August 09, 2015

Popular Resistance Newsletter: Remembering Through Action

"This week, memorials were held to mark the one year anniversary of the murder of Mike Brown which sparked the #BlackLivesMatter movement and the 70th anniversary of the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The United States has been at war since the founding, both at home and abroad."

By Margaret Flowers and Kevin Zeese, www.popularresistance.org
August 8th, 2015

Newsletter: Remembering Through Action

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"Black Lives Matter is bigger than police brutality

This weekend there are events in Ferguson to mark the anniversary of the deaths of Mike Brown, Kajieme Powell and others. Organizers and activists are reflecting on what the last year has meant. Tef Poe and Kayla Reed were interviewed about it and Pamela Merritt gave her views. Click here to read more about the events and take the action pledge.

It was a year ago that we saw the tweets showing Mike Brown’s body lying in the middle of the street, left there for more than four hours after he was killed by Officer Darren Wilson. The Black Lives Matter movement, which had been percolating for decades, took off with marches in Ferguson that were met with an over-reaction by heavily militarized police leading to the Ferguson Rebellion and solidarity actions across the country.

This was a classic ‘take off’ moment as we described in “Major Social Transformation Is Closer Than You May Think” which was based on Bill Moyer’s “Eight Stages Of Successful Social Movements.” Another classic ‘take off’ was the Occupy Movement in 2011 which brought wealth inequality and political corruption to the public dialog. Now both fronts of struggle, which are part of the movement for social, economic, racial and environmental justice, are continuing to create national consensus around the issues.

The Black Lives Matter movement changed the conversation about racism in the United States and brought White Supremacy, which Herbert Dyer, Jr. describes as an inherent part of the “entire social, political, cultural and economic ‘American’ milieu,” to the forefront. Now we are counting the number of black and brown people who are being killed by police (638 this year at last count). A new poll shows that more than three out of five blacks in the US are either mistreated by police or have a family member who was mistreated. And over the past year, 40 laws have been passed in 24 states to address police behavior."...
Read full posting here

Here's a link to Bill Moyer's "The 8 Stages Of Successful Social-Political Movements," originally posted by PopularResistance.org  on December 26, 2013.

"Bill Moyer (September 17, 1933 – October 21, 2002), was a United States social change activist who was a principal organizer in the 1966 Chicago Open Housing Movement. He was an author, and a founding member of the Movement for a New Society."
Source: Wikipedia (Moyer is not to be confused with the American journalist and politician, Bill Moyers.)