Black Lives Matter

This investigative report from the Washington Post won the Pulitzer Prize in 2016.
The project aims to highlight the statistics concerning killings by police in the United States. Previously, these data had never been collected, and indeed the result of the project has been ground-breaking. The Washington Post has been updating this database for five years, highlighting one of the most intimate problems of the United States, which exploded in the summer of 2020 in the aftermath of George Floyd’s brutal murder, with images that became viral and shocked the world.
From 2015 to 2020, the rate of murders committed by the American Police has followed the same linear trend: with a thousand fatal shootings every year, it remains one of the greatest national problems of the United States. You can browse the victims’ stories in the database.
Just a couple of facts you can find in the database. The 95% of the victims are male, but the American police has killed more than 250 women since 2015. Here you can find a feature story devoted to these 250+ women. Even though the number of black people in America is definitely lower than the number of white people, black Americans are killed by police at more than twice the rate of white Americans.

In this multimedia reportage, the New York Times narrates the protests in Portland. By using maps and photographs, The New York Times manages to convey all the anger of the protesters, who did not let the Covid-19 epidemic stop them and who took to the streets in search for justice after the death of George Floyd.
The Black Lives Matter movement and the revolts bring us back to 1968, when a four-day protest in Washington Dc would change America forever – those days of protest have been recounted by the Washington Post with a multimedia reportage.
Going back to 2020, and precisely in Washington, during a night of protests two American military helicopters flew over the streets swarmed by protesters in a sort of “demonstration of strength” trying to scare away demonstrators. The two low-flying helicopters have generated winds comparable to those of a tropical storm, as the Washington Post recounts here.
Between 2019 and 2020, the Black Lives Matter protest has not been an isolated case; indeed, students and activists have taken to the streets of Hong Kong for more than 100 days, and their story is told by the South China Morning Post.

A multimedia timeline that collects the photographs of every demonstration of the Black Lives Matter organization in the United States in the months following George Floyd’s death. In this long photographic Scrollytelling, the New York Times tries to make the numerousness of the demonstrations and of the demonstrators perceivable.
Throughout the country, the demonstrations are bringing about a change in the perception of the felt experience of the most segregated ethnicities, and especially of the daily challenges that the African-American people have to face.
The Washington Post published a journalistic enquiry in 2018, which shows that America is more multi-ethnic than ever, but still extremely “segregated”.
In addition, also in 2018, the New York Times denounced the career prospects among people of different ethnicity with a data-driven investigative report, and the result was shocking.