Morry Gash/AP Photo
Protesters rally outside the Third Precinct, April 19, 2021, in Minneapolis during the murder trial of former Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin for the killing of George Floyd.
The technology to record the murders of Black Americans has actually been with us for a very long time. There are lots of photos of 19th- and early-20th-century lynchings, though most are long shots, taken so the viewer can’t identify the specific individuals at the front of the mobs. Even when they were identifiable, however, no one with even a smidgen of power suggested charging them with a crime.
Nor could liberals get anti-lynching legislation through Congress, despite growing revulsion against this savagery. (Though different versions have advanced in each chamber recently, as of 2021 we still haven’t passed an anti-lynching bill out of Congress.) In 1934, the great filmmaker John Ford included in his film Judge Priest a scene in which the judge, played by Oklahoma good old boy Will Rogers—then perhaps the most popular figure in the country other than FDR—talked down a lynch mob about to string up a Black character and roundly excoriated them, only to have the scene die on the cutting-room floor when 20th Century Fox decided they dare not screen it in the South.
In 1991, a man named George Holliday filmed the police beating of Rodney King from his balcony and gave the footage to a local Los Angeles TV station, which aired it to the world. The four cops who violated both law and every precept of humanity were nonetheless acquitted one year later. I was the news editor and political columnist at the L.A. Weekly at the time, and clearly remember how the staff stood riveted before the TV in the conference room—as Americans were riveted awaiting the George Floyd verdict earlier today—and reacted with both outraged disbelief and a certainty that the city would go up in flames upon hearing the not guilty verdicts.
So visual evidence of racist and murderous police conduct has seldom made a difference when it has come to punishing the perpetrators. It’s been a necessary condition, but very seldom a sufficient one.
Let’s not credit the iPhone, then, with the deeply just conviction of Derek Chauvin today. People like Darnella Frazier, the horrified 17-year-old who recorded the murder on her phone because “it wasn’t right,” matter. Social movements matter, and if they didn’t, the very idea that Black lives matter wouldn’t have gotten as far as it has. History only changes when pushed, and the strategists who formed and emerged from Black Lives Matter built the kind of movement, at once racially rooted and racially diverse, that made a compelling case for radical yet achievable change, and rallied an immense number of their fellow Americans behind it.
That movement still has miles to go beyond today’s verdict, of course. Creating circumstances so interactions with police don’t end in abuse and murder would be a start. Laws have begun to be changed. Maryland just repealed its long-standing law that had made it very hard to track and expose violent cops, and kindred legislation is pending in other states. Longtime police reformer Karen Bass, now a member of Congress from South Central L.A., got a bill through the House last year that would have banned chokeholds and made it easier to identify and punish lawbreaking cops; we need to see that bill come back this year and get through the Senate (this can only be done, of course, by scrapping the filibuster).
The cops we will always have with us, even if defunded, and some irreducible fraction of cops will always have chosen to become cops because they’re thugs (and some irreducible fraction of that fraction, racist thugs). That’s one reason why we need Black Lives Matter to always be with us as well, organizing against police violence and for the right to vote, among many other fundamental rights. That the demands of the movement are so heartbreakingly basic is a measure of how far we have to go just to become a civilized society.
So: a good day for civilized society. We need many millions more.
