BLK Social Journalist

Bernie Sanders: Black lives matter. And the reason those words matter is the Afircan American community knows that on any given day some innocent person like Sandra Bland can get into a car and then three days later she’s gonna end up dead in jail. Or that kids are gonna get shot. We need to combat institutional racism from top and bottom and we need major, major reforms in a broken criminal justice system in which we have more people in jail than China. And I intend to tackle that issue, to make sure that our people have education and jobs rather than jail cells. 

Martin O’Malley: The point that the Black Lives Matter movement is making is a very, very legitimate and serious point, and that is that as a nation we have undervalued the lives of, black lives, people of color. When I ran for Mayor of Baltimore…I said that if we were burying white, young, poor men in these numbers, we would be marching in the streets and there would be a different reaction. Black lives matter, and we have a lot of work to do to reform our criminal justice system and to address race relations in our country. 

In a video released Wednesday night, multiple police officers seem to be holding 28-year-old Sandra Bland to the ground while she cries out, “You just slammed my head into the ground, do you not even care about that?” Three days later, Bland was found dead in a jail cell.