The Black Radical Success Story Your History Class Ignored
The Reconstruction era as it’s taught minimizes a grand, transformative project that remade not just Black life, but life as we know it
Update 6/7/22: Level has a new home. You can read this article and other new articles by visiting LEVELMAN.com.
Earlier this week, journalist Taylor Crumpton screenshotted a bewildering Google autocomplete suggesting that Shaun King was the founder of the Black Lives Matter Movement. This is… not true. (For years, the movement’s true founders — Alicia Garza, Patrisse Cullors, and Opal Tometi — have had to battle assumptions that King and DeRay McKesson are co-founders.) Yet somehow, it took less than 48 hours before King’s latest stunt: threatening to dox police officers in response to the vicious shooting of Jacob Blake in Kenosha, Wisconsin.
That King is still seen as a leader in the movement for Black liberation despite numerous troubling issues — in this case putting Black people in immediate harm by riling up police officers who need no extra encouragement, in other cases a history of questionable business practices and harassment toward Black women — is more than an annoyance. It’s an unnecessary intraracial obstacle that creates more confusion than real change. Both…
