By Pastor Rasheed Z Baaith
“Let no one despise you for your youth, but set the believers an example in speech, in conduct, in love, in faith, in purity.” (1 Timothy: 4:12)
Led mostly by a vanguard of courageous, determined, un-compromising, committed young Black women warriors, the Black Lives Matter Movement has evolved into a global political power group. With Black Lives Matter protests and marches taking place in over 60 countries and over 100 cities in America, Black Lives Matter is leading the world into an historical moment never before seen.
Recognizing that this moment, the combining of education disparities, politics, social inequities, police culture and economic opportunities into one explosive dynamic, the group has forced America into a self-evaluation it cannot turn away from.
The power in that externally driven self-evaluation is so strong that even if one denies to one’s self that Black Lives Matter, there has to be an admission that the denial comes not from reason but racism.
These young people have learned from the mistakes of those Black leaders who have come before them. The have learned that while negotiations may have to be entered into, compromise is not a dogma but a strategy. One paradigmatic experience of past negotiations in recent years anyway is how the power of the moment has been compromised away by some of our leadership.
It is as if those leaders did not know the history of how American institutions have conspired to keep Black people in permanent state of victimhood. The Civil War amendments, (13th, 14th, and 15th) have been systematically stripped of power since the end of Reconstruction.
The 13th Amendment (1865) abolished slavery and involuntary servitude except as punishment for a crime. More on that later. The 14th Amendment (1868) gave Black people citizenship and the 15th (1870) gave us the right to vote.
The Black Codes passed in 1865 and 1866 nullified the 13th Amendment. What were the Black Codes? The Black Codes were laws that determined the behavior of Black people. Breaking those laws sent us to prisons. The Black Codes led to the first wave of mass incarceration of Black people. Boys, girls, women and men were imprisoned. Most of the prisons of that time were plantations and the inmates were the free labor harvesting the crops.
Brutally enforced Jim Crow laws nullified the 14th Amendment and in 1876 the Supreme Court of that time made voting impossible for our people. In Lawrence Goldstones’ “On Account of Race: The Supreme Court, White Supremacy, and the Ravaging of African American Voting Rights,” Goldstone writes his book “tells the story of an American tragedy, the only occasion in United States history in which a group of citizens who had been granted the right to vote then had it stripped away.”
In short it has always been a concerted effort to deny Black people what the Constitution granted us and others. That means it requires a concerted effort by us to demand what we’ve been denied. The young people of today understand “demand.” They will not wait for this slow ship of equality to dock.
They refuse to accept any more state sanctioned murders, to watch their mothers and fathers work for starvation wages or be on the front lines of fighting this Coronavirus and not be recognized as “essential.”
And they are tired of politicians like Ben Carson and Tim Scott and Kanye West supporting the very people who harm us. I do not agree with everything Black Lives Matter says or what they do and how they do it. But I am proud of their fearlessness, inspired by their sense of determination and touched by their refusal to back down.
And so should we all.
