The Black Lives Matter Movement

The Prevalence of the “Black Power” and “Time and Distance Overcome” in the “Black Lives Matter” Movement
Even before the civil war a very large problem in the United States has been racial controversies and equal rights. These topics have been a struggle for many citizens of different race but one of the largest is the lives of African Americans. It began with slavery, was prevalent during the time of Martin Luther King Jr., and now has resulted with the Black Lives Matter movement. Eula Biss wrote a personal story on the death and lives of African Americans in her story “Time and Distance Overcome.” Stokely Carmichael delivered a strong speech called “Black Power.” The “Black Lives Matter” movement has revived attention to these topics once

She is a white woman putting emphasis on other white people to clean up their act. She uses her personal story and Telephone polls to connect the reader to her point of how killing blacks have drastically affected her emotionally and that it should turn others away from killing also. Her repetition of death cases places importance on how ugly society was at the time and how citizens used a common item to harm people. Her list is only a small number of deaths in the United States, this shows that there was so many circumstances where whites looked down on other races just because they believe they were superior. The black power movement started because of racist police violence, but her story shows how regular citizens committed violence against blacks by hanging them on telephone polls and shootings. “From the middle of the nineteenth century to the middle of the twentieth century, black men were lynched for crimes real and imagined, for whistles, for rumors, for ‘disputing with a white man,’ for ‘unpopularity,’ for asking a white woman in marriage,’ for peeping in a window.” (Time and Distance Overcome). Through this we see that people were being hanged for any reason at all just because of hate. This is one of the causes for the Black Lives Matter movement. Police were killing black men because they were “committing a crime” and “resisting