August 18, 2015
Danny Glover, Issa Rae, and Patrice Cullors in Martha’s Vineyard to Discuss African Americans and Media
What motivated your decision to include Danny Glover and Issa Rae as panelists?
Danny Glover has been, in many ways, fortunate–he’s tremendously talented–but there are a lot of talented people of color who don’t get to play the diverse and rich roles that he has gotten to play. Issa Rae has used the medium of YouTube and the Internet to get her story out; that’s a real change.
This is the first moment in human history, in which almost all of us have the ability to speak and tell stories to millions of people and hear back from them without mainstream media and gate keepers. Issa Rae, like Danny Glover, is a very talented story teller. She’s been innovative in finding new ways to tell her story; in the way she wants to tell it, through a medium that literally didn’t exist a decade ago. So, that was the idea behind bringing together this diverse panel, which of course includes Patrice Cullors who has used Twitter to [support] activism and concern about police killings of unarmed black men.
Social media has played a pivotal role in the development of social justice movements, particularly Black Lives Matter. Can you talk about some of the ways technology has impacted activism and differences between today’s black activism and the civil rights movement?
Social media is an organizing tool. So, people [from] far reaches of the country and the globe now know they have allies with whom they can connect. Imagine if Martin Luther King Jr. had access to Twitter–the movement he would have been able to create. Today activists are able to tell their story, organize, and bring people together to demand action; that’s transformative. There are certainly differences between 20th and 21st century movements. 21st century movements tend to be more decentralized; there are fewer recognizable national leaders. They are more networked. But I think when we look back a decade or two, at the Black Lives Matter movement, we’ll see that there were a cadre of leaders, just as there were in the previous civil rights movement. We’ll see that there were people who exerted tremendous personal courage and leadership, and were the glue that held these movements together.
The event was held at the Harbor View Hotel, Edgartown Room, 131 North Water Street, in scenic Martha’s Vineyard. To learn more about The Opportunity Agenda visit www.opportunityagenda.org.
This article was written by Rebecca Nichloson.