The George Floyd encounter, however, broke through like nothing since the 1991 video clip of Los Angeles Police Department officers savagely beating motorist Rodney King. Nine minutes of agonizing cell phone footage quickly went viral, showing Floyd lying prone, suffocating under Chauvin’s knee as the middle-aged Black man pleaded for his life while Chauvin, displaying no emotion, slowly squeezed it out of him.

It was a visceral, damning illustration of “institutional racism,” a term that for many Americans was more academic than real, and it propelled Black Lives Matter to global prominence. The organization shaped the response to the murder and to anti-Black racism in general.

BLM first began staging protests against controversial police killings after the fatal police shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, in 2014. Floyd’s murder tipped the scales and made Black justice a cause célèbre in a way it hadn’t been since the 1960s. 

Protests peaked on June 6, 2020, when a half million people showed up in 550 cities and towns around the country, by the New York Times’ count. It’s been described as the largest street protest movement in U.S. history, attracting more people than the Women’s March in 2017 and the entire Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and 1960s. Millions of dollars poured into the Black Lives Matter nonprofit. BLM became both a clarion call and a shorthand for racial justice, not just in the United States, but in countries around the world. 

And then came the backlash — or, more accurately, the reemergence of a whitelash against aggressive demands for racial justice — that’s always present in America. Trump trashed protesters as criminals, thugs and radicals, calling them the greatest threat to America’s well-being; never mind that some of the president’s devoted followers subsequently took radical, thuggish and racist criminal actions in the Jan. 6, 2021, siege of the U.S. Capitol.

At the same time, Black Lives Matter went through its own struggle born from the scale of its sudden success. In 2022, a group of BLM activists sued BLM Global Network Foundation, its donation arm, accusing it of mismanaging funds. The activists ultimately lost a nasty court battle, and the organization split.

Meanwhile, MAGA’s far-reaching opposition to racial equality and police reforms was mainstreamed via a soundbite campaign against “wokeness” and “DEI.” That campaign helped to catapult Trump to a second presidential term. The country is now living through the most explicitly repressive, punitive and anti-justice presidential administration in modern history. 

One example: President Trump told police in 2017 that they should feel free to rough up suspects, which was alarming enough, but similar sentiments are now reflected in a Justice Department that is cancelling its oversight of police departments. It is also promising to enforce an April executive order dubbed “Strengthening and Unleashing America’s Law Enforcement to Pursue Criminals and Protect Innocent Citizens.” 

There is also enough of a push — from prominent MAGA figures such as Elon Musk, Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene and right-wing commentator Ben Shapiro — for the president to pardon Chauvin, who is serving a 21-year federal sentence for violating Floyd’s civil rights, for Minnesota authorities to brace for public outrage in response. (Chauvin is serving a concurrent 22 1/2-year state sentence for second degree murder that the president cannot legally pardon away.) 

Abdullah is unfazed. “Either we become totally perpetually paralyzed — cower in corners — or we fight,” said Abdullah, a longtime professor of Pan-African Studies at Cal State Los Angeles. “You can’t find a comfortable place in oppression. It doesn’t happen.” 

Abdullah, who was Cornel West’s running mate in his independent bid for the presidency in 2024, said that as dispiriting as this moment is for so many Black people, sitting out the struggle isn’t an option. 

“It’s not just about police violence. … Federal workers who got fired are Black,” she said. “Black immigrants are being deported too, including Venezuelans.” 

One legacy of Black Lives Matter is how it engaged young people in causes beyond police brutality in the United States. Many who protested anti-Black racism became part of the college campus movement against the relentless Israeli assault on Gaza in response to Hamas fighters’ Oct. 7, 2023, sneak attack on Israel.

But times have changed. Being involved in that more recent protest movement has proven to be risky in a way that was unimaginable during the George Floyd uprising, which despite the subsequent whitelash had tremendous popular support. 

Abdullah said one of the early members of Black Lives Matter’s youth contingent went on to become a Columbia University student who participated in the Gaza protests on May 7. She suffered immediate consequences — she lost her meal plan, couldn’t access her dorm and ultimately was barred from participating in graduation ceremonies even though she was slated to graduate with honors. One of BLM’s current campaigns is Hands Off Students, a collaboration with the California Faculty Association, which supports students facing retaliation for their campus activism.

Chauntyll Allen, a Minneapolis activist who heads BLM Twin Cities, said that despite the real risks of protesting in 2025, young people are ready and eager to get into the streets. “It’s going to be them that’s going to lead us,” she said. 

Even at the height of the outpouring over George Floyd, it was clear that the problem of police shootings would not disappear or even decrease overnight. Shootings by police officers nationwide have increased every year since at least 2017, not even declining the year after the George Floyd protests, with 2024 registering the highest numbers on record, according to Statista. Black people are shot at the highest rate.

In Los Angeles, police officers shot and killed more people in 2023 than in 2022, firing significantly more rounds than they had the previous three years combined. Abdullah said BLM continues to publicize and follow the stories of victims in and around L.A., such as Christopher Mitchell, killed by police in Torrance in 2018. 

But the new pro-law enforcement, anti-justice mood emanating from the White House is already casting a pall. The interim U.S. attorney in L.A. is trying — post-trial — to offer a plea deal to Trevor Kirk, the sheriff’s deputy who was convicted of violating the civil rights of a Black woman he body-slammed to the ground in 2023.

As for the media, Abdullah said it’s completely turned away from coverage of police abuses, “unless you’re talking about something that’s drastic.” When the federal government sees anti-white discrimination as America’s real civil rights problem, and Trump welcomes white South Africans as refugees from that country’s Black government, it’s hard to know what “drastic” means. 

Worse to Abdullah is seeing liberals and politicians — especially Black politicians — who seemed committed to racial justice capitulating to a fear of Trumpian retribution.

Mayor Karen Bass, a legendary community organizer before launching a career as an elected official, has increased funding and provided raises for police since becoming mayor. She was, perhaps not coincidentally, endorsed by the police union. That spending is part of the reason the city finds itself facing a $1 billion deficit now, Abdullah noted.

For the last five years, Black Lives Matter has proposed a People’s Budget to the L.A. City Council in an attempt to reduce police funding and prioritize housing, mental health, parks, libraries and other services. 

Bass received the People’s Budget at a public event in Leimert Park in April, but none of its recommendations were adopted. BLM mobilized around the recent City Council vote on the budget, which did not increase police hiring nearly as much as Bass wanted — an outcome that was a win for BLM’s bigger mission. “This is not personal,” Abdullah said. “I’ve known Karen since 1994, when I first moved to L.A. I love her. But this isn’t about that love. You’ve got to call people out. Love is also about challenging people.”

Abdullah refuses to be wistful about the watershed year of 2020, when over 100,000 people jammed the streets of Hollywood on a memorable day of protest. “It was an unrealistic expectation to keep that up,” she said. “It was a different time. We were in COVID, people were home and available to get out.” 

She added that even as democracy is being undermined — or because it’s being undermined — Black Lives Matter is regaining traction. The Wednesday protests that were often miniscule are growing. “On our lowest days, we’ve got 40 people. That’s tremendous growth,” she said. 

The organization is onboarding 10 new chapters, including one in Santa Clarita, and another in Sweden. That would bring the total number of chapters to 50, a high. Though some people continue to despair about the trajectory of Trump 2.0, Abdullah observed that “some people are more determined than ever” to counter it, chiefly by returning BLM to its roots with a strategy of changing the status quo one campaign at a time, one week at a time.  

“I said in 2020 that the world cracked open,” said Abdullah. “It’s cracking open again.”