Black Lives Matter, 10 years later
Notes from America with Kai Wright
WNYC Studios
4.4 • 1.5K Ratings
🗓️ 6 November 2023
⏱️ 51 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
It’s been 10 years since the Black Lives Matter was founded in response to the acquittal of the man who fatally shot 17-year-old Trayvon Martin. Kai Wright speaks with organizer Chelsea Miller about the impact the movement has had on a generation of young people. She makes the case for why we must keep telling the story of Black life and death in America and saying the names of those killed as a result of police violence.
Plus, in partnership with New Yorker Radio Hour, Kai discusses the impact of the movement with Samuel Sinyangwe, a policy analyst with Mapping Police Violence & Police Scorecard, Anya Bidwell, an attorney for the Institute of Justice and the Federalist Society, and Mike White, professor of criminology and criminal justice at Arizona State University. They look back on some of the policy changes that have been implemented to reduce use of force by police and whether they’ve been successful.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | This year marks a decade since the emergence of what's become known as the movement for black lives. |
| 0:09.0 | Obviously, racial justice activism existed long before an unarmed 17-year-old boy, Trayvon Martin, |
| 0:16.1 | was killed by a gun-toting vigilante. |
| 0:18.8 | But when a court of law declared that man did not commit murder. |
| 0:22.5 | Something changed. |
| 0:23.8 | A focus on the value of black life became central. |
| 0:27.8 | So what's happened in the decades since? |
| 0:29.8 | I'm Kay Wright and we've partnered with our friends |
| 0:32.1 | at the New Yorker Radio Hour to wrestle with that question. |
| 0:35.0 | I'll talk with a group of people who have been working on police reform in varying ways over the past 10 years. |
| 0:41.0 | And I'll check in with a youth organizer in New York whose own life was |
| 0:45.1 | changed when Trayvon Martin was killed and this movement emerged. She'll tell me |
| 0:49.4 | about what she's witnessed among young people who experienced a similar transformation is hers, but now |
| 0:54.4 | following George Floyd's murder. |
| 0:59.2 | When you have the name George Floyd, what does that mean to you? |
| 1:04.8 | A black man whose life was taken unprovoked. |
| 1:08.8 | I think it represents a social movement and something that's inspired a lot of people and sparked a lot of change in many people's lives. |
| 1:16.5 | It's an empowering name. |
| 1:18.0 | When that event happened, it shocked the whole world and I feel like it pushed us to be better, push us to be more demanding as a culture. |
| 1:26.0 | I think like George Florida is like more than just a name of a person now. |
| 1:29.0 | I think it's more of like something that happened in our society. |
| 1:33.0 | George Floyd is one example of many people out there, |
... |
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