Forum/Discussions

This Zimmerman verdict and analysis I have watched gave me flashback when I was traveling as a Field Director with Rev. Jesse Jackson through Florida and and other areas where Rev. Jackson used to ALWAYS remind the crowds that jurors are selected from the rolls of registered voters and here we are today with Blacks complaining about the lack of Blacks on juries when in Florida there are over 300,000 UNREGISTERED Blacks!! So this Zimmerman verdict is a major VOTER EDUCATION/CIVIC EDUCATION  moment in that you cannot have over 300,000 unregistered Blacks in Florida! You cannot have all these urban cities with millions of unregistered voters who won't wake until until times of crisis but to stay protected one must be actively and systematically STAY engaged in this electoral process BEFORE it offends you and not AFTER!! So I am not moved by WORDS that are not going to followed with people ready to WORK on a massive voter registration and voter education drive!!

Of course there is also the observation of so many that WHY does it take a White man killing a Black person to get the Black community into this kind of organizing and direct action frenzy in ways that did not happen as these same communities in Chicago and other urban areas have not bee able to do in response to the lives lost from Black on Black violence. Isn't fighting for Black life just as important when unjustly taken at the hands of another Black person as we are now mobilized when a Black life unjustly taken by a White?  The same voter education/civic education vehicles that are being organized now after Trayvon tragedy must be sustained in Chicago and other urban cities.  And from The National Black Wall Street Black economic perspective this kind of movement must also be sustained from a core Black community now being projected as controlling almost a trillion dollar consumer spending power. 

Much of the violence and injustice in Black and Poor communities would not have happened if we had sustained the community economic campaigns of the Nationalists who followed the Honorable Elijah Muhammad and Nation Of Islam or the Christian community at the core at the core of the Civil Rights Movement led by Dr. King.  Despite the differences in Nationalism or Civil Rights, both movement still had a core belief that the Black community would be better served if it used its own economic power to create, sustain and increase the Black communities own community businesses, jobs, and institutions. And from that economic power would be the capacity to sustain the political empowerment movement.  That "operational unity" is what is needed right now to make this a sustainable movement.

There is too much at stake. The Black and poor communities have been suffering from the lack of a sustainable voter education/civic education campaign that would direct an urban political and policy policy campaign. The tragedy of Emmit Till's murder set the stage for the Civil Rights, Economic, Political agenda yesterday and the tragedy of Trayvon Martin murder should the vehicle to launch our modern day Poor People's Campaign, which is also in time as a natural extension of the 50th Year Anniversary of The historic March on Washington.