ABSTRACT
The legacy media coverage of the Civil Rights Movement often highlighted charismatic male leaders – such as Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., Malcolm X, or John Lewis – while women like Ella Baker, Diane Nash, and Jo Ann Robinson worked quietly in the background, with little or no recognition from the press. Today’s leaders of the modern Black Lives Matter movement, however, are largely black women who say that they have turned this paradigm on its face. In a series of semi-structured interviews, they report that they have learned to make their political contributions visible through an artful use of Twitter and a keen awareness of legacy media’s normative values. This study explores the phenomenology of black women activists who produce protest journalism for the Black Lives Matter movement from the front lines. I focus on: (1) the black women activists’ stated purpose for creating original content about the Black Lives Matter movement; (2) whether or not they intuit their bearing witness as a form of intersectional protest journalism; (3) how they view their bodies in relation to the world (for example, whether they see themselves in the body of a slain black woman who was gunned down by police); and (4) how they believe their individual work as a black woman activist-cum-media maker or headliner impacts the broader Black Lives Matter movement. While interviews reveal that all of the women frame their contributions to the movement in terms of black womanist work, they have divergent ideas about how the media should prioritize their identity markers. For some of the participating activists, for example, their race, sexual orientation, and gender should receive equal mention in related media coverage. For others, however, an emphasis solely on race was deemed more essential to propel the Movement. Other interesting findings include the Women's views on the role of legacy media in the Movement. While some of the women embraced the international reach that mainstream outlets have – and even staged political events to leverage that power – others shared that they gave up on legacy media entirely, due to the level of misreporting they witnessed as on-the-ground activists, and so turned to Black Twitter to report, share, and consume Movement-related news. This cohort of womanist protestors, working as media makers and manipulators, may be shaping the collective memory of the Black Lives Matter movement, and creating a new lexicon and iconography from which legacy news media pull to discuss its political evolution.
