The
NYC mayor was right when he said last night that we shouldn't have to
say black lives matter. We should be able to take it for granted. In
the 1780s the British Society for the Abolition of Slavery adopted as
its official seal a woodcut of a kneeling slave above a banner that
read, "Am I Not A Man And A Brother?" More than a hundred years later,
black sanitation workers in the Poor People's Campaign answered the
slave's question with signs worn around their necks that read:
"I Am A Man." Today, fifty years after the passage of the Civil
Rights Acts and the supposed demise of the old Jim Crow, we have the
mayor of New York City acknowledging that we are, once again, at a point
in our history where black people must raise signs saying "Black Lives
Matter" because it is so blatantly obvious that the lessons of our
history have yet to be learned.
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