Digital Marketers Can Play a Role in Archiving for Black Lives Matter

Preserving the culture as a form of resistance and resilience in the Black Lives Matter Movement

Image source from author

In 2015, after Black people spoke out against the mysterious-death-ruled-suicide of Sandra Bland while in Houston police custody, her hashtag algorithm was deleted from Tumblr, Instagram and Twitter. While the hashtag was restored, many in academia began archiving tweets as a way to preserve how people responded to social issues.

There is a deep and ugly history of erasure of Black voices in the media.

In writing about community-based approaches to preserving Black Lives Matter, Senior Archivist Yvonne Ng says it best:

“This growth reflects a recognition that people and communities should be empowered to document and preserve their own histories, and to make decisions about how their stories are collected and used. These participatory archive movements are especially valuable in communities that institutional archives have traditionally overlooked or misrepresented, and in communities where archives belonging to the state or other institutions have historically enabled discrimination and abuse.”

— YVONNE NG