Following the death of Trayvon Martin, Black Twitter laid some of the most influential groundwork for what would become the biggest social justice movement of our time.
I remember Johnetta [Elzie] being one of the first people that I really saw tweeting about it. When it happened, it was like, oh shit, now I need to follow her. She was really there.It wasn’t like I was shocked that the St. Louis police had killed someone. The police had just shot and killed one of my closest friends in February.Police brutality didn’t start when Twitter started. The difference was that Twitter made it so that it was no longer just local news that could be snuffed out.
Did it matter that certain participants in that conversation were not, as critics liked to point out at the time, “real journalists”?There were over a thousand tweets about Mike Brown and his murder before any national news outlet picked it up.As much as three days before national news outlets were in Ferguson, people from Black Twitter were in Ferguson.We knew Michael Brown was a teenager, and we knew that he wasn’t armed. We knew all these things that we felt with our intuition.
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