As Black History Month came to a close, a Cambridge civic organization reflected on one of the most defining and divisive movements of the digital era.
Years after the Black Lives Matter movement’s 2020 peak – when protests swept through cities across the United States and around the globe – organizers of The Black Response invited the community to a Feb. 24 Oxford-style debate (in which audience members vote on their level of support for the statement under discussion before and after) centered on the prompt: “The Black Lives Matter Movement was successful.”
Support for the statement shifted sharply between the debate’s start and finish. Initially, 42 percent agreed, but that fell to 29 percent by the end. Disagreement rose from about 10 percent to 48 percent, while neutral responses increased from 4 percent to 24 percent.
The speakers of the debate were BLM organizers themselves, all of whom having founded or worked a chapter in cities across the country. Framing the debate was Wayland X Coleman, an incarcerated activist who grounded the discussion in his experience with systemic racism and policing.
The debate was focused on a single word: success.
Evelyn Reynolds, a sociologist and organizer who was a part of the BLM Global Network Strategy Table, opened for the affirmative. She argued that the movement’s success should be measured not solely by legislative wins, but by shifts in national consciousness and institutional behavior.
“Was the Civil Rights Movement a failure because it didn’t eliminate racism? Was the women’s suffrage movement a failure because sexism persists? Was Occupy Wall Street a failure because we still have economic inequality?” Reynolds asked.
She contended that Black Lives Matter altered permanently how protest movements operate and how they are perceived by power structures. The phrase itself, she argued, reshaped public discourse and forced institutions to publicly confront racial inequity.
On the opposing side, Nakisha Lewis, founder of the New York City BLM chapter and organizer of the BLM Freedom Ride to Ferguson, measured success differently.
“History does not remember movements for the size of their marches alone,” Lewis said. “History remembers them because of what those marches produce.”
Lewis argued that despite unprecedented demonstrations, there has been limited tangible policy change. “Not a single major American city has meaningfully and permanently defunded its police department,” she said.
Kay Martinez, an educator and former teaching fellow at the Harvard Graduate School of Education and former organizer BLM Cambridge, bolstered the negative case by pointing to “Cop City,” formally known as the Atlanta Public Safety Training Center, as evidence of expanded police infrastructure in the years following the 2020 protests. The center, which opened about 10 months ago, is a $90 million police and fire training facility that drew national protests from activists who argue it represents the militarization of policing and raises environmental concerns.
“Cop City will allow police, not just from Atlanta, but all over the world, to learn repressive tactics so that protests and rebellions can be easily crushed,” they said.
They also cited the outcome of the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act, which would have banned chokeholds, limited qualified immunity for police officers and created a national registry of police misconduct. The bill passed the U.S. House of Representatives but stalled in the Senate and did not become law. Martinez argued that its failure underscores the movement’s limited success in securing lasting federal policy change.
Vanessa Lynch, founder of Orange Ink of BLM Western Massachusetts, arguing for the affirmative, framed Black Lives Matter as one iteration of an “intercontinental struggle for liberation” spanning more than 500 years. She pointed to tangible outcomes such as the expanded use of police body cameras and the establishment of BLM chapters in countries including Ghana and Canada as markers of impact.
Stephanie Guirand, the organizer for the debate, said in a phone call that for many organizers who left the movement on bad terms, gatherings such as this create space for reflection and accountability, helping participants reconnect and rebuild a sense of shared purpose.
“Because we were intentional and we held critical but good and healthy spaces, people are now interested in coming together again. We hope to continue to record the oral history, because so many more people are interested in participating now,” she said.
Guirand said she hopes to continue hosting similar debates throughout the year and to secure additional funding to expand the organization’s oral history project.
The debate was part of the BLM Era Exhibition held at The Foundry community building in Cambridge in February.
A version of this article was produced for Binj.news, the independent weekly magazine published by the Boston Institute for Nonprofit Journalism, and was syndicated by Binj’s MassWire news service.