What happened to Black Lives Matter’s momentum?

By Francis Wilkinson

Opposite the underground entrance to Albany’s Kitty Carlisle Hart Theater, beneath the cold and desolate Empire State Plaza, the protesters were squeezed between police barricades and the New York State Department of Motor Vehicles.

I had been told there would be a protest here last week, on the occasion of Governor Kathy Hochul’s 2025 State of the State address. But these were not the protesters I was looking for.

A small group of Seneca Indians drummed and chanted. They wanted their land back. A few feet away another clot of protesters held signs, reading: “Say No to Assisted Suicide.” Nearby, others protested Israel’s war in Gaza while their neighbors called to “Reject Medical Apartheid” and someone else stood strong for public consensus with a sign stating, “All Kids Deserve Education.” I asked a man what his yellow “I Choose” button signified. He didn’t know. “I didn’t have a chance to ask them,” he told me.

(Behind him, the Robert Kennedy Jr. paraphernalia supplied the answer: The right to choose not to vaccinate children against lethal disease.)

There were nuclear power antagonists — pro and con — and still more people beating drums. But there was no sign of the protest I came to see.

What happened to Black Lives Matter?

In December, New York Attorney General Letitia James released multiple videos of state corrections officers beating a handcuffed prisoner, Robert Brooks, at the Marcy Correctional Facility in upstate New York on the night of December 9. Brooks, a 43-year-old Black man, was serving a 12-year sentence after having pleaded guilty to first-degree assault. He was declared dead the next day at a hospital in Utica.

Videos of the attack, each from the perspective of a different officer’s bodycam, are catalogued on the attorney general’s website. In the first, we see Brooks in what appears to be an infirmary. He seems physically weak, perhaps struggling to remain conscious. Then we see the back of a guard, his right arm pumping as he pounds the incapacitated prisoner with his fist. When we next see an image of Brooks, his face is bloodied, and he appears dazed. His body flops helplessly as another guard yanks him from behind.

The abuse doesn’t end there. It is variously inflicted, observed or ignored by more than a dozen agents of the state.

Less than five years ago, Black Lives Matter was one of the largest social movements in American history. Extrapolating from public polls, it seemed that by the middle of 2020 at least 15 million adults had participated in a BLM protest. The demonstrations weren’t only in America’s largest cities; small-town America also stepped into the breach. According to a New York Times tally, protests were held in more than 500 places on June 6, 2020. University of Pittsburgh historian Lara Putnam tracked more than 400 separate anti-racism protests across 230 Pennsylvania communities in a single month.

On June 7, 2020, just weeks after the brutal killing of George Floyd by a Minneapolis police officer, a Civiqs poll showed 52 per cent of registered voters said they supported the Black Lives Matter movement and 30 per cent said they were opposed.

Public opinion influenced public outcomes. The use of bodycams by police increased. Data collection on police killings became more comprehensive and accurate. Inhumane prisons and jails came under pressure to reform or close.

Times have changed. Civiqs data for January 17, 2025, showed 41 per cent of registered voters now support Black Lives Matter and 43 per cent oppose it.

BLM's supporters faded away. The Opposition stayed.

“The Black Lives Matter movement reached an apex with the George Floyd murder, and since then it’s been under attack,” said University of Connecticut historian Manisha Sinha, author of The Rise and Fall of the Second American Republic, a history of Reconstruction and the backlash to it. “Not just the Black Lives Movement, but any sort of attempt to talk about Black history. We’ve just seen this enormous right-wing movement; they seem to be the ones more energized now.”

Right-wing attacks on Black Lives Matter were relentless. Trump called the protesters exercising their First Amendment rights of speech and assembly “terrorists” and “anarchists” and “thugs.”

(The January 6 insurrectionists who assaulted police officers and smeared feces on the US Capitol were, by contrast, “beautiful” people overflowing with “love.”)

William Barr, Trump’s attorney general, called BLM “a revolutionary group that is interested in some form of socialism, communism,” adding, “they’re essentially Bolsheviks.” Fox News attacked Black Lives Matter more than 400 times between November 2020 and April 2021.

An analysis of more than 7,000 Black Lives Matters events in all 50 states found “overall levels of violence and property destruction were low, and most of the violence that did take place was, in fact, directed against the BLM protesters.” Trump’s lies and the right-wing propaganda-verse were no doubt powerful forces in distorting that reality. Still, the movement outlasted such attacks for a time. Then, eventually, it no longer did.

In Albany, I finally encountered the people I had come to see. Led by the Reverend Kevin McCall of Brooklyn, a couple dozen protesters marched toward the theater in advance of Hochul’s speech.

“Say his name!” McCall shouted through a black megaphone.

“Robert Brooks!” the protesters replied.

The protesters carried no signs stating, “Black Lives Matter,” and the words were never uttered by McCall or chanted by the crowd. Black Lives Matter seemed absent even at a protest over a Black life. When the crowd settled into a location across from the theater entrance, I asked some protesters why. Moshe Canty gave one compelling answer.

Black Lives Matter protesters, he explained, “knew that Black men were being gunned down in the street and that, potentially, they themselves or their sons or their nephews could be as well,” he said. Robert Brooks, Canty said, was a different matter. “I think when people look at people who are incarcerated, there is a stigma attached to that. They say, ‘you kind of put yourself in that situation’. People don’t look at people who are incarcerated as being human.”

Canty, 47, works for a nonprofit and lives in Old Bridge, New Jersey. He said he spent two decades incarcerated in New York prisons. “I’m not saying people are not incensed,” he said about the modest turnout to protest the death of Brooks. “But people are not inclined to go out and speak out. Most of these people here — 95 per cent — are formerly incarcerated. All these guys are guys I walked the yard with.”

Canty’s analysis has strong implications for the Brooks case, but it doesn’t explain the slow fade of Black Lives Matter. Clearly, some of the movement’s mojo was channeled into Gaza protests, which became the primary cause on many college campuses. Questions about the BLM leadership’s dodgy use of funds also eroded some support.

The movement’s successes were real. Derek Chauvin, the police officer who murdered George Floyd, received a lengthy jail sentence. The city of Minneapolis agreed to make “transformational” changes in race-based policing, enforceable by a court. More White Americans in more places were exposed to the trauma that some Black citizens experience at the hands of authorities. But much of the movement has retreated from public consciousness, and what’s left behind doesn’t smell much like victory.

This week, Trump enlisted the federal government in his battle against diversity, demanding that federal employees snitch on colleagues who appear eager to promote diversity in government workplaces and placing a “freeze” on civil rights litigation. Attorneys in the Civil Rights Division of the Justice Department were ordered not to file new complaints or amicus briefs. The DOJ also announced it would “review” agreements like the one with Minneapolis.

“I just feel we are at a modern moment that reminds me a lot of the late 19th century when there was an enormous backlash against Reconstruction and Black rights and Black citizenship,” Sinha, the historian, said. “The Lost Cause just never seems to go away.”

Under the Empire State Plaza, two busloads of additional protesters finally arrived from Queens. With close to 200 people now in tow, the Robert Brooks protest began to acquire power, and volume.

“Say his name!”

“Robert Brooks!”

The simplicity of the slogan is reminiscent of previous protests for Black rights. Striking sanitation workers in Memphis in 1968, the focus of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s last hours on Earth, wore sandwich boards stating, “I am a man.” “Black Lives Matter” is a similarly elemental assertion.

Yet claims to equal rights and dignity rarely stand up by themselves. With Trump back in the White House, much of the nation says it opposes a movement identified with a baseline commitment to social justice. At times like these, with the public checked out and summer soldiers in retreat, summoning outrage over the outrageous falls to a vocal few. For 90 minutes, without pause, McCall shouted “Say his name!” into his megaphone. And for 90 minutes, without pause, the protesters shouted that name back at him. “Robert Brooks!”

Does a dead prisoner possess the dignity of a name? Was he a man? Do Black Lives Matter?

It’s 2025 in America. The jury, it seems, is still out.