No Justice, No Peace: From the Civil Rights Movement to Black Lives Matter

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Use this Toolkit from SURJ for calling in white folks who are using harmful narratives around protest “violence:” https://tinyurl.com/SURJTools. Abu-Lughod, Janet L. Race, Space, and Riots in Chicago, New York, and Los Angeles (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007)

If you want peace, work for justice”—no slogan has perhaps been less identified in the American mind with Catholicism in the last decades than these powerful, concise words uttered almost 50 years ago by Pope Paul VI. Flores, Angel (31 July 2020). "Know Justice, Know Peace: A Jesuit Antiracism Retreat". The Jesuit Post . Retrieved 15 April 2021. Fairbanks is an American journalist who has been based in South Africa for almost 15 years and has reported on the country for a range of U.S. publications, including this one. Her knowledge of the country is formidable, yet her Americanness often gets in the way of her analysis. If you’ve got a march without an objective, then you’ve got an exercise class going on,” Sharpton says.But Sharpton knows he will also encounter the ghosts of another era on the steps of the Lincoln Monument, where the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. proclaimed that he had a dream. I was late to the meeting. By the time I arrived, a few dozen folks, including about ten of my spirit-children/students were closing out discussions of what it means to build “a movement, not a moment”.

I never thought I’d live to see my grandchild,” Sharpton said recently in an interview at the midtown Manhattan offices of National Action Network, the civil rights organization he founded in 1991. Nevertheless, the nonviolent protest envisaged by King was not viewed by the “white moderate” as “peaceful,” and the state did not see it this way either. As we have seen, following the urban rebellions that came after the Civil Rights Movement, King believed that the only path forward was to engage in a larger scale of mass civil disobedience. King remained committed to mass direct action on principle even as his advisers, like Bayard Rustin, insisted on making a shift towards policy-making, and criticized King publicly. As part of the Poor People’s Campaign and the campaign against the Vietnam War, King wanted to shut down traffic in Washington, DC. Perhaps the names and specifics of each case unfolded independently, but the system of American policing was designed to produce these outcomes. The system is brutal, murderous and violent. Only by transforming the way that we vision justice can we realise peace.

Sociology Ph.D. student and South Bend BLM organizer Emmanuel Cannady discusses the current strategies for sustaining movement momentum and achieving meaningful change. More »

In his book, Küng turned to two virtues in particular that deserve further scrutiny today: courage and constancy. I strongly agree that these virtues are required for global peacebuilding, complemented, among others, by responsiveness to the other, resistance to coercive power, and temperance as a virtue of non-violence. Virtues must be learned, especially in a Church that teaches obedience rather than courage and resistance to injustices. Christo never had to face accountability for his crime. As Fairbanks writes, “A military superior got Christo’s murder charge dismissed.” Christo enrolled at UFS in the aftermath of the case and immediately started getting in fights. He displayed signs of PTSD and felt betrayed by the army. He had been fighting to uphold apartheid, and suddenly the leaders at the top changed their minds and his sacrifices had become an embarrassment. There seemed to be no place for him in the new South Africa. As I discuss in “ Racial Transition” and elsewhere, we can more genuinely honor King’s vision of a just peace by: In what, then, does a “true respect” consist that constitutes justice and provides the basis for peace? First, such respect is grounded on the recognition of real, concrete human persons and their inalienable dignity. Think of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Ahmaud Arbery. “ Every man today knows he is a person; and he feels he is a person: that is, an inviolable being, equal to others, free and responsible — let us use the term: a sacred being,”Paul VI said. Second, such “true respect” requires recognition that justice cries out for structural change in the here and now. “It is a dynamic Justice, and no longer a static Justice,” the pope said. And thus we are obliged to “work for justice” if we want peace. Police in New York City clashed with protesters on Thursday night. NYPD Lt. John Grimpel told USA TODAY that there had been "numerous" arrests in Lower Manhattan. He said an officer was hit in the head with a garbage can, another was punched in the face and others had been spit on.

The recent proclamation of George W. Bush, to take one especially striking example, also sets out a perspective on justice and peace, which is intended to reconcile the two. He says that “lasting justice will only come by peaceful means,” adding that “looting is not liberation, and destruction is not progress.” According to Bush, who launched the so-called War on Terror, “we also know that lasting peace in our communities requires truly equal justice. The rule of law ultimately depends on the fairness and legitimacy of the legal system. And achieving justice for all is the duty of all.”