Mr. Bourbeau and Mr. Levandusky: You profess indignation at the way Black people have been expressing their outrage at their treatment by law enforcement, government, and society, and at the youth’s apparent lack of historical knowledge.
Perhaps it doesn’t go without saying, so I’ll say it: I know, from my college-level U.S. History class, that no oppressed group was ever simply gifted the rights they’d been denied by the American government. No, they — colonists, women, Black people, veterans — had to fight.
Fighting meant directly opposing conventions and laws of the time. It meant discomfort for the ruling group, who was satisfied by the status-quo and saw no reason to change because they were not negatively impacted.
Fighting meant speaking truth to power in a language they would hear – petitioning, destroying property, or taking a militant stance. We see this with colonists’ toppling of a statue of King George III on July 9, 1776; we see it in the war waged against the British.
See the Underground Railroad through which enslaved Black people escaped the South; see Nat Turner’s and John Brown’s Slave Revolts. See labor strikes. See the marches and angry ridicule the suffragists spewed at men in power. See the sit-ins and Selma; see the open defiance of what is legal and “right.” See today.
What do you think these Americans should have done?
When laws, popular opinion, and a lack of opportunity served to corner them at every step? How exactly were they “supposed to” get their rights? I’ll tell you – they weren’t. Dr. Martin Luther King wrote, “Justice too long delayed is justice denied.” The United States must no longer deny justice and complete freedom to the marginalized groups of this nation, and they must compensate these groups for damages done. Anything else would be villainy.
Ella McDaniel
Greenfield