1144 ★ CHAPTER 28 A New Century and New Crises
officers who used excessive force be held accountable. It gave public voice to
the countless African- Americans who had experienced disrespect, harassment,
or violence at the hands of police. The movement used social media and current
technology to organize protests and disseminate videos of encounters between
black persons and the police. The impact of these images had precedents,
notably in the role of television in bringing the war in Vietnam and violent
reactions to civil rights demonstrators to national awareness in the 1960s. But
the creation of such images was now democratized— most of the videos that
spurred outrage were taken by bystanders with cell phones. The Black Lives
Matter movement was less an articulation of specific policy demands than a
broad claim to black humanity. In this sense, it had historical precedents in
abolitionism, with its slogan “Am I Not a Man and a Brother?” and in “I Am a
Man,” the defiant claim of Memphis refuse collectors during their 1968 strike,
where Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated.
In Ferguson, Missouri, Brown’s death inspired weeks of sometimes violent
street demonstrations. These led to the deployment of state police and National
Guardsmen dressed in battle gear and armed with assault rifles and armored
personnel carriers, as if equipped for a war zone overseas— a sign of how polic-
ing had become increasingly militarized since the 1960s. The death of Brown
and the others, at the very least, suggested that half a century after the ghetto
uprisings of the 1960s, many police departments still relied on excessive force
in dealing with black men, and that the criminal justice system remained mired
in racism. In Ferguson, investigations after the death of Michael Brown revealed
that the almost entirely white police, city government, and local judiciary reg-
ularly preyed on black residents, seeing them not as citizens to be served and
protected but as a source of revenue to balance the local budget. Blacks were
hauled into court to pay fines for non- existent driving violations, jaywalking,
even walking on the sidewalks too close to the street. Sometimes jail terms
ensued for those unable to pay the fine. Over ninety percent of such arrests in
Ferguson—which were entirely discretionary—were of black men and women.
Nationally, public reaction to the Black Lives Matter movement revealed a
sharp divide between white and black Americans. In public opinion polls, over
eighty percent of blacks but just thirty percent of whites agreed with the state-
ment that blacks are victims of discriminatory treatment by the police.
Obama and the World
The most dramatic achievement of Obama’s presidency in foreign affairs was
fulfillment of his campaign promise to end American involvement in the Iraq
War. At the end of 2011, the last American combat soldiers came home, although
a few hundred advisers remained. Nearly 5,000 Americans and, according to