Crook County

Content Warning: The source material addresses racism and racial inequity in the US criminal justice system. References to racial degradation, including the use of the N-word, and racial violence appear throughout the text.

Crook County: Racism and Injustice in America’s Largest Criminal Court was published in 2016, three years after the start of Black Lives Matter (BLM) Movement, a decentralized sociopolitical movement seeking to redress racism, racial injustice, and racial violence in the United States and abroad. BLM started 2013 in response to the highly publicized acquittal of George Zimmerman in the fatal shooting Trayvon Martin, a Black teenager walking to a family friend’s home in a gated Florida community. The hashtag #BlackLivesMatters started trending on social media. BLM gained momentum after a series of high-profile cases of police violence against Black people, including the choking death of Eric Garner in New York City (July 2014); the fatal shooting of 18-year-old Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri (August 2014); and the fatal shooting of 14-year-old Tamir Rice in Cleveland, Ohio (November 2014). Between 2014 and 2016, the founders of BLM, Alicia Garza, Ayọ Tometi, and Patrisse Cullors, expanded the movement to a national network of more than 30 local chapters. The murder of George Floyd, a 46-year-old Black man, by a white Minneapolis police officer in 2020 thrust BLM back into the national spotlight.