police violence, is brilliant in its simplicity. But more striking than the slogan’s ability to express so much in so few words is how painful it is that its message needs to be asserted. What began as a small but fierce rebellion in a St. Louis suburb exploded into a wildfire that has engulfed the whole country.

The movement has done something all too rare in our time: it’s escaped the control of the ruling establishment. Neither police repression nor Democrats have been able to stop the movement. which has confounded the politicians and the news media, accustomed as they are to using the same old scripts to discuss race and protest without challenge. City governments across the country had to accept the disruption of business as usual, as, for example, when activists from the Black Youth Project 100 (BYP 100) occupied Chicago’s City Hall on November 26, and marchers in New York City repeatedly shut down most major bridges and tunnels leading into and out of Manhattan in November, while police appeared powerless.

Strong at its beginning
In a matter of weeks, the movement shattered what remained of the notion of a “post-racial” America and reoriented the entire national conversation on anti-Black racism. The movement follows in a tradition of Black struggles in the United States whose impacts far exceed the numbers of people involved and go well beyond their point of origin. The civil rights revolt, for example, cracked open the Cold War conservatism of the McCarthy era and inspired more than a decade of mass social struggle on many other fronts.