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From #BlackLivesMatter to Black Liberation book cover; photo of the author

Credit: Haymarket Books / Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor

From #BlackLivesMatter to Black Liberation by Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor

The unprecedented protests across the country and around the world against police brutality and in support of the Black Lives Matter movement invite the question: How did we get here? Among the litany of reading materials that have been making the social media rounds in attempts to answer, this 2016 book by Princeton professor and Pulitzer finalist Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor is among the best of the bunch.

Taylor’s book serves as an essential guide, giving crucial context as she writes with clarity and great nuance about the conditions that eventually led to the formation of the Black Lives Matter movement. She toggles back and forth in time, showing how the radical nature of the 1960s civil rights movement helped push President Lyndon Johnson to expand government benefits and how that same radicalism, which led to widespread strikes by working class people across racial lines, scared Nixon into implementing vicious crackdowns on members of the influential Black Panther Party and a push for an expansion of the carceral state. She shows us how Reagan and Clinton built up this carceral system even further. She dispels the common notion that “black faces in high places” — namely a small ruling class of black elites — can implement meaningful change in the lives of working class black people. She discusses the liberal notion of a “culture of poverty”— meant to be a refutation to the idea that black people are biologically inferior, but which instead became a ready excuse used by both conservatives and liberals alike to blame black people for their high rates of poverty and generally lower quality of life— something she points out, Obama had a tendency to do throughout his presidency.

And she walks us through the nascent days of the Black Lives Matter movement—from the widespread protests over the killings of Trayvon Martin and Freddie Gray to the uprising in Ferguson. She highlights both the differences and similarities between this movement and the 1960s—particularly emphasizing the prominence of black queer women and a decentralized organizational structure in this new phase.

Reading this book now— as staggering numbers of people take to the streets, yielding results — makes me eager to find out where the next chapter of the movement may take us. And hopeful that Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor will be one of the folks writing it. Get your copy. —Tomi Obaro