Documenting Wisconsin\u27s Black Lives Matter Demonstrations

The police murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis on May 25, 2020 ignited an ongoing global movement that has galvanized our collective abolitionist efforts through demands for racial justice, an end to police brutality, and the dismantling, de-institutionalization, and defunding of racist systems. A collaborative effort on the part of students and faculty at UWM and Marquette and community stakeholders, this project assembles a digital, real-time, community-based archive of the movement in Milwaukee and across Wisconsin. This work, as it must be, is ongoing; thus, the archive is still very much a work-in-progress. It features source material from the protests and includes: photos, videos, firsthand reflections, oral histories, news articles, documentation of protest events, a timeline, press releases and public statements from elected officials and community leaders, a geo-spatial analysis of the movement, and more. The archive will help ensure that when it comes time to write the history of this mo(ve)ment, the story is told by its participants. The project situates the current Black Lives Matter Movement within the broader arc of Black-led struggles for police accountability and racial justice in Milwaukee across the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Pedagogical and on-campus initiatives around this project, as well as outreach and educational efforts in activist spaces and elsewhere off campus, will help frame discussions of anti-racist social change and societal transformation. The archive’s participatory model seeks, in turn, to move the needle forward on community-engaged scholarship and memory work