2015: The Year Blacks Lives Mattered

The Black Lives Matter movement started in the wake of George Zimmerman's acquittal on charges that he murdered black Florida teen Trayvon Martin. While the movement grew in size and scope in two short years, #BlackLivesMatter was tagged in countless news stories about crime, safety and institutionalized racism. The hashtag itself stirred debate and educated everyone why #AllLivesMatter is a poor, racist sentiment and option for political awareness and change—not a better or more inclusive one.

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Viola Davis' 2015 Emmy Awards acceptance speech for Outstanding Actress in a Drama went beyond thanking everyone who helped her get to where she is today. Instead, she spoke the truth about what has kept her and others like her from standing exactly where she did until that moment. "You cannot win an Emmy for roles that are simply not there. So here's to all the writers … people who have redefined what it means to be beautiful, to be sexy, to be a leading woman, to be black," she said through tears.

Davis won for her role as Professor Annalise Keating in "How to Get Away With Murder," marking her first Emmy win (also her first nomination) and the first win for an African-American woman in the lead drama actress category. Viola and fellow nominee Taraji P. Henson of "Empire" were the first African-Americans to be nominated in that category in the same year.

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Film director Ava DuVernay's "Selma," officially released in 2014, played well into this year up through and including March, when the 50th anniversary of a pivotal scene in her movie was re-enacted on the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Alabama. On "Bloody Sunday," March 7, 1965, more than 600 civil rights marchers, led by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., headed east out of Selma, Ala., on Route 80, where they were beaten back by police. The 2015 march was peaceful, and a reminder that work in civil rights isn't over, even five decades later.

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This is the last year racism on the campus of the University of Missouri would be tolerated. At least that's what campus activists hope after their action—which drew the support of faculty and even the school's famed football team and coaches—led to the resignation of the school's president and chancellor. The students were protesting the administration's refusal to investigate and initiate consequences for frequent and persistent acts of racism against the university's students of color, including the student body president.

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Mizzou wasn't the only university receiving resignation letters. In addition to resignations from the top administration at Mizzou, rising and unrelenting student protests against institutional racism and white privilege resulted in the resignations of many. The latest holdout, a lecturer in child development at Yale. Erika Christakis wrote a response to a call from university's student affairs warning students against wearing insensitive costumes for Halloween. "Is there no room any more for a child or young person to be a little bit obnoxious, a little bit inappropriate or provocative or, yes, offensive?" she wrote. "American universities were once a safe space not only for maturation but also for a certain regressive, or even transgressive, experience; increasingly, it seems, they have become places of censure and prohibition."

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Ta-Nehisi Coates won the National Book Award in non-fiction for the beautiful, sad, angry and very in-this-moment book-length letter to his son, "Between the World and Me." The longtime Atlantic contributor has been at the forefront of talk about race and racism in the U.S. and gained wide attention in 2014 for his provocative essay "The Case for Reparations."

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Jacqueline Woodson's semi-autobiographic YA novel "Brown Girl Dreaming" received the highest honor for American children's fiction, the Newbury Award. "Brown Girl Dreaming" tells the story of Woodson's childhood, in verse. In her poems, she tells what it's like to grow up African American in the '60s and '70s in both New York and South Carolina, where she explains she lived with the remnants of Jim Crow.

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With her widely followed journey to become one of the most recognized ballerinas, 32-year-old Misty Copeland was promoted to principal dancer at the American Ballet Theater. She is the first black female to hold this title New York-based company's 75-year history.

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A 21-year-old white gunman opened fire at one of the nation's oldest black congregations, worshippers at Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in downtown Charleston, S.C., killing nine people who were part of a Bible study group that Wednesday evening. While the nation grieved the loss of lives, and the vulnerability with which African Americans in the U.S. are forced to live, a manhunt ensued. Dylann Storm Roof was arrested 200 miles away in North Carolina. The Rev. Clementa C. Pinckney, pastor at Emanuel AME Church, was among the killed, as was a mother of three, Sharonda Coleman-Singleton, a pillar of her community.

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A McKinney, Texas, police officer was suspended and he eventually resigned after a video of him slamming a teen girl to the ground and sitting on top of her went viral. The teen, who is black, and her friends (also black) had gathered at the suburban housing development's pool for a party, where a white person called the police because they were being noisy. The following month, 11 women, most of them black, were kicked off a train in Napa Valley for making a white woman uncomfortable. Critics say both groups were being punished for simply doing fun things while black.

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In a year when black lives (and, sadly, deaths) made headlines, Rachel Dolezal stole the show. A white woman, Dolezal passed as black for years, including serving Spokane, Wash., NAACP president. The Africana Studies professor at Eastern Washington University first denied that she was white until her parents, Lawrence and Ruthanne Dolezal, confirmed their daughter was denying her race, but that she wasn't black or even biracial.

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Mattel's attempts to make Barbie relevant again gained some traction this year. Not only did they release a line of girl super heroes that don't pander or blind you with pink, they also created dolls that go beyond the blonds. They released a Zendaya Coleman Barbie earlier in the year and, in time for Christmas, an Ava DuVernay Barbie. If you had your heart set on the likeness of the "Selma" director, bad news. They opened sales for the doll just a day after announcing it would be available and it sold out within 10 minutes.

Well, there's always 2016.

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