The Gantt Report
I recently had a good conversation with a dear Central Florida friend that I respect and admire. We were discussing what might happen if things don’t go as they should go in regards to the killing of Trayvon Martin and the subsequent arrest of George Zimmerman.
My friend suspects that if Zimmerman is not convicted of second degree murder, the non-violent protests may turn into more violent activities and one reason that violence would be bad is that many Blacks will be arrested and jailed.
Now, I’m no historian but my recollection and my research indicates that every time Blacks in America and Blacks around the world have made significant social and judicial progress someone has had to go to jail.
Jesus Christ went to jail, Martin Luther King went to jail, Malcolm X was incarcerated and Nelson Mandela served time in prison. Even Rosa Parks was taken off a city bus for sitting in the “wrong” seat and placed into a paddy wagon.
Fear of jail was never a deterrent for people protesting and fighting for equal rights and justice!
America’s founders fought hard against so-called British exploiters. There was nothing non-violent about George Washington and his contemporaries. It was the idea of Liberty or Death that propelled American colonists to stand up against the mighty British Empire!
The people that get all of the media time regarding the Trayvon protests are the people that claim the best way to get justice for the Martin family is to continue to march, pray and sing “We Shall Overcome”, peacefully.
Ok, I get that and I am in no position to tell anyone that they should do anything different.
But at the same time, I am smart enough to understand it takes a whole village to solve a village problem.
We need all kinds of people with all kinds of solutions to address Black community murders and other serious problems. We needed Dr. King and we needed Malcolm X. We needed Booker T. Washington and we needed W.E. B. Dubios. We need Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson and we need Louis Farrakhan and the Black Panther Party.
To me, this idea of protesting only in the way the oppressors and exploiters want us to protest is crazy! Proper protests, proper rallies, proper sermons and proper internet posts primarily embolden the people being protested against!
Why? Because proper limits oftentimes have to be exceeded in order to right a wrong! In most cases, power will never take a step back, so to speak.
Brothers and sisters in Sanford, Florida have to fight for justice in ways they feel are best for them but if you truly want justice for Trayvon Martin, you should want justice for everybody that has been treated in an unjust manner by unjust people. A Black person is victimized or killed somewhere in the world every day.
There are streets named after Martin Luther King because he believed in non-violent civil disobedience but there will never be streets named after Nat Turner and Denmark Vesey because they fought against slave masters the way that slave masters fought the slaves.
Don’t ever think just because George Zimmerman was arrested that George Zimmerman cannot walk out of a Central Florida courtroom a free man. People that hurt African Americans escape jail sentences all of the time. You know what happened to the people that beat Rodney King.
The Gantt Report says we should leave all of our options open as we try to respond to what happens now in the Trayvon Martin murder case.
If we want justice, we have to be willing to use any resource necessary to obtain it. Prayer is good but God helped Joshua fight his unjust Biblical oppressors to the death and God always helps those that help themselves. God is on the side of the oppressed!
