Black Lives Matter emerged in 2013 as a hashtag and became, after the killing of Michael Brown in Ferguson in August 2014, the largest protest movement in American history. Each of its major waves — Ferguson in 2014, Baltimore in 2015, the summer of 2016, and the George Floyd uprising of 2020, when as many as 26 million people took part in demonstrations — was met with mass arrest, curfew prosecutions, and a steadily escalating legal response that moved from municipal charges toward state and federal felonies.

The pattern that defined the decade was selective severity: the overwhelming majority of arrestees saw their charges dropped, while a small number of defendants — often young, Black, and already known to police — received multi-year sentences meant to stand in for the crowd. Joshua Williams in Missouri, Jasmine Richards in Pasadena, and the federal arson defendants of 2020 became the movement's political prisoners, held up by supporters as proof that the state punished the uprising through exemplary cases rather than provable individual guilt.