Black Guy on the Phone

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About

Black Guy on the Phone is the nickname of former Republican congressional primary candidate Martin Baker, who was photographed talking on his cell phone during an event to support police officer Darren Wilson in August 2014. The photograph has been widely circulated in joke tweets posted on Black Twitter.

Origin

On August 17th, 2014, The Guardian^[1] published an article about protesters in St. Louis, Missouri who came out in support of Darren Wilson, the police officer who fatally shot teenager Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri earlier that month. The article referred to a man named Martin Baker as the sole black member of the crowd.

The same day, a thread titled "Meet the one black man that showed up at the rally for the cop that killed Mike Brown" was submitted to the Lipstick Alley Forums,^[2] which highlighted a photograph of Baker holding a Darren Wilson T-shirt (shown below, left). In the thread, forum member originalwharris posted another photograph of Baker, in which he is shown holding his cellphone up to his ear (shown below, right).

Spread

On August 18th, 2014, UpRoxx^[6] published an article about the online backlash toward Baker for attending the rally. On August 20th, several Twitter users posted the photograph of Baker with jokes about various types of phone calls he could be making (shown below).^[3]^[4]^[5]

On August 27th, Nike Talk Forums^[7] member 4318MichaelJohnson431 posted a thread titled ''Is Black Guy on the Phone the Hottest Meme in the Streets?'', which gathered more than 300 replies over the next two months. On February 5th, 2015, the pop culture blog Complex^[8] reported that Baker was working at a new job recording mixtapes.

2017 Resurgence

On February 22nd, 2017, Twitter user @Jay_50_Williams^[9] tweeted a photograph of Baker at a soda shop with the caption "I think I just found the guy from the meme in a soda shop lmao" (shown below). Within 48 hours, the tweet gained over 19,000 likes and 11,000 retweets.

That day, Twitter users reposted the photo with various humorous captions (shown below). The following day, Twitter launched a moments page for the tweets titled "TFW you spot a meme in the wild."^[11] Meanwhile, Redditor lj300 reposted the photo to /r/BlackPeopleTwitter,^[10] where it gathered upwards of 14,900 votes (94% upvoted) and 350 comments within 24 hours.