This weekend’s Movement for Black Lives
may frame next year’s GOP Convention
All
eyes will be on Cleveland in July 2016 when the Republican National Convention
comes to town. Fifty thousand people, including 15,000 members of the media,
are expected to gobble up every hotel room for miles around, rent apartments
and condos at exorbitant rates, and create an economic impact of some $200
million dollars. The city fathers are absolutely giddy. If recent history runs
true to form, the demographics of most of those spending all that money will
skew Caucasian, wealthy, heterosexual, Christian. Party leaders hope that their
actions will result in one of their own becoming the next President of the
United States, the Leader of the Free World, and the Restorer of the Old.
A
year prior to this highly publicized event, which is to say starting today,
hundreds of black people will arrive largely by car and bus, for a Movement for
Black Lives Convening. The demographics of these attendees will be
overwhelmingly African American, intergenerational, and omni-sexual, if that
term represents the broadest spectrum of human sexual orientation. The economic
impact will be slight — many of them will be crashing in church basements or
possibly in the homes of total strangers. They will meet in classrooms at
Cleveland State University for workshops to learn, heal, organize and mobilize
for what they are determined must be a new American regime where Black Lives
Matter equally as much as all others.
The
backlash of the Civil Rights Movement, the dawning of the Information Age, and
globalization are among the potent forces that have produced the growing divide
in America between the relative few who have enormous amounts of wealth,
liberty, and secure and expansive personal space, and the vast numbers of other
Americans who have increasingly less.
While
technology has made it possible to create and transfer immense wealth almost by
keystroke — the mortgage manipulation that precipitated the Great Recession is
Exhibit A — the smartphones and social media that make us all potential
eyewitnesses and video reporters have spotlighted the continuing dangers of
being black in America.
One
hundred years ago Cleveland was the symbol of great wealth in America. It is
currently on a run celebrating the centennials of great civic institutions —
the Cleveland Foundation, the Cleveland Orchestra, the Cleveland Museum of Art,
and many other cultural gems in and around University Circle. Nobody looks too
closely beyond a point at how the fortunes were accrued that launched these
proud markers of civic accomplishment.
The
choice of Cleveland as the site of the Movement for Black Lives was made
intentionally, because our city has come to represent all of the ills that
plague black people nationally: indifference and hostility to women of color,
especially members of the LGBT community; excessive and outrageous police
misconduct, documented by the most recent U.S. Department of Justice report; economic
disparity; a public education system that is besieged on all sides; communities
with Third World health statistics; and even Ohio’s status as an open-carry state.
For one observer, this week's Movement for Black Lives convening evokes the spirit of the old Chambers Brothers anthem, Time Has Come Today, first released in 1967 ["I don't care what others say. Time has come today!"]. One
spokesperson told us the convening is inspired by this spirit of creative
resistance, righteous resistance, prophetic resistance.
More
than 800 people are expected to register for this weekend’s programs.
Registration is open, inexpensive, and begins at 8am. Information is available online
at www.movementforblacklives.org.
