How well do you know #BlackLivesMatter? Take the quiz.

Rising to prominence after the shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Mo., the coalition of activists – rallying around the hashtag #BlackLivesMatter – march in demonstrations, live-broadcast confrontations with police, and stage die-ins to demand reform of what they consider racially biased policing and criminal justice policies.

Find out how much you know about the influential movement that rapper Tef Poe described as anything but “your grandparents’ civil rights movement.”

1. What event inspired Alicia Garza to write the “love letter to black people” with the ideas that inspired the first #BlackLivesMatter hashtag?

Loren Elliot/Tampa Bay Times/AP
A Black Lives Matter protest, held in response to the deaths of Alton Sterling and Philando Castile, takes place in downtown Tampa on Monday, July 11, 2016.

The shooting death of Trayvon Martin

The acquittal of George Zimmerman in the shooting death of Trayvon Martin

The acquittal of Darren Wilson in the shooting death of Michael Brown

The death of Freddie Gray

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Dear Reader,

About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:

“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”

If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.

But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.

The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.

We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”

If you’re looking for bran muffin journalism, you can subscribe to the Monitor for $15. You’ll get the Monitor Weekly magazine, the Monitor Daily email, and unlimited access to CSMonitor.com.

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