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Thousands of Londoners took to the city’s streets last week to protest the murder of George Floyd, an unarmed black man, by police officers in the US, as well as institutional racism here in the UK.
The Londoners who came out for the Black Lives Matter marches were largely wearing masks and PPE and carried signs displaying messages such as ‘the UK is not innocent’, ‘say his name: George Floyd’, ‘white minds must change’ and ‘colour is not a crime’ as they protested across the city.
Now, Black Cultural Archives (BCA) is asking Londoners to share digital artefacts of this wave of activism to help the institution build a collection documenting the Black Lives Matter movement in 2020. It’s part of the organisation’s long term campaign to collect, preserve and celebrate the histories of people of African and Caribbean descent in the UK – one that you can donate to here.
BCA’s managing director Arike Oke has written a blog post on its website asking ‘what will the future generations remember of this time?’. It explains that lockdown means it’s harder for BCA to collect physical objects, and so calls on people to donate digital photos, videos, artworks, petitions, articles and poems from this time. (Nothing that identifies individual protestors, though.) You can share yours here.
BCA isn’t the only organisation collecting content from the protests. Magazine and online publication gal-dem is asking people to share videos of themselves protesting from home. It’s looking for clips of people making signs to put in windows, reading anti-racist books, tuning into informative Zoom calls and more.
Donate to these anti-racism charities and organisations doing amazing work in London.
These resources connect Londoners to black-owned businesses.