Largest anti-racism movement

Black Lives Matter (BLM) was co-founded in July 2013 by community activists Patrisse Cullors, Alicia Garza and Opal Tometi (all USA) to oppose racial injustice and police brutality in response to the acquittal of George Zimmerman who fatally shot teenager Trayvon Martin in February 2012. Since then, public engagement with BLM has sky-rocketed in the USA and beyond, particularly in the wake of the murder of George Floyd by a police officer in Minneapolis, Minnesota, on 25 May 2020, According to research of poll data by political scientist Professor Erica Chenoweth of Harvard University, between 15 and 26 million people in the USA alone participated in a BLM demonstration in the month following Floyd's death. This means it most likely represents the largest mass protest movement in US history of any kind.

The greatest number of BLM demonstrations on a single day were logged on 6 June 2020, where an estimated half a million people took to the streets in more than 550 locations across the USA alone; the largest gatherings (numbering in the tens of thousands) took place in Philadelphia, Chicago and Washington, DC.

19 June 2020 saw another spike in anti-racism demonstrations spearheaded by BLM. This date, known as Juneteenth, is particularly poignant as it's an annual US holiday that marks the emancipation of African-American slaves. President Joe Biden recognized it as an official federal holiday on 17 June 2021, with the signing of the Juneteenth National Independence Day Act.

The proliferation of BLM-driven anti-racism demonstrations in June 2020 came almost 60 years after the largest single civil-rights rally, led by Martin Luther King, Jr, where more than 250,000 demonstrators marched down the Mall in Washington, DC, and gathered in front of the Lincoln Memorial on 28 August 1963 where King delivered his momentous "I have a dream" speech.