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Black Lives Matter 2014–2020: celebrity flashpoints and iconic images

For a brief period in August 2014 US journalist Wesley Lowery unexpectedly attained a fleeting celebrity status, which he recounts in his book ‘They Can’t Kill Us All’, a compelling and illuminating first-person account of the sharp and dramatic rise to prominence in the US of the Black Lives Matter movement (2017, p. 12). It came after he was arrested while covering the civil unrest that ensued from the fatal police shooting of Michael Brown and its aftermath in Ferguson, Missouri on 9 August that year. By the time Lowery and his colleague Ryan Reilly were released from custody, just half an hour after having been placed in a cell at Ferguson police headquarters, news of what had happened to them had gone viral across the online mediascape and ‘it was clear’, he writes, ‘that we had become momentary media celebrities’ (2017, p. 12). Since then, Black Lives Matter, both in the US and in the UK, has given rise to the politicised celebrity status of heretofore relatively unknown individuals like Lowery. It has also been punctuated by numerous celebrity flashpoints, and a range of interventions by extant celebrities whose public profiles have become inflected by their associations with, material support for, or vocal advocacy of the movement. Politically engaged interventions into Black Lives Matter by established major celebrities thus ensued from the 2014 Ferguson events and their aftermath quite quickly, accompanied in some cases by noteworthy acts of celebrity philanthropy that were undertaken in ostensible support of the rising movement. Beyoncé for instance, who was rumoured to have secretly met with Black Lives Matter civil rights activist DeRay McKesson post-Ferguson and who (along with Jay Z) went on to donate a six-figure sum of money to various groups affiliated with the movement (Lowery 2017, p. 158), was arguably the highest profile example of such a celebrity. In addition to this act of politicised celebrity philanthropy, in the months and years after Ferguson, Beyoncé’s records, music videos and performances also started to reference Black Lives Matter, in ways both explicit and implicit. This culminated in the major celebrity flashpoint that occurred around her, arising from her 2016 Superbowl performance in which she, accompanied by a troupe of black women dancers, performed her racially politically charged song ‘Formation’, in costumes that paid clear tribute to the movement and its political sentiments via evocations of the visual aesthetics associated with the Black Panther Party (all black, with black beret