The Sandra Black Act is now law in Texas, mandating state-wide reforms to increase prison inmate safety. Police de-escalation training was removed from the bill. ibid. caption
I feel lucky and blessed that I’m serving in the Congress but there are forces today trying to take us back to another time and another dark period. John Lewis: Good Trouble, Sky Documentaries 2020
His voice and his example are probably needed now as much as they’ve ever been. ibid. Hillary Clinton
Arrest us if we’re wrong, don’t beat us. ibid. Selma protester
As we crossed the bridge we saw a sea of blue – Alabama state troopers. ibid. Lewis
I hated this system telling people you cannot be seated at a lunch counter, you cannot go into a restaurant simply because of the colour of your skin. ibid.
We shall match your capacity to inflict suffering with our capacity to endure suffering. We shall meet your physical force with soul force. Do to us what you will, and we shall continue to love you. We cannot in all good conscience obey your unjust laws, because noncooperation with evil is as much a moral obligation as is cooperation with good. Throw us in jail, and we shall still love you. Bomb our homes and threaten our children, and we shall still love you. Send your hooded perpetrators of violence into our community at the midnight hour and beat us and leave us half dead, and we shall still love you. But be ye assured that we will wear you down by our capacity to suffer. ibid. Martin Luther King, essay Loving Your Enemies
Within a matter of weeks, freedom riders are boarding buses all over the South. The riders are harassed and jailed, sometimes they are beaten by angry crowds of whites while southern sheriffs look the other way. ibid.
People all over the world take the knee. But for centuries black resistant to oppression has taken many forms: when the Quarterback Colin Kaepernick first took the knee in 2016, during the national anthem at an NFL game, there was a huge backlash. Ultimately, this act of defiance cost him his livelihood. In the years since, taking the knee has become a powerful symbol of resistance. 400 Years of Taking the Knee I, Dotun Adebayo narrator, History 2020
Queen Nanny – Granny Nanny – aka Granny of the Maroons, is Jamaica’s original national hero. Her face adorns the country’s $500 bill, recording the story of a freedom fighter who stood up to the might of the British people to win freedom for her enslaved people. ibid.
Toussaint Louverture, St Dominique: emerged as the rebellion’s national leader … and abolished slavery from Hispaniola for ever … Bonaparte’s army suffered huge losses. ibid.
The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano or Gustavus Vassa, The African, written by himself: it was far from the last such attempts to discredit the veracity of black suffering. ibid
Phillis Wheatley: poems on various subjects were published in London in 1773 when she was 19. She was born in Gambia, and like Sancho, was separated from her family for ever when she was snatched. ibid.
Sojourner Truth ... She heard the spirit of God calling on her to tell the truth … She began to preach restlessly … on the abolition of slavery … She came to know other prominent abolitionists. ibid.
Ned Turner was hanged … Fredrick Douglas escaped his enslavement in 1838. He became a great writer and orator … William Still: ibid.
Canada: Harriet Tubman: The Underground Railway had many heroes. Chief amongst them is Harriett Tubman … ‘I never ran my train off the track and I never lost a passenger.’ [Tubman made 13 trips to the South and rescued approximately 70 people from bondage.] ibid.
The American Civil War was over. Enslaved people were now free people. Though the chains of physical bondage were gone, new ways were found to restore the pre-war social order to keep black people down and subjugate them. Racist Jim Crow bylaws for example were enacted in the South long before South Africa institutionalised them as Apartheid … Not all men were created equal; in Black America t he struggle continued. 400 Years of Taking the Knee II
William E B Du Bois 1903: condemned Washington’s programme of industrial education, conciliation of the South, and submission and silence at their political rights. ibid.
Marcus Harvey was described by du Bois as, ‘The most dangerous enemy of the Negro in America and in the world.’ ibid.
100 days after Emmett Till was lynched, in December 1955 Rosa Parks was to initiate the year-long Montgomery bus boycott. ibid.
‘We can’t solve this problem through retaliatory violence. We must meet violence with non-violence.’ ibid. King
Rosa Parks’ bus boycott eight years earlier had it parallel in Bristol in the west of England: Paul Stephenson, the city’s first youth black officer … The Bristol Bus Boycott was organised: it took just 60 days to succeed. ibid.
Muhammad Ali’s boxing career took a turn towards social activism in 1966 when he refused to be drafted into the military, publicly declaring his opposition to the Vietnam war. ibid. King
Fires are burning in cities across America, with storefronts smashed amid clashes between cops and protesters against police violence. It comes days after the Coronavirus death toll in our country passed the grim milestone of 100,000, after a month in which 40 million people went on to the unemployment – exceeding the depths of the Great Depression.
With the country in crisis after a month from hell, President Trump’s public schedule for this last day of May is blank. But when he’s not MIA, the President’s comments have only deepened our division, with tweets like ‘when the looting starts, the shooting starts’, coming one day after he retweeted an account saying ‘the only good Democrat is a dead Democrat.’
President Trump has sowed the seeds of conflict and now we are all reaping the whirlwind of chaos. His inability to empathize with others, his instinct to play white identity politics, his essential disinterest in uniting the nation, have brought us to this breaking point. CNN online article 31 May 2020
CNN: As I wrote this, the US Capitol building was being stormed by right-wing protesters trying to stop the peaceful transfer of power.
This was an attempted coup, encouraged by the President of the United States, in an attempt to derail today’s congressional certification of the electoral vote that will lead to Joe Biden’s inauguration in two weeks.
Donald Trump’s legacy is American carnage. Our country is far more divided and violent and deluded than before he entered office. His misrule has led to this moment, but it is not his responsibility alone. Trump’s fear-fueled lies and extremism and conspiracy theories have been indulged for too long by partisans. His rhetoric has directly led to death threats against election officials who have done their job honestly and independently. Now we are all reaping what they’ve sown, as the President watches it all burn from within the White House. But then, there are some men who want to ruin if they cannot rule.
Make no mistake: this is sedition. And it’s coming at the hands of self-styled super-patriots who have been amped up by the President’s lies about non-existent mass voter fraud to excuse losing a free and fair election by a large margin.
They are not conservatives – they are radicals. Because patriots don’t break the windows of the US Capitol building and storm inside when they lose an election. No hostile foreign power has done more damage to what President-elect Joe Biden called ‘the citadel of our democracy’ since an invading British army burned down the Capitol in the war of 1812. But certainly, the enemies of democracy have taken great comfort from their actions today.
We are still in the fog of war. But some things are clear. The politicians and hyper-partisans who have coddled this President’s autocratic impulses have enabled this assault to our democracy. The Republican members of Congress – like Senators Ted Cruz and Josh Hawley – who have tried to benefit politically from contesting the election results without any concrete evidence of fraud are culpable in this violence because they have stoked its fears. So is Trump’s attorney, Rudy Giuliani, who demanded ‘trial by combat’ to resolve the election dispute at a ‘Save America’ rally this morning, after his legal team lost some 60 cases in court because of an absence of evidence. CNN online article 7 January 2021, ‘Donald Trump’s American carnage ends with a coup attempt’
The 6th January 2021: The day that shook the foundations of American democracy, where hundreds stormed the seat of government. And tried to overturn an election result. This assault didn’t come out of the blue. It was by people that were carrying out the wishes of the sitting president, wishes they felt he signalled to them loud and clear. BBC News report 9th January 2021, Storming the Capitol, Aleem Maqbool reporting
‘I call on President Trump to go on national television now and demand an end to this siege.’ ibid. Biden
He was caught pressuring an official to re-calculate the votes in a state he lost in the November election. ibid.
But Wednesday 6th January was always going to be the day it came to a head. Congress was due to do what’s normally procedural, formalize the results of the election. ibid.
Fight for Trump: At his [Trump] request thousands of his supporters had gathered from all over the country … ‘You’ll never take back our country with weakness; you have to show strength and you have to be strong.’ It was all his supporters wanted to hear. ibid.
Many point to the relative restraint shown by the security forces as compared to some of the scenes we saw as the Black Lives Matter protests last summer. ibid.
Many Americans described feeling numb at the events the previous day. ibid.
Democrats are adamant Donald Trump needs to leave office immediately … ‘an armed insurrection against America.’ ibid. Pelosi
A brazen assault on American democracy. The warning signs I heard just an hour before. And what it means for America as it confronts the threat of extremism from within. It was just after 2pm on Wednesday. This was the protest march that became a riot, that became an insurrection. Storming the Capitol: The Inside Story, Robert Moore reporting, ITV 2021
These last four years have been different: anger has been weaponised on social media. The election didn’t calm America, with a president who refused to accept his loss. The anger became fury. The drumbeat of incendiary rhetoric has been growing louder by the day. ibid.
‘Our lives are at stake. This is our last stand.’ ibid. protester
And so they did. Although the president never joined them. ibid.