Darkness cannot drive out darkness:
only light can do that.
Hate cannot drive out hate: only love can do that.
Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
Darkness.
Light.
Justice.
Peace.
Love.
Five officers killed in Dallas.
Five.
One sniper. Acting alone. While many, many #BlackLivesMatter activists marched peacefully.
Before that, however, the many lives lost in the African American community at the hands of law enforcement, which gave rise, finally, to #BlackLivesMatter.
We do not condone violence against African Americans.
We do not condone violence against police.
The overwhelming majority of African Americans want peace.
The overwhelming majority of police want peace.
The overwhelming majority of people want peace.
What sense can we make of the State of the Union? What is happening to us? Is this 1968 again?
Activists stormed the Democratic National Convention in 1968 and were met with brutality by police. Why did they not storm the GOP convention that year?
Because they knew the GOP would not listen anyhow.
A mere 12 years later, Ronald Reagan bowed down to “states rights” in Philadelphia, Mississippi, where, in 1964, civil rights workers had been murdered.
Ronald Reagan was calculating, the “great communicator,” remember?
He knew what he was doing. He knew to whom he was speaking. The Southern Strategy was alive and strong with this one.
The GOP has been stoking the fires of the Southern Strategy for decades. And the chickens have come home to roost. Talk about buyer’s remorse. Watch, as GOP leaders try, so desperately try, to distance themselves from Donald Trump. But many of these same leaders vowed, when President Barack Obama was elected, that they would not work with him at all.
And they spent the better part of eight years fighting each and every thing President Obama proposed, said, didn’t say.
Whatever.
From the moment that then-Senator Barack Obama declared his intention to run for POTUS, the number of hate groups in the United States began to grow. In 2011, for the first time ever, the Southern Poverty Law Center reported that the number of hate groups in this country topped 1,000.
Their number continues to grow.
And, now, with membership in the KKK growing, America’s oldest, most infamous hate group, we watch in horror.
For your consideration, from the NAACP:
Activists created the NAACP more than a century ago to fight racialized violence.
Then, we called it “lynching.” Today, we call it “police brutality,” but the effect is still the same — our lives are in danger. Endangered by some of the very people who are called to protect and serve us. We are all tense, angry, devastated, and grieving.
We grieve for Alton Sterling. We grieve for Philando Castile. And we grieve with the rest of the country over the senseless loss of lives in Dallas, too — because the execution of police officers does not end the execution of black Americans, and it will not put us on the path to change.
What will put us on the path to justice is the passage of the Law Enforcement Trust and Integrity Act (LETIA) and the End Racial Profiling Act (ERPA). Radical reform of policing practices, policies, and laws at all levels must be made — immediately — because the current system is taking too many lives.
We can take small solace in the fact that the outrage over this 21st century form of lynching is not isolated to the black community. Americans of all races and ethnicities are fighting to put an end to the epidemic of violence — gun violence in particular — in this country. Now is the time to come together as one in grief, in protest, and in pursuit of real, measurable change.
As an organization, we are doing everything we can to ensure justice is served, but we can’t do it alone. Stand in solidarity with your fellow activists, hand in hand with your community. Contact your elected officials to demand life-saving reforms to a broken system.
We can — and must — put an end to this together.
Cornell William Brooks
President and CEO
And, we remind ourselves again:
Darkness cannot drive out darkness:
only light can do that.
Hate cannot drive out hate: only love can do that.
Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.