2018

Stacey Abrams, who narrowly lost the 2018 Georgia governor's race to Brian Kemp — who served as Secretary of State overseeing his own election and oversaw the purge of 340,000 voter registrations — refused to call her loss a 'concession,' citing suppression. She founded Fair Fight Action in November 2018 to fight voter suppression. Fair Fight registered over 800,000 new Georgia voters and provided election protection resources in 2019–2020. The organizing contributed to Biden flipping Georgia in 2020 and Democrats winning both Senate seats in January 2021. Abrams was widely credited with transforming Georgia's political landscape through sustained grassroots organizing.

The National Memorial for Peace and Justice, conceived by Bryan Stevenson's Equal Justice Initiative, opened in Montgomery, AL on April 26, 2018. The memorial documents over 4,000 racial terror lynchings in the U.S. between 1877 and 1950. It was the nation's first memorial dedicated to victims of racial terror lynching, forcing a public reckoning with racial terror previously absent from American public memory.

The National Memorial for Peace and Justice, conceived by Bryan Stevenson's Equal Justice Initiative, opened in Montgomery, AL on April 26, 2018. The memorial documents over 4,000 racial terror lynchings in the U.S. between 1877 and 1950, with steel monuments for each county where lynchings occurred. It was the nation's first memorial dedicated to victims of racial terror lynching. The companion Legacy Museum opened the same day. The project forced a public reckoning with racial terror previously absent from the landscape of American public memory.

Tennis champion Serena Williams publicly shared in a 2018 Vogue interview that she nearly died after giving birth to her daughter Alexis Olympia in September 2017 at a hospital in Palm Beach, FL. Williams, who has a history of blood clots, told a nurse she was experiencing symptoms of pulmonary embolism. The nurse dismissed her concerns; a doctor initially attributed her breathlessness to medication. After Williams insisted, a CT scan revealed multiple blood clots in her lungs. Williams' story, told by one of the most famous and wealthy Black women in America, illustrated that medical dismissal of Black women's pain crossed class lines and became widely cited in maternal mortality advocacy.

Stephon Clark, 22, was shot 20 times by Sacramento police officers Terrence Mercadal and Jared Robinet in his grandmother's backyard on March 18, 2018. Officers said they thought Clark was armed; he was holding a cell phone. A police helicopter tracked Clark; officers fired within seconds of encountering him with no warning. The Sacramento County District Attorney and the California DOJ both declined to charge the officers. The killing prompted protests that shut down a Sacramento Kings basketball game twice. Clark's family sued; the city settled for $2.4 million. The case contributed to California passing AB 392 in 2019, raising the standard for use of deadly force.

The U.S. Department of Education's 2015-16 Civil Rights Data Collection, released in 2018, confirmed stark racial disparities in school discipline. Black students represented 15.5% of enrollment but 31% of in-school arrests and 36% of students referred to law enforcement. Black preschool children were 3.6 times more likely to receive out-of-school suspension than white preschool children. The data documented 'school resource officers' (police in schools) arresting students for minor infractions that previously resulted in detention. Research consistently showed harsh discipline reduced graduation rates and increased incarceration odds — a documented pipeline.

Botham Jean, 26, was shot and killed in his own apartment in Dallas by off-duty officer Amber Guyger on September 6, 2018. Guyger entered Jean's apartment claiming she mistook it for her own, directly below. Jean was eating ice cream on his couch. Guyger was convicted of murder in October 2019 and sentenced to 10 years. During sentencing, Jean's brother Brandt embraced Guyger in a forgiveness gesture that drew both praise and criticism from observers who felt it individualized a systemic issue. Guyger's sentence was seen by many as inadequate given the facts. The case raised questions about implicit bias, armed off-duty officers, and the home as a site of Black death.

Antwon Rose II, 17, was shot three times in the back and killed by East Pittsburgh officer Michael Rosfeld on June 19, 2018, seconds after exiting a car that had been involved in a drive-by shooting. Rose was unarmed. Rosfeld was charged with criminal homicide — the first Western PA officer charged with homicide for an on-duty shooting in over 30 years. He was acquitted by an all-white jury in March 2019. The shooting and acquittal sparked extensive protests in Pittsburgh. The borough of East Pittsburgh disbanded its police department in 2019. Pennsylvania's legislature subsequently considered use-of-force reform.