The Decline of Black Lives Matter

The wounded state of a movement that set fire to the country.

Businesses burning during the 2020 riots in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Credit: Hungryogrephotos.

A gray sky stretched over the Manhattan courthouse as cries of joy and anger erupted within the room on the thirteenth floor. Daniel Penny, a white former Marine who got into a fatal altercation with a black homeless man while riding the subway, was acquitted on the charge of criminally negligent homicide.

Demonstrators gathered daily to call for Penny’s head as the trial unfolded. One of the organizers, a man named Walter “Hawk” Newsome, was inside the building that morning. He spotted Penny as he emerged from the courtroom. “It’s a small world, buddy,” Newsome said. Gasps were heard as court officers ushered Penny and his team out, The New York Times reported. He called on “black vigilantes” to act in response to the verdict.

Newsome, who was arrested in May after he confronted a police officer, co-founded Black Lives Matter Greater New York with his sister Chivona. “It was foolish of us to think that a black man would get justice in a system that is designed to keep him oppressed,” she said in a statement. But justice had been served—by jurors unconvinced of Penny’s guilt by prosecutors who went hard in the paint to lock him up. It was a significant moment in that it highlighted just how exasperated Americans have become with crime—even in blue citadels—and underscored the decline of Black Lives Matter, which was, until recently, a potent movement.

I wouldn’t be surprised to see a resurgence at some point. But as it stands, Black Lives Matter is a far cry from the militant street-level movement that could once set fire to whole city blocks and terrorize communities with virtual impunity.

Twenty-twenty feels like a fever dream in retrospect. One of the images burned into my brain from then is that of a mass of masked people heaving a massive sculpture of a raised fist, the centerpiece in a memorial for George Floyd. Icon and adherents of what The Times called “the largest movement in the country’s history.” At its peak, on a single day that year, half a million souls protested in nearly 550 places across the country. All manner of misbehavior was permitted, often with great or at least reluctant solemnity, before the movement’s march. Now, people like Hawk and Chivona Newsome appear startlingly out of step with a public that has grown weary of a faith that demands repentance without forgiveness and redemption.

It was also a business and a lucrative one at that.

The exact amount of money generated by the movement as a whole is actually hard to calculate, given the myriad entities, donors, and payout methods. The Center for the American Way of Life, a branch of The Claremont Institute, places the total number in the ballpark of $83 billion.