Americans are abandoning the popular Black Lives Matter movement, based on data that professors say shed light on the historical phenomena of African American liberation struggles and civil rights movements. 

Civiqs, a nonpartisan online survey firm linked with the progressive media outlet Daily Kos, found that 44% of respondents oppose the Black Lives Matter movement and another 43% indicated they support it, while 11% said they don’t know whether to support or oppose it, as reported by NBC News. 

The survey has been tracking responses from 2017 until November 2021. 

RELATED: Judge Allows Rittenhouse to Randomly Select Final Jurors in His Case 

Support for the Black Lives Matter movement peaked at 52% in June 2020, a month after George Floyd was killed, according to the poll. After the shooting of Jacob Blake, a Black man, by police officers in Kenosha, Wisconsin in August 2020, and the conviction of former police officer Derek Chauvin in the death of Floyd, public resistance to Black Lives Matter has increased. 

“These polls are quite representative of America’s approach,” said Vida Robertson, the director of the Center for Critical Race Studies at the University of Houston-Downtown. “There’s no historical evidence whatsoever that America has ever been interested in Black liberation and building an equitable society. We are simply coming to grips with our romantic ideals that are running up against our political realities. And the fact stands that America has constantly and will constantly struggle with the liberation of Black bodies, because we are endemically a racist society.” 

RELATED: George Floyd’s Bronze Bust Defaced in New York 

#BlackLivesMatter was created in 2013 in response to the acquittal of George Zimmerman, who killed 17-year-old Trayvon Martin in February of 2012, per the organization’s website. Its purpose is to end white supremacy and establish local power to intervene in state and vigilante violence against Black communities.