We Say Their Names

In its current form, this twitter project was a daily remembrance of the challenge to be overcome. Each and every day, at the time of their killing, the account tweets out the name, story and news report of every found record of an unarmed Black person murdered by a police officer from January 1, 2015 to June 3, 2020. They currently number 146. Over time, I hope the constant and consistent invocation of these lost lives in our feeds will go some way towards keeping present what is too easily relegated to the past or delegated to the future. The account is @WeSayTheirNames.

After the murder of George Floyd, I looked to find a list of other Black people like him, unarmed and without-threat, (more on those terms later) killed at the hands of officers. There was no list before 2013. There is no single complete list of even the past 5 years. That is to say, we have better archives of our emails than we have of black lives lost.

The story of making this project, and the wholly insufficient public data surrounding police killings in the United States, is posted here

Currently, the twitter account is on hold - I apparently violated Twitter's policy by having the account tweet the same things each and every day.