LBJ's Peniel Joseph talks with Texas Monthly about what he sees — echoes of the past and hope for the future — in the Black Lives Matter demonstrations rocking the nation.
"We’ve seen mostly peaceful demonstrations, but you're also seeing violence perpetrated by police against nonviolent demonstrators," he said. "That's very similar to the 1960s, where most of the violence you saw was police violence. There was a very, very tiny amount of violence from self-styled left-wing revolutionaries, but for the most part the violence you saw was police in Selma attacking demonstrators on the Edmund Pettus Bridge and police in Birmingham, Alabama, attacking nonviolent unarmed demonstrators with fire hoses that were strong enough to tear the bark off trees, and with German shepherds. So really, throughout, the police are the biggest users of violence during the civil rights and black power periods. We see echoes of that today."