I’m dealing with a death in the family right now so I’m not going to be as thorough as I want to be, but I want to take a moment to talk about some other similar moments in history where rebellions hit a climax. [thread, 1/?]

Ferguson, MO was only years ago, and yet it feels like people have forgotten Michael Brown’s murder and the protests that lasted for days. This is a great case study in how rioting and looting is often targeted towards businesses that have not supported the black community. [2/?]

This NYT article gives a good look at the protest sites, and there’s been plenty written about each of these sites and their relevance to black folks in Ferguson: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2014/11/21/us/Ferguson-Map.html

Another good place to look for historical information is the summer of 1965, during which hundreds of riots exploded across the U.S. White folks were confused because the Civil Rights Act of 1965 had just been passed, so why were black folks still so angry? [4/?]

The Civil Rights Act began to dismantle Jim Crow laws in the South, but for black folks in the North, this did nothing to fix their poverty, joblessness, low-quality public housing, or de facto racism. If anything, the law proved that these problems were being overlooked [5/?]

As we’ve seen time and again, the government loves passing laws that symbolically show their support while doing nothing to solve the actual problem. And this was very much the case in 1965, so black folks protested in Detroit, Chicago, Miami, and more. [6/?]

This is particularly a good example because it shows how strategic protesters were, even when they gathered unplanned. The Kerner report, written by government officials about the protests, shows confusion towards how these “unorganized” black folks were able to evade the police.

For example, protesters would use hit-and-run tactics, while others called into police phone lines and provided false information to police about the protesters’ locations. Others used Molotov cocktails, which require forethought and preparation to make and use. [8/?]

The bottom line here, with both of these examples, is that black protesters aren’t the unorganized, angry mass of common folk that the media often portrays them to be. Protest is a calculated tactic that is used when all else has fails. [9/?]

Nobody wakes up wanting to destroy property, ESPECIALLY in their own neighborhoods where the city isn’t going to help them rebuild. People DO THINK before they act, and violent protest is a last resort. So the question to ask is, what are you not hearing? Why are they so angry?

Stop worrying about policing the methods of people’s protest, and start wondering why they’re using these tactics. Listen to what they’re saying. Read between the lines. [11/11, end thread]