Signs of the Times - Uriah Fields comments on the Black Lives Matter movement
August 2015
Letters to the Editor: Uriah Fields comments on the Black Lives Matter movement
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George,

Black Lives Matter is an activist grassroots movement that can be traced back to the July 2013 acquittal of George Zimmerman in the Florida deadly shooting of African American teen Trayvon Martin.

Recently, members of Black Lives Matter confronted two politicians seeking to be President with the demand that they address police brutality, specifically, the police killing of unarmed black men and boys. They rebuked Democratic presidential candidate Martin O'Malley who had said "Black lives matter, white lives matter, all lives matter." They maintain that saying "white lives matter, all lives matter," fails to acknowledge that black lives, not white lives, are often adjudged to be insignificant. O'Malley offered an apology, admitting he had failed to give due credit to the dictum "Black Lives Matter."

On August 9, members of Black Lives Matter Seattle Chapter took the stage and forced Independent Democratic candidate Senator Bernie Sanders to the side at an event in Seattle and asked the gathering to join them in holding Sanders accountable for not doing enough to address police brutality. Sanders said that he was committed to racial justice and acknowledged that more needs to be done to eliminate racial discrimination.

I implore members of Black Lives Matter to not allow their name to be weakened or dismissed by adding "white lives" and "all lives" to their pursuit. And not let happen to "Black Lives Matter" what happened to blacks when they were designated as "minorities." Only blacks were enslaved and subjected to legal segregation, disfranchisement and lynching. Their fight for freedom and equality has been a struggle. I commend to readers the Charlottesville African American Authors Book Club selection for September: "Ebony and Ivory: Race, Slavery and the Troubled History of American Universities" by Craig Steven Wilder.

White lives have always mattered in America, even doing slavery and the 100 years that followed slavery when the Ku Klux Klan, emboldened by the U.S. Supreme Court's 1896 Plessy v. Ferguson decision that declared "separate but equal" to be constitutional.

To take the position that "Black Lives Matter, white lives matter, all lives matter," as O'Malley originally stated, is like calling blacks "minorities" and having in that classification poor whites, Latino, white women. disabled people, homosexuals and lesbians who are not saddled with a 244 years of slavery and 100 years of legal segregation legacy. Designating blacks as minorities has benefited non-blacks more than blacks and at the expense of blacks, and that is why I have called for abolishing affirmative action.

That is what will happen if blacks fail to acknowledge "Black Lives Matter" singularly. Even worse, black lives will be considered to be protected and respected the same as the lives of non-blacks which is not true in reality.

As a person who helped lead the Montgomery Bus Boycott, more than three score years ago following the arrest of Rosa Parks who refused to give her bus seat to a white person, I salute members of Black Lives Matter and those who will become members. Some changes can only be achieved with direct, or what I refer to as, "up-in-your-face" action.

O Brothers and Sisters Wake Up Now

O brothers and sisters wake up now,
and help save our dying race.
We are losing too many every day
who have a right to live.
Often they are young, too young to die.

Chorus

Help save our dear brothers' precious lives,
Help save our dear sisters' precious lives.

The guns, drugs and prisons are killers
of our people young and old.
We are victims everywhere we go
and it's because we're black.
We are the last hired and the first fired.

O brothers and sisters unite now,
and become race warriors.
We must fight if we would win, this is our fight,
and that's always been true.
O yes, this maybe the final call.

Uriah J. Fields (Electronic mail, August 11, 2015)


Comments? Questions? Write me at george@loper.org.