Black Lives Matter (BLM) is a social justice movement in America that began in 2013 after a string of high-profile killings of unarmed Black people. While the gun deaths of Black people in America was not a new phenomenon, a few elements helped lead to the popularization of BLM, including a shifting culture after the election of the country’s first Black president in 2008 and the continued emergence of social media sites like Twitter that allowed better outreach and an easier approach to grassroots organizing.

The BLM movement continued throughout the 2010s as more murders occurred. While the main public conversation around BLM focused on the murder of unarmed Black people by police officers, BLM actually focused on many other societal inequities and examples of systemic racism, including economic inequality, discrimination, representation in media, education, and other aspects of American culture.

BLM gained its most widespread popular reach during the presidency of Donald Trump and especially after murder of George Floyd in 2020.

While BLM is a term representative of a broad array of political actions and beliefs, at its core the movement is about affirming the humanity of Black people. Despite this fundamental belief and due to widespread civil unrest in the nation exacerbated by multiple facets, BLM became one of the most divisive entities of the late 2010s.