Black America built its power through unity. Churches became meeting halls for strategy. Barbershops became forums for debate. Front porches became classrooms for the next generation. Every major advance the community achieved in the past two centuries grew from collective action rooted in shared purpose.
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In this political season, we need a sycamore tree—something rooted firmly enough in truth to lift us above the noise, fear, greed, and deception threatening to rot the heart of our society.
Florida Democrats have a unity message. My question is simple: When will voters see the effort behind it, and when will our communities see the reward?
Black Americans lived through Jim Crow and fought to make the ballot a right. Today, barriers can be harder to recognize: a polling place moves, a registration requirement changes, or a voter learns too late that the rules are different. Voting laws have changed in recent years, and polling locations can change between elections.
Welcome to Alcatraz, not merely the infamous prison that once stood in San Francisco Bay, but the state of mind now infecting our government.
How do we keep our young people involved? That question has stayed with me. Because maybe the problem is bigger than getting young folks to come to a park, put on a family T-shirt, eat some barbecue and pose for a picture.
It is time to stop playing around.
And there comes a time when people who have been pushed, divided, labeled, ignored, and taken for granted must stand up and say what the great civil rights warrior Fannie Lou Hamer told America more than half a century ago:
When Nobody Wants to Give Up the Chair, Who Is Listening to the People?
By Bobby R. Henry, Sr. There are moments when a community must refuse to be silent simply because the people making the decisions have the authority…