William & Mary Journal of Race, Gender, and Social Justice
Abstract
Starting in May and June 2020, the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement swept the United States, drawing tens of millions of participants across the United States together to try and create individual, institutional, and systemic change. This paper shows the correlation between Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement protests, both online and offline, and legal and policy change from 2020 to 2021. In Part I, the paper analyzes the 2020 protests by connecting online and offline activism through data models tracking the volume of over 700 words and hashtags on Twitter, with the frequency and geographic location of those words set against the geography and volume of offline protests in those series. The authors also analyzed tweet volume and hyperlocality by focusing on leads (tweets before protests) and lags (tweets after protests) to find a relationship between efficacy and lasting nature of the social movement. Part II examines the aftermath of the protests to determine if there was lasting political, social, or legal change created by BLM. These trends were broken into individual policy changes, institutional policy changes, and systemic policy changes – overlapping terms from Twitter were sorted both by category and by frequency of use across the platform to determine efficacy of calls to action. Finally, the paper includes two appendices compiling state statutes and local ordinances passed in the wake of the BLM protests. The paper found that city level changes with heavy protest activity were the most effective, and that statewide change was less likely, and in fact sometimes created backlash legislation.
Repository Citation
Jamillah Bowman Williams, Naomi Mezey, and Lisa Singh, #BlackLivesMatter: From Protest to Policy, 28 Wm. & Mary J. Race, Gender, & Soc. Just. 103 (2021), https://scholarship.law.wm.edu/wmjowl/vol28/iss1/6
Included in
Law and Race Commons, Law Enforcement and Corrections Commons, State and Local Government Law Commons
