Student activists have long been the beating hearts behind social movements, using whatever new technology is available to their advantage.
For young activists in the 1960s, television was the promising new medium through which they could prevent the world from turning a blind eye to violence against Black people. Or, as Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. poignantly stated in 1965: “We will no longer let them use their clubs on us in the dark corners. We’re going to make them do it in the glaring light of television.”
And, in that sense, social media has made possible movements that are horizontally and, some would argue, more democratically run.
“Not having a centralized leader is so empowering because it provides an entry point into a more intersectional and grassroots approach,” says Dr. Tiera Chantè Tanksley, an assistant professor of educational foundations, policy and practice at the University of Colorado Boulder.
Typically, past movements, such as the Civil Rights Movement, have had centralized male leaders and, in effect, “the labor of queer people, women, people with disabilities is erased from the mainstream narrative,” she says. “So having a movement be on social media provides a lot of possibility for what we can accomplish.”
The Black@ movement
