“…there is not a great American city from New York to Cleveland or Detroit, from Washington, the nation’s capital, to Chicago, from Memphis to Atlanta or Birmingham, form New Orleans to Los Angeles, that is not disgraced by the wanton killing of innocent Negroes.” – We Charge Genocide (1951)

On December 3rd of 2014, Daniel Pantaleo, the white NYPD officer responsible for the murder of Eric Garner, a middle-aged Black male resident of NYC, was not indicted for Garner’s murder by a grand jury overseeing the proceedings of the case. Given the recent history of massive protests in opposition to police brutality and anti-Black violence across the country, a wave of protests decrying the grand jury’s decision was inevitable.

Mere weeks after the Wilson verdict, in which Ferguson, Missouri, police officer Darren Wilson was cleared of all charges in the killing of unarmed Black teen Michael Brown, the Pantaleo verdict created even more distress in the hearts of people across the country fighting for the end of police violence and recognition, in both thought and action, of the value of Black lives.

Despite the attention given to present-day police violence in Black communities, the mass murder of Black people, both by vigilantes and those employed by the state, is not a new phenomena in the United States. However, modern day killings of Black people have been said to surpass those which took place in the South during the era of racial apartheid.

Due in large part to the accessibility of information in today’s world, thanks to social media websites such as Twitter, people across the country, and even the globe, are showing solidarity to activists on the front lines of the Black Lives Matter movement.

This said, before the Black Lives Matter movement shifted a broader lens on the issue of police violence in Black communities, two organizations, the Stolen Lives Project and the October 22 Coalition, have been active in challenging anti-Black police violence for decades.

The Stolen Lives Project, whose mission, as quoted from their website, is “to assemble a national list of people killed by law enforcement agents from 1990 to the present.”, has documented over two-thousand cases of people killed by police officers, publishing this information in a book in 1999. While acknowledging the fact that the two-thousand cases they’ve documented are a small fraction of the number of people killed by police officers, the goals of the project are twofold; to maintain evidence of the epidemic of extrajudicial killings in the United States, and to preserve the dignity of those whose deaths would have been swept beneath the rug to maintain the myth of a policing system untainted by corruption.

Active since 1966, the October 22 Coalition began as the brainchild of various people engaged in radical politics during the 60’s. Working in tandem with the Stolen Lives Project, the Coalition helps organize those seeking to take part in the National Day of Protest. A mass database of resources and points of contact for those wanting to get involved in protest against police violence, the Coalition seeks to bring together “those under the gun and those not under the gun as a powerful voice to expose the epidemic of police brutality.”.

As exemplified by two organizations mentioned above, police violence in Black communities is not a new occurrence; however, neither is resistance.

With Black Lives Matter protesters in Washington, DC interrupting lunches on Capitol Hill by staging ‘die-ins‘, time will only tell if we’re entering a new stage of the Black Lives Matter movement, one where those who aren’t living in military-police occupied zones, such as Ferguson, are willing to push the nation’s political big shots on their willingness to take action to cease the terrorism afflicting Black lives.