thenation | At first, she used Facebook in that
cute, ho-hum way that most people do: selfies vamping new hairstyles,
jocular shots with her sisters and mom—nothing special. Not until just
after Christmas of 2014, and the debut of Selma. Within weeks
of seeing that electrifying portrayal of the civil-rights era, she
transformed her Facebook page. “I’m here to change history,” she
declaimed in a smartphone video posted in January 2015.
She apologized that she was about to go to bed. In a T-shirt and with
her hair pinned in rollers, she could not have seemed more
unself-conscious. Her face glowed with the smile that everyone who knew
her loved, and her voice was rich and friendly. “It’s time for me to do
God’s work,” she said. She called her new project #SandySpeaks.
In the next few months, she would post over two dozen videos.
Typically, they began with that smile and the greeting “Good morning, my
beautiful kings and queens!” Her links took readers to articles about
black history. (“No, this is American history!” she corrected.) She
posted about the economic crisis burdening young African Americans. She
suggested that white people get black friends and that blacks befriend
whites. That might be hard for African Americans to do, she said, but
God was testing their ability “to show love to somebody who can hate you
for no very reason.”
In the days after she died, #SandySpeaks went viral. Her videos
made her the first black casualty of police brutality whom the world
could know and deeply love postmortem. She’s been gone now for almost a
year, and we are still asking: #WhatHappenedtoSandraBland? Too often,
that question has been merely a call to conspiracy theory: about
monstrous jail guards murdering her, perfectly hiding the evidence, even
taping her eyes open after death to take a convincing mug shot. The
obsession over what transpired during three days at the end of her life
has left little room for considering the 28 years before. Black lives
matter—and hers was one of them, in its length, complication, and black
pain.
