medalist John Carlos proved when they raised their right fists during an olympic ceremony in 1968. The two were banned from further Olympic activity for a simple, but no less controversial, show of support for human rights.
The Peace Sign
The peace sign was designed by Gerald Holtom for a 1958 nuclear weapons protest in London. For four days protestors marched to a nuclear holding facility in a nearby village brandishing flags with Holtom’s symbol, which contains the letters N and D from the semaphore alphabet. (Apparently that thing sailors do with flags is its own language.) According to CNN, it’s probable that Civil Rights activist Bayard Rustin introduced the sign to the United States on his return from the protests.
The Venus Symbol
The Venus symbol is an evolved shorthand for the ancient greek word for the planet of the same name. It’s been used in botany and biology and on bathroom signs as a signifier of basically everything female. As has often been the case in social movements, second wave feminists adopted and redefined the symbol as a sign of empowerment. In 1968, activist Robin Morgan gave the simple circle and cross a radical makeover, adding the ubiquitous raised fist to the Venus symbol for a protest of the Miss America pageant in Atlantic City.
The Black Panther
According to Design Observer, The Black Panther Party logo that we know today was actually designed for a different Black Panther Party. In 1966, Stokely Charmichael, then the head of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, asked Dorothy Zellner, a white woman and SNCC member, to draw a logo for the Lowndes County Freedom Organization in Alabama. The organization, also known as The Black Panther Party, was a progressive ticket aimed at putting more black people in elected positions. Zellner’s logo would be redrawn by fellow SNCC member, Ruth Howard, taking cues from the logo of Clark College, a historically black school. That panther would eventually make its way from Alabama to California, where it was adopted by The Black Panther Party for Self-Defense, a revolutionary political organization founded by Bobby Seale and Huey Newton.
The Pink Triangle
Sometimes a symbol’s simplicity belies a complicated past. As is the case with the pink triangle, which was first used by the Nazis as a way of flagging homosexuals in WWII concentration camps. According to one Time article tracing the origins of the pink triangle, it’s estimated that between 5,000 and 15,000 men were sent to concentration camps for perceived homosexual tendencies. Once there, they were segregated, castrated, experimented on and murdered. The triangle became formally associated with gay liberation as the logo for The AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power (ACT UP), which was founded in 1987 to end the AIDS pandemic. That same year, designer Avram Finkelstein, turned the Nazi triangle right side up, gave it a bold fuschia wash “to mimic the language of authority in fashion, music and design,” and placed it above the words Silence = Death, in one of the most memorable protest posters of all time.