WP3-1

Foreman

All Lives Matter Or Do They
Jonathan D. Foreman
Professor Meredith
ENGL 1302: Sec. 2202
10 May 2016

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Table of Contents

Writing Project 3 Topic ................................................................................................................................... 1
Original Image.................................................................................................................................................2
Annotated Bibliography ..................................................................................................................................3
Visual Argument ............................................................................................................................................ 4
All Lives Matter Or Do They ..........................................................................................................................5
Works Cited.................................................................................................................................................... 8

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Writing Project 3 Topic
My project will discuss Black Lives Matter. I will use visual argument to why all people
should support it the movement as it is seen with a new generational Civil Rights
movement.

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Original Image

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Annotated Bibliography
Leifer, Neil. Ali Over Liston. 1965. Photograph. Maine.

This image captures the iconic picture of Muhammad Ali’s knockout victory over
Sonny Liston at their second bout. At the time of the picture the photographer had
been originally moved out his seat by another senior photographer. This iconic
picture would go on to symbolize over the years the victory for a lot of people.
This was one of Ali’s defining moments of his career as he became “The
Greatest”.

I will use this image to show the fight that black people around America and the
world have been going through just to get their voice heard. The backlash of
doing so is getting counter argued with another movement such as All Lives
Matter which suggest that they think black people are only trying to push an
agenda of making America blacker by our standards.

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Visual Argument

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All Lives Matter Or Do They
In the past decade of America a lot of things have changed. In that time frame we
saw the first black President get elected among many first elections of people of color
around the nation. There seemed to be a cost of all of this celebration in the eyes of
people of color. The past five years or so in the world of social media and television there
has been an uproar from those under the thumb of a type of oppression which has the
majority in some type of feeling as if it was all made up out of nowhere and some big
propaganda cause. Quite frankly, it is the same old song that black people have been
singing for years and it seems that the time for singing has ended and now the age of
screaming has been ushered into existence once again.
The portrayal of people of color in movies and various other platforms has not
always been a good one unless they are playing a villain, slave or somebody crooked as
in Denzel Washington’s case was in the movie “Training Day” for which he received his
Oscar award for. February 26, 2012 is a day that a family, friends, and strangers young
and old will never forget as long as they live. On this evening Trayvon Martin had kissed
his mother bye as he walked to the store for an Arizona Tea and a pack of Skittles for
what nobody thought would be the last time ever. What Trayvon did not know or what he
was not supposed to know that he was already a victim. All of the pretenses have been set
against him from the moment he left the house regardless if he was going to do anything
wrong or not. The young man was leaving the store when he was preyed upon for fitting
a description. What description was it? He was black and wearing a hooded jacket. Why
is this such a travesty? Trayvon was fitting the role of movies and television shows

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everywhere that he was a gangster and a criminal. The odds were completely stacked
against him.

Now we insert George Zimmerman into the equation. Zimmerman is a
neighborhood watch coordinator for a gated community in which Trayvon was staying in
temporarily at the time of their engagement. Trayvon was on his way home from which
he would not make it when he was stopped by this adult for presumably nothing besides
walking while black. The two engaged in words and to this day it is still not clear how the
altercation got physical but it did and ended up with the death of an unarmed black
teenager (CNN). This rippled through the streets of the black community everywhere.
What could this child have done? He got into a fight with an older man and possibly beat
him up and in a jealous rage shot the young boy? What makes all of this worse is that the
fact that once the case was taken to trial there was presumably no evidence of a hate
crime. Zimmerman was told by the police, in which he was in contact with the whole
time while following Trayvon home, to not engage this young man and let him go about
his day. The media speculation tried to destroy the innocence of a young by finding all
types of pictures they thought could ruin his image and it ultimately did its job.

Through this shocking incident and many others following a group of young black
people found each other by using Twitter and Facebook by using the hashtag Black Lives
Matter. They established a full blown organization dedicated to bringing awareness to
everyone regardless if they listened or not, how tired the black community was of getting
overlooked by the legal system that was truly never there to help them out and wanted
fair treatment. This was never meant as an agenda to say that a black life mattered more
than a white or Hispanic life. It was an affirmation that as black people we want the same

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amount of respect as a white person gets if a crime is committed or if we are killed by the
hands of police or strangers. It is a hard sell to some Americans to grasp that as they only
see the word black and want to include everyone. This organization is trying to be the
new leader in civil rights for a new and young generation so that their kids do not have to
go through what a lot of blacks parents and grandparents went through.

Once the hashtag and the protest started to pick up you immediately had a
crushing blow thrown back at the black community saying All Lives Matter. This
argument does nothing but downplay everything that has gone on and shows willful
ignorance amongst anybody that supports this claim. If the people for this claim truly
believed this then how do you explain a police officer putting a black man in an illegal
chokehold who did nothing wrong besides stand there and killing him? Or police
shooting 100 rounds inside a couple’s car that had no weapons or were they resisting
arrest?

All Lives Matters suggest that every human being of color is equal. Completely
wrong considering this land of America was never intended for the progression of people
of color. This is the same place that slavery was written into law. Where a slave wasn’t
even considered a human being but a piece of property like an animal. This is the lineage
that majority of black people come from in this country and we are told to overlook that
but how do you do so knowing that nothing here was intentionally written for people that
look like you?

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Works Cited
BlackLivesMatter.com Staff “Who We Are” Organization 2012. Web.
CNN.com Staff “Trayvon Martin Shooting Fast Facts.” Events 2016. Web