Dallas massacre a turning point for Black Lives Matter movement

Inside Black Lives Matter, the national revulsion over videos of police officers shooting to death black men in Minnesota and Louisiana was undeniable proof that the group’s message of outrage and demands for justice had finally broken through.

For those who have harbored doubts or animosity toward Black Lives Matter — among them police unions and conservative leaders — the Dallas attacks are a cudgel that, fairly or not, they are eager to swing.

In Texas, several state officials, including Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick, lashed out at the group, directly linking its tone and tactics to the killings.

Patrick acknowledged that the demonstration in Dallas on Thursday night had been peaceful until the gunman struck, but he accused the movement of creating the conditions for what happened.

“Clearly the rhetoric of Black Lives Matters encouraged the sniper that shot Dallas police officers,” he wrote on Twitter.

[...] a bigger problem for Black Lives Matter, supported by many liberals, is that Johnson’s actions could jeopardize the movement’s appeal to a broader group of Americans who have gradually become more sympathetic to its cause after years of highly publicized police shootings.

In the days before the Dallas massacre, Aesha Rasheed, 39, of New Orleans, felt that at long last, white and black America were watching the same images with the same horror: two Louisiana police officers tackling and then shooting Alton Sterling, 37, at point-blank range; the slumped, blood-soaked body of Philando Castile, 32, after a Minnesota police officer shot him through a car window, with his girlfriend and her daughter sitting inches away.

[...] in a sign of alarm over the volatile situation, leaders of several organizations associated with the movement put out formal statements that repeatedly describe the Dallas attacker as a lone gunman, unconnected to the group’s cause.

Police have said that Johnson — a military veteran who told authorities that he had hunted down white police officers as retribution for their abuses — had no direct links to any protest group.

Black Lives Matter was born, as a phrase and a rallying cry, after the 2013 acquittal of George Zimmerman in the Florida shooting death of Trayvon Martin, an unarmed African American 17-year-old.

By the time demonstrators took to the streets of Ferguson, Mo., a year later to protest the killing of Michael Brown, another unarmed African American, it was the motto and name of a decentralized collection of activists.

In interviews Friday, leaders scoffed at calls to recalibrate their message or their strategy, or to temporarily pause protests out of respect for the dead police officers in Texas.

By Friday night, protesters had returned to the streets in the Bay Area and elsewhere, swarming the Williamsburg Bridge in New York City; shutting down a major highway in Atlanta; and marching through downtown Phoenix, where officers used pepper spray and beanbag guns to keep the demonstrators from taking over Interstate 10.

On social media, Black Lives Matter activists watched with dismay Thursday night as a squall of outrage and mourning over the shootings of Sterling and Castile was suddenly overwhelmed by a furious outcry over the shooting of Dallas police officers and messages of rage directed at activists and protesters.

Sitting in his bed after midnight with an iPhone, DeRay Mckesson, 30, who is active in Black Lives Matter, watched the rapid change in tone.