The Minneapolis city council’s promise to tear up its police department and start from scratch “has not only implications for Minneapolis,” Mitchell said. “That has national implications.”
Angela Lang, executive director of Black Leaders Organizing for Communities in Milwaukee, said she is having more conversations than ever with other Black organizers across the country. The Milwaukee Police and Fire Commission is in crisis, with an executive director on the way out and a president facing charges of ethics violations as protesters demand change. Lang’s organization gathered 300 responses to the commission on what residents want to see from the next chief executive, and is putting pressure on the local police department as its boss completes its six-month evaluation.
Meanwhile, other parts of the movement are organizing larger national actions. Woodard Henderson, along with SEIU, the Fight for $ 15 advocacy group and other unions, organized a black lives strike on Monday, with thousands of workers in more than 25 cities abandoning work.
Jessica Byrd, a strategist with Three Point Strategies and leader in the Black Life Movement, gets up at 4 in the morning most days to prepare for the online Black National Convention on August 28, which aims to involve 4 million black people across the country. Before the convention, approximately 1,000 black activists will gather virtually to come up with a 100-day agenda for a possible Joe Biden administration, which will be unveiled at the national meeting.
“We have a new electoral cycle in which we are a central force, whereas in 2016, there were headlines saying that the black movement did not care about elections,” said Byrd, who oversees the Electoral Justice Project for the Movement for Life. Negra, which launched in 2017.
Federal lawmakers have already responded to the dramatic change in public attitudes toward Black Lives Matter, and the House, led by Democrats, passed a police reform bill in late June. Although several high-ranking lawmakers have rejected the push to “pay the police”, activists see the bill as a starting point. They countered with its own legislation: the Breathing Law, which seeks to eliminate federal agencies and programs that invest and expand law enforcement.
“We wanted to be clear that we could speak for ourselves,” Woodard Henderson said. “That we could actually write our own federal legislation that is incorporating the policy demands that we have been raising.”
The bill has yet to be formally tabled by a legislator in Congress, but First Representatives Ayanna Pressley (D-Mass.) And Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.) Participated in its launch with the Movement for Life. Black. Pressley, members of the Black Caucus of Congress and activists from the Black Life Movement are in ongoing talks about the proposal.
“I am grateful for the leadership of M4BL and I am ready to work alongside them to fight for structural change, legislate accountability, and advance in the direction of justice and healing,” Pressley said in a statement to POLITICO.
But other impulses of national politics that emerge from the movement have inspired dissent within it.
One of the best-known policy plans to exit the Black Lives Matter movement is the “8 Can’t Wait” proposals by the racial justice group Campaign Zero. The package is made up of “restrictive use of force policies” for local police departments, including a ban on bottlenecks, an obligation to scale down and a warning before shooting, which the group argued would decrease killings.
Deray Mckesson, co-founder of Campaign Zero, said the platform was intended to “normalize” police reform policies. “If the police are going to exist tomorrow, tomorrow they should have much less power,” he said. GQ.
But the launch of “8 Can’t Wait” in early June received swift criticism from several activists who felt that the proposals did not go far enough in a climate where calls to “unseat the police” were winning more acceptance. Within a week, Campaign Zero co-founder Brittany Packnett Cunningham announced it. departure of the organization in response to the backlash. Campaign Zero issued a Sorry on his website, saying that his campaign “unintentionally hurt the efforts of other organizers who invested in paradigm shifts that are possible right now.”
