Black Twitter: #NeverLovedUs

 Sandra Khalifa, co-communications director of Dream Defenders, was in her Tallahassee apartment coordinating a Twitter strategy, and within an hour, she and a few other staff members created graphics capturing the team’s emotions and tweeted them. #NeverLovedUs was trending a few hours later, because the group has no official office and all voulenteers work from home, most member communicate via cellphone and email over how to respond.

 “I think, especially after the Jordan Davis and Trayvon Martin verdicts, that it just feels dangerous to be a youth of color today, especially in Florida. With laws like Stand Your Ground, with huge amounts of school-based arrests in schools disproportionately affecting youth of color, these are the kinds of issues we face on a day-to-day basis. For a person to see a youth of color as dangerous and feel compelled and justified in killing him or her and then walk away free tells us that legislators and the laws that are in place in Florida perpetuate a system that says ‘we don’t care about youth of color,’ so I think that’s where #NeverLovedUs came from.”

The Dream Defenders do not have a physical reach beyond Florida, so they rely heavily on social media to nationalize their message and galvanize support around local causes. Jelani Cobb, associate professor and director of the Institute for African American Studies at University of Connecticut in Storrs, told NewsOne that social media is as vital to the group today as the advent of television was to the civil rights movement.

Join The Dream Defenders on Twitter: