Marcus Rashford & Adwoa Aboah Cover Vogue’s September ‘Activism’ Cover

It was, more than anything else, the feeling of positivity that took me by surprise. It was 3 June, and on a warm, grey lunchtime in central London – mask on, distance kept – I stepped outside my home to head to the Black Lives Matter rally in Hyde Park. For all the obvious reasons, it had been an especially fraught few days for Black people around the world; a fraught year in a fraught decade in a fraught life. Yet, somehow, this particular day took me from feeling lost in despair to experiencing something that felt an awful lot like hope.

One of the more joyful phenomena of the past years has been seeing how, in the face of what can seem like ever-escalating injustice, activism has re-emerged from the margins and taken hold of the mainstream. I have loved seeing younger generations fire up older generations again, seeing “social justice” go from a term that elicited a yawn and an eye-roll to embedding itself in our daily lives, and giving rise to people using the platforms of a new era to essentially say, “Enough is enough.”

To be in London early this summer was to witness those voices erupting from the screens of our smartphones and pouring out on to the streets. Outrage for George Floyd – a father whose death at the hands of Minneapolis police officers in late May ignited anti-racism protests around the world – brought us together to march in the name of justice. As every Black person knows, police brutality happens all the time, it’s just not always recorded, and rarely at such horrifying length. Yet with all of us in lockdown, there was nowhere else for our eyes to go but to watch as Mr Floyd was suffocated.

The special pull-out September 2020 cover features the “faces of hope”.

The need to protest was overwhelming. As Hyde Park began to fill, I started to feel the energy of generations uniting, of coming together to stand in solidarity. It was the most peaceful experience. It felt like all of London was there – Black, brown, white – as people sat on the ground listening to speeches, chanting in unison and holding signs aloft. The actor John Boyega spoke brilliantly, as did organisers such as Naomi Smith – one of the groundswell of women who shaped and led so many protests this summer. It was painful, and only the beginning. But it was freeing, too.

The protests that day and in the days that followed have come to define 2020 as the year the world woke up, with names such as Breonna Taylor, Ahmaud Arbery and Shukri Abdi being heard around the globe. The BLM marches in the US amounted to the largest movement in American history. This year has often seemed like a dark time for humanity, but it has also marked itself as a golden era for activism. From climate change to child poverty, domestic abuse to the struggle for democracy, people will no longer be silenced. In the fight against injustice, the power of the collective voice is being heard.

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