Justice won’t be served until those unaffected are as outraged as those who are.

– Benjamin Franklin

Thanksgiving to New Years is generally considered the “holiday season” in America. People of different faiths celebrate their high and holy holidays, the “shopping season” has the commercial industry geared up and excited, and we end one year as we usher in a new one. It is an extremely busy and hectic time of the year for people, no matter their religious affiliation or beliefs. It is a time when people open their hearts and their wallets to those less fortunate and give to shelters, food banks, charities, and children. Neighborhoods are decorated with lights; wreaths and boughs of holly and businesses large and small are set aglow with decorative lights and holiday festivities, special customer sales, and enticements. There is nowhere that you can turn where you do not see vestiges of “holiday cheer.”

This year, there is a peculiar and heart-wrenching canvas on which our holiday season is drawn. A strange and constrained atmosphere surrounds us as we make our traditional preparations for the season. Millions of people across the nation are filling city streets in coordinated nonviolent demonstrations as they march shoulder to shoulder, arm in arm in protest of what they see as the continued injustice and lack of accountability in the mounting cases of unarmed Black men being killed by police without consequence or cause; cases from Staten Island, New York, to Ferguson, Missouri, to Cleveland, Ohio, to Los Angeles, California, to Phoenix, Arizona and so on and so on and so on… Voices fill the space and cut through the night air in collective chords chanting their discontent by shouting #BlackLivesMatter, #NoJusticeNoPeace, #HandsUpDontShoot, and #ICantBreathe! The stark and unmistakable comparison must be made to other iconic moments of the 50’s and 60’s in the struggle for civil rights and equal protection under the law. Thousands of people of all races, beliefs, and vocations came together when the consciousness of the nation woke up and stood up together for change.

During the daily accounting of murder, violent attacks and the bitterness of the civil rights struggle in the 1950s and 60’s, nonviolent protesters took to the streets, and in the height of their resistance and social disobedience they never gave up…they persevered. The demonstrations were documented through photojournalism and videotape and then released for the entire world to see, calling into question both the integrity and the very foundation of “Freedom and Equality” on which the United States of America was founded. The citizen-activists demanded that their government live up to platitudes of justice and freedom it espoused and the position of moral leadership it wanted to claim in the world. The eyes of the world were watching. Americans were watching nightly in their living rooms, and could no longer ignore the state of inequality and injustice that defined the distinctly different and desperate experiences that the citizens of this nation, whose skin was not white, lived each and everyday. Americans had to call upon their “better angels” and work for equal justice for all of its citizens or it could no longer claim to be the America it was founded to be. We are better than what our history has been.

Dr.T
Tawnya Pettiford-Wates, Ph.D.
Founder and Artistic Director
The Conciliation Project and
Associate Professor
Virginia Commonwealth University
DrT@Margins2theCenter.com
www.theconciliationproject.org

Up Next Week:  Kindness Can Be Catching