OUR STORY

Black Men Smile® was created one month after Michael Brown was murdered in Ferguson, Missouri. After seeing 100s of images of Michael's body lying in the street and after a flurry of other painful and oppressive images of Black men in the weeks to follow, I did an experiment to explore what other images of Black men made up the landscape of social media. I entered the HASHTAG #blackmensmile on Instagram.

It yielded ZERO results.

I posted the first image with this hashtag September 30, 2014. I asked Black men to do the same. Today there are over 70,000 images tagged with that hashtag on Instagram and over 40,000 people follow the Instagram page.

After some consideration of what I wanted to accomplish with this new platform, I set out to explore one seemingly basic question, WHAT MAKES YOU SMILE? After posing that question to a test group of 20 Black men, 17 of them had the same initial response:

"No one has ever asked me that."

That response broke my heart and continues to serve as the fuel for this transformative work.

-Carlton Mackey

(Creator, Black Men Smile®)