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The movement's online presence has been critical to its impact and growth over the last five years. A recent report from the Pew Research Center found that #BlackLivesMatter has been tweeted nearly 30 million times since 2013, an average of 17,002 times a day.

“That hashtag is recognizable, that hashtag evokes something, I think, in the spirit of all people, not just here in America but around the world,” said Sonia Lewis, the lead of the Sacramento chapter of Black Lives Matter and the cousin of Stephon Clark, who was killed in a police-involved shooting this March.

On the street, Black Lives Matter has both sustained protests around police violence and has shaped the principles of more recent protest movements.

And the movement's work has reverberated far beyond urban enclaves that have often seen the tension between law enforcement and minority communities play out.

Delaney Tarr, of the March for Our Lives protests stemming from gun control protests after the mass shooting in Parkland, said that Black Lives Matter has been something she’s “incredibly conscious of.”

“No matter who the perpetrator is gun violence is still gun violence,” she added, saying that the lessons from Black Lives Matter have been something her movement has factored in because “we really wanted to be as intersectional as possible.”

\"PHOTO:
Taimy Alvarez/Sun Sentinel/TNS via Newscom
PHOTO: Marjory Stoneman Douglas students hold a press conference on June 4, 2018 at Pine Trails Park in Parkland, Fla.
>

In addition to protests, Woodly said that Black Lives Matter has been instrumental in “changing people’s minds about what’s possible and desirable.”

According to Gallup’s most recent Most Important Problem poll, Americans rank immigration and race relations as the third and fourth biggest issues facing the country, a shift from five years ago Woodly says.

Black Lives Matter helped popularize some of today’s more liberal policy positions.“The call to abolish ICE is connected to the call to abolish police and prisons,” Woodly said.

Adrian Reyna, the director of membership and technology strategies at United We Dream, a youth lead immigrant rights organization, echoed that sentiment.

\"They have really set the ground to be able to push back against federal agencies like ICE and CBP, who are basically executing the agenda of putting as many people into the deportation pipeline and into detention centers,\" he said.

\"PHOTO:
Jim Watson/AFP/Getty Images
PHOTO: Participants arrive for the March for Our Lives Rally in Washington, DC on March 24, 2018.
>

The Movement for Black Lives platform, released in 2016 by a coalition including 50 activist groups related to Black Lives Matter, calls for single-payer healthcare, the legalization of marijuana, in addition to an end of mass incarceration and police violence towards black people.

“There are so many different elected [officials], both black and white, who are challenging the status quo right now,” Cullors said, calling Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s recent election “a testament to our movement”.

Kerri Evelyn Harris, who is running for Senate in Delaware on a progressive platform, said that Black Lives Matter has “made sure that we had to recognize things that for so long that we’ve turned a blind eye to.”

As for the future of Black Lives Matter, Cullors said the organization is “in the middle of an evolution.”

“For the last five years we’ve been on the streets. We’ve been protesting, we’ve been shutting down highways,” she said. “And now, we have to ground down and decide what are the strategies, what’s our institution going to look like.”

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