SNCC 60th

Despite greater visibility today, the Black community continues to experience both justice delayed and justice denied.  The police or vigilantes are either never charged, never taken to court, or acquitted in a court trial.

We feel compelled to point out here that in Kenosha, Wis., where Jacob Blake was shot seven times in the back by police for no apparent reason, a white teenager strolled easily and comfortably among police while raising an automatic rifle in the air.

This teenager had already shot and killed two people. The response of the city’s police chief was that if protesters had not been in the street, in violation of the curfew that had been imposed, they would not have gotten shot. 

For hundreds of years fear has been used as a political tool. Certainly in the 2020 Presidential election we see how fear has been injected into political life with dire warnings of the danger to peaceful suburbs by out-of-control mobs.

Past political campaigns offer other potent examples: George H.W. Bush stoking racial flames with the Willie Horton case; Ronald Reagan pointedly announcing his candidacy at a county fair popular with the Ku Klux Klan in Philadelphia, Miss., where three civil rights workers...

...were killed by a white mob after being handed to them by law enforcement officials in 1964; and the political shift by the Southern Democratic Party, once dominated by segregationists and white supremacists, to a Republican Party now dominated by those same forces.

We want to stress again that while the police and vigilante killings take place in different cities, committed by different actors, their patterns and practice evolve from the same rationale.

In the United States, Black people, whether armed or unarmed, are viewed as a dangerous threat by some in the white community.