All products are independently selected by our editors.
If you buy something, we may earn an affiliate commission.
In 2016, two friends took to Twitter to announce plans for a sit-in.
Getty
It had been one week since police had shot and killed Philando Castile and Alton Sterling.
Eva Lewis knew one of the two posters from her old school.
When she saw her call to action, she wanted to help.
Young and Restlessby Mattie Kahn,$29
Another volunteer later joined.
All four of the activists on the impromptu steering committee were Black girls.
I said, we need a group chat, Lewis recalled.
I said, we need goals, we need a purpose.
What we wanted was this to be a peaceable protest.
Lewis envisioned no arrests.
She wanted hundreds of people to comefrom all different backgrounds.
She wanted to make a statement.
When it was over, Lewis and the other three activists went to eat pizza.
An interviewer later asked how she had prepared for the event.
Lewis told her she sang gospel songs.
Historic events tend to have a medium of documentation associated with them.
We remember the World Wars in great books and serif-font letters.
The civil rights movement has been sequenced in thousands of photos.
When the Twin Towers fell, millions of people watched their collapse on television.
The Arab Spring was livestreamed.
The war in Ukraine aired on TikTok.
That evolutionthat democratizationhas had mixed results.
Local news has been decimated.
A content creator is not a journalist.
And activism that never moves from the internet into the real world can have a blunted impact.
Social media can start a revolution, but it needs to resonate IRL.
Still, its impact is undeniable.
And it has expanded the set of perspectives that reach the public.
For centuries, women and girls have been written out of the canonical narratives.
With the internet, their voices have been amplified.
The cultural critic Jane Hu has assessed how the mechanics of protest have evolved over time.
She cites the proliferation of links to bail-fund donations and retweets calling for people to match them.
She recounts how email and phone call templates urge users to reach out to their elected officials.
Fewer people seem to want or care to distinguish between one world and the other.
There is less need tothe streams have crossed.
Young and Restlessby Mattie Kahn,$29
Girls have made the most of it.
High school studentsused to drafting their papers in Google Docsnow workshop their mission statements in real time.
TikTok videos have educated a generation in the principles of abolition.
(Who had shown these kids how totalk like that?)
And then there was Darnella Frazier.
Frazier was 17 when she witnessed the murder of George Floyd.
Her evidencecirculated on social mediarefuted the law enforcement line.
Protests exploded around the world.
She was still a committed activist, now in her 20s.
The pandemic had created new needs, which she wanted to meet.
She was coordinating drop-offs of food for families who lacked access to fresh groceries.
She had crowd-funded rental assistance.
People sent her videos of their own demonstrations which she reposted on social media.
She wanted people to see activists at work.
Im just sharing as much as I can, she said.
Ten thousand people followed them.
In San Francisco, two students met on Instagram and marshaled a Black Lives Matter protest within 18 hours.
Her mother discovered her involvement when she saw her daughters face on the cover of theChicago Tribuneat Walgreens.
Girls rallied in front of courthouses and police stations.
Girls shared protest details on social media.
Some had been active in organized demonstrations before.
Others were experiencing the thrill of protest for the first time.
Girls slid into DMs.
Girls got exhausted and didnt pretend otherwise.
Whose interests did it serve to make believe that girls were invincible?
In an interview, she was defiant: Were allowed to be weak.
We are teenagers…and were allowed to be emotional.
Frazier testified at the trial.
The incident still haunted her.
She cried on the stand.
Millions of people had seen her video.
Far fewer had heard her voice.
The murder changed how I viewed life, she wrote.
It made me realize how dangerous it is to be Black in America.
She had been honored with a Pulitzer Prize.
She had turned 18.
She had helped deliver some justice.
Chauvin is serving over two decades in prison.
But Frazier did not feel special.
People liked to talk about the girl who had been there.
It was different to be her.
Frazier was not eligible to vote when she recorded the video that helped spark a continent-spanning call for justice.
But she was grateful she had the internet.
In no previous generation would her action have been possible.
She wanted to heal.
She needed to cope with the trauma.
Still, she wrote she was proud of what she had done.
Copyright 2023 by Mattie Kahn.
