Beyoncé shared a message Thursday in response to the deaths of Alton Sterling and Philando Castile, calling on her fans to “channel our anger and frustration into action.”
Posted to her personal website, the letter, titled “Freedom,” a clear nod to her militant anthem of the same name, begs for an end to the killing of black people by law enforcement.
The message comes just weeks after her powerful performance of the song of the same name at the BET Awards along with Kendrick Lamar.
She also shared a message with her 77 million Instagram followers and encourages us to reach out to local legislators to “voice protest” for Sterling and Castile.
This year has found Beyoncé becoming more vocal about the issue of police violence in America. For the past few years, she has quietly supported victims and the Black Lives Matter movement, attending a vigil for Trayvon Martin and anonymously bailing out protestors in Baltimore and Ferguson along with her husband Jay Z.
Of course, her new album Lemonade was, among many other things, a mediation on the value of black lives. The short film included heartbreaking portraits of the mothers of men like Eric Garner and Mike Brown posing with pictures of their dead sons. Her BET performance opened with a snippet of a Martin Luther King Jr. speech, and it is likely not a coincidence that the most electric performance of her Formation World Tour is “Freedom.”
She found herself at the center of a stupid controversy following her Super Bowl performance of “Formation” which featured dancers outfitted to look like Black Panthers. The “Formation” music video also included the images of Beyoncé sinking a New Orleans police cruiser and a young child defiantly dancing before a line of armed police.
Early this year, it was announced that Jay Z’s streaming service Tidal—of which she is a part owner—would be donating $1.5 million to Black Lives Matter and other civil rights groups. And in February, Beyoncé announced a fund to aid children in Flint, Michigan following the water crisis there.
You can read her full message here.
UPDATE:
Image via Frank Micelotta.