Nearly a decade after he began protesting racial injustice and police brutality in America by sitting and then kneeling during the national anthem at NFL games, Colin Kaepernick remains out of a job.

Some demonstrators, and in some cases the police, have paused to kneel, recalling the manner of George Floyd’s death and the gesture by Colin Kaepernick.

Years later, athletes in the NFL and beyond still reproduce Kaepernick’s gesture, summoning it to oppose the structural forces that imperil so many people’s lives. The journalist Dave Zirin refers to what’s become a mass political movement as “The Kaepernick Effect.”

The moment happened as so many others have. A man unknown to most around the world was about to become a hashtag. Millions would watch a video played countless times over the course of a year, horrified to see a police officer press his knee into the man's neck for 9½ minutes, killing him. The desire to reverse this man's fate seemed as desperate as it was futile.

Calls for racial justice touched nearly every aspect of American life on a scale that historians say has not happened since the civil rights movement of the 1960s.

USA Today's The American South spoke with five civil rights changemakers about the George Floyd protests, police discrimination and the progress they hope to see.

Website devoted to documenting the lives of African Americans lost to "the terror of racism, excessive force, and countless other injustices."

his op-ed talks about how Black women, specifically, get overlooked in conversations on police violence.