Urban uprisings

The Gantt Report

Urban uprisings

By Lucius Gantt

I told you what would happen and you read it in the paper but all you could say was Lucius is a hater.

America’s so called Black community leaders can’t draw flies to an outhouse but every time a young Black man gets beaten, chocked, shot or gets his back broken, hand-picked Negro leaders rush to call for peace.

More and more and more urban uprisings will take place in the future as long as political puppets, social opportunists and embedded informants masquerading as leaders call for peace while the poor, the Black, the denied, the disrespected, the exploited and the oppressed masses are calling for equal rights and justice!

Every day you hear protesters saying “No Justice, No Peace”! Their cries for justice are ignored, their demands for equal rights are disregarded and their pleas for jobs, contracts and economic opportunities are looked at as jokes!

When you like people that rise up you call them “rebels” and when you hate people that rise up you call them “thugs”! Any one that shoots young people of color is a hero and any teenager that throws a rock at a trigger happy law enforcer is a hoodlum, a gangster or an urban criminal.

America helps “rebels” that shoot at law enforcers in Syria, in Afghanistan, in Iraq, in Libya but people that fight violence with violence in America are ghetto degenerates! Saddam Hussein, Muammar Gaddafi and other foreign leaders said from day one that people fighting their governments were terrorists but the politicians you love call ISIS terrorists “rebels”.

The imperialist press is quick to quote lawmen and politicians when covering urban uprisings but those same media members are slow to interview mothers who have sons that died while in police custody, slow to interview large numbers of African Americans that can’t get a job, can’t get a good education, can’t get a loan and can’t get a chance to improve their and their family’s lives.

Fox News especially makes the victims of violence look like the perpetrators and they make you think the perpetrators of choke holds, knees to the spine, punches and kicks are the innocent victims.

Personally, I don’t think that destroying businesses and institutions in your neighborhoods is a good idea.

However, history is a better teacher than I am.

Hurt people can march but marching gets very few results. They can “sit-in” but no progress comes from that either. People trapped in the ‘hood can even lock arms with closet klansmen and sing “We Shall Overcome” and they still won’t get the kind of attention that they want or need!

I’m sorry to say it but if you look at past riots in Los Angeles, past riots in Detroit, past riots in Atlanta and urban uprisings in hundreds of other cities, when the skies light up and costs go up things begin to happen.

Don’t take my word for it. Compare Central Florida, New York City, Ferguson and other areas to Baltimore. In all of those cities nothing happened after the non-violent marches called by so-called and politically endorsed Negro leaders but when flames can be seen from miles and miles away, every resource a city has is put into action immediately!

How do I know? I know because I got my first media job at WSB-TV in Atlanta just days after Molotov cocktails lit up some of Atlanta’s major thoroughfares!

No, we don’t need more fires but yes, we do need more consideration.

We need a way out of poverty. We need an end to the vicious cycle where you live in a bad neighborhood, attend a bad school for a few years, only become qualified for a bad low paying job and end up right where you started from back in a poor, bad neighborhood!

I’m old, if you listen to my children, but there is a new generation of young people in urban America. The young people of today don’t care anything about your armored personnel carriers, your helmets, your shields, your automatic pistols and assault weapons and your threats of incarceration.

If you are young and Black, you expect to go to jail sooner or later at some point in your life.

And, if you die, young people believe it is better to die fighting for equal rights and justice than to die handcuffed in the back of a patrol car, locked up in a jail cell or shot in the back in broad day light!

Get ready for all of the proposed panel discussions, study groups and prayer breakfasts. Instead of hand picking all of the speakers and all of the participants, at least invite people that represent all aspects of Baltimore’s and America’s Black communities.

At least listen to some Black community members that are not afraid to tell the truth about how we all can live and work together! (Buy Gantt’s books and contact Lucius at www.allworldconsultants.net)