Last week at the Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia, black protesters made their presence known in marches down Broad Street. After these groups mostly ignored the Republican National Convention in Cleveland and just two weeks after the deaths of Alton Sterling and Philando Castile launched new protests, familiar slogans and chants of “Black Lives Matter” once again rang out in Philadelphia...Black Lives Matter protesters showed up, but they did not steal the show...
This Monday, with 99 days to go until the election, a coalition of over 50 black-led organizations known as the Movement for Black Lives released a wide-reaching and in-depth platform detailing the coalition’s policy demands. The platform, which goes beyond criminal justice and rivals even political-party platforms in thoroughness—complete with issue briefs, a glitzy website, and a coordinated social-media strategy—reflects a good deal of organization and effort. Even as commentators like CNN’s John Blake cite “confusion over what BLM wants” as a point of contention among the public, this platform is another indication that the movement is building.*
The “Vision 4 Black Lives,” as the platform has been known on social media, lays out six core planks around criminal justice, reparations, investment and divestment, economic justice, community control, and political power. Some of these items, including the criminal-justice components of the platform’s demands to “end the war on black people,” are likely familiar to anyone who has followed the development of Black Lives Matter. But other ideas, including demands to add special protections for trans, queer, and gender-nonconforming people to anti-discrimination laws, a call for free education for black people, and a proposal to implement black economic cooperatives, haven’t previously been spelled out quite this clearly.
The process by which the platform was created provides insights into both the state of black activism and the political moment. According to several people who were involved in the creation of the Movement for Black Lives platform, that process was not unlike what might be expected from a political party. Janae Bonsu, the National Public Policy Chair of the Black Youth Project 100, one of the groups involved in the platform’s development, told me that organizations had been working on the platform since the early days of Black Lives Matter. “Not so long after this time last year, many black-led organizations gathered in Cleveland at a weekend that was full of workshop sessions,” Bonsu said. That August meeting, known as the Movement for Black Lives Convening and held in a city that held special resonance to the movement after the death of Tamir Rice, was part of a series of smaller meetings of black activists and a string of conference calls.
As Karl Kumodzi, also with BYP 100 and a member of the platform’s core policy development group, explained, “In the aftermath of Ferguson on the Ferguson Action site, there were a set of six broad visionary demands,” he said. “A lot of them were pulled from the Black Panthers’ Ten-Point Program.” That program demanded education reform, an end to police brutality, fair housing, legal self-determination, and a host of other reforms from politicians.
