Modern Civil Rights Leaders
Every generation has had to fight for rights the previous generation thought were settled. This generation is no different.
On the night of February 26, 2012, a 17-year-old named Trayvon Martin walked to a convenience store in Sanford, Florida and did not come home.
He was shot and killed by a neighborhood watch volunteer named George Zimmerman. Zimmerman was acquitted in July 2013.
The night of that verdict, a Black woman named Alicia Garza sat at her kitchen table and wrote something she called a love letter to Black people. Her friend Patrisse Cullors shared it with a hashtag. Another friend, Opal Tometi, helped build the infrastructure around it.
The hashtag was #BlackLivesMatter.
What followed was not inevitable. Movements do not spring fully formed from a single moment. Black Lives Matter grew because it named something that millions of Black Americans had been experiencing and saying for generations without being heard. It provided language and structure for grief that had nowhere else to go.
The movement expanded with each new death. Michael Brown in Ferguson. Eric Garner in New York. Breonna Taylor in Louisville. And on May 25, 2020, George Floyd in Minneapolis, whose death was filmed in its entirety by a 17-year-old named Darnella Frazier, who understood what she was watching and did not look away.
The protests that followed were, by many estimates, the largest civil rights demonstrations in American history. Between 15 and 26 million people participated in the United States alone. It went global. Cities that had never heard of Minneapolis put George Floyd's name on murals.
This is the visible part of the modern civil rights movement. There is also the quieter work.
Bryan Stevenson founded the Equal Justice Initiative in 1989, providing legal defense for people on death row and challenging mass incarceration through the courts. His book Just Mercy, later adapted into a film, brought those cases to a wider audience. He also built the National Memorial for Peace and Justice in Montgomery, Alabama, a memorial to the more than 4,000 Black Americans lynched in the United States between 1877 and 1950.
Legal scholar Kimberly Crenshaw coined the term intersectionality in 1989, providing a framework for understanding how race, gender, class, and other identities overlap in ways that existing civil rights law did not address. The concept has reshaped fields from law to medicine to education.
Stacey Abrams ran for governor of Georgia in 2018, narrowly losing in an election later scrutinized for voter suppression. Rather than retreat, she built Fair Fight Action and worked to register hundreds of thousands of new voters in Georgia. In 2020, two Democratic senators were elected from Georgia for the first time in decades.
The civil rights movement did not end in 1965. It continued. It is continuing now.
The names changed. The work did not.
Black Lives Matter is not a moment. It is a movement. And movements are made of people who refused to stop.On the continuation of civil rights organizing in the 21st century
The modern civil rights movement is happening in real time, which makes it harder to see clearly.
It is tempting to look at the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 60s as settled history, the heroes already identified, the victories already secured. The present moment is messier. The outcomes are not yet known. The leaders are still alive and still fighting, which means they are still controversial.
But the pattern is recognizable. People organizing around documented injustice. Institutions resisting change. Young people deciding that the injustice is not acceptable. The tools are different. Social media replaces pamphlets. Cell phone footage replaces eyewitness testimony. The power dynamics being challenged are the same.
What the modern movement has added to the historical conversation is specificity. Data on police killings. Names and faces and video. A refusal to accept that individual incidents are isolated rather than systemic.
Whether that changes the systems it is challenging is still being determined.
What is certain is that the people doing the work have studied their history. They know what has worked before, what has failed before, and what the cost of both looks like.
They are paying that cost. Deliberately. In full view.