Protest

In the year since the death of Michael Brown and the protests that followed in Ferguson, Missouri, a poll from the Washington Post shows that 60 percent of Americans say the nation needs to continue making changes to give blacks and whites equal rights. That compares to 46 percent from a Pew Research Center poll prior to the Ferguson events.

Activism works. Inequality is a campaign issue (at least on the Democratic side). And as David Cay Johnston reminds us, it's about more than money:

It's also about education, environmental hazards, health and health care, incarceration, law enforcement, wage theft and policies that interfere with family life over multiple generations.

The Ferguson protests made a difference.

St. Louis County Police Chief Jon Belmar told The Huffington Post it was “a shame that we haven’t had the political will before 2014” to look at the municipal courts.   ..."[I]n areas that are not as affluent, and where folks really are struggling with issues of poverty and education and crime and everything else that goes along with it -- unemployment -- they don’t have the ability really to voice that opinion. They can’t leverage change. That’s a good thing that’s come out of all this.”

A shift in media behavior after a tragedy is not unusual, Sarah Oates, a journalism professor at the University of Maryland, told The Huffington Post. Before Ferguson’s uprising, many media outlets tended to accept police accounts as fact. Now, reporters are asking why black communities are outraged with policing. 

“What’s sad is it often takes a tragedy,” Oates said. “What happened in Ferguson wasn’t unusual -- which is awful, but true. The response was unusual, and the depth and breadth of the protests was unusual. And you could kind of see it coming from Trayvon Martin ... This rising awareness [about] race and unfairness, and this real question about what was really going on.”

Black Lives Matter activists frequently extend the conversation beyond police brutality to economic, academic and other forms of inequality. 

“When we say Black Lives Matter, we are talking about the ways in which Black people are deprived of our basic human rights and dignity,” writes co-founder Alicia Garza on the movement’s website. “It is an acknowledgement [that] Black poverty and genocide is state violence.”