3 Civil Rights Facts Everyone Needs to Know Now | James Gray

“We can’t win this war on police brutality by fighting, we have to be intellectual and come together!” James Gray

In today’s episode of the podcast Walk In Victory[1] we continue our talk with James Gray, an African American historian, political consultant and actor. We will focus on parallelism between modern day events and historical events in order to draw similarities, which will help us understand the narrative better and thus act accordingly. Gray says that the culture of racism is something that was built over time by unaccepted behavior and the social environment allowed it to mature to what it is now.

We will discuss three cases related to the civil rights movement. The first one is the case of Emmett Till[2], the 14-year-old victim of police brutality. His mother let the photographers take a picture of his body in an open casket and the photograph let the whole world see the injustice. Here we draw a parallel with the case in Georgia where the video of the beating went viral, with the same effect. In other words, we’re still dealing with a serious level of racial injustice all across the board.

The black community doesn’t have resources to defend themselves in court. In the light of that, Gray organizes legal nights where he and his colleagues give attorneys pro bono to the people in need.

Another parallel that we discuss is the one dividing America then and now. In the past, it was the North and the South, each with its own roots, and today we have an example of the President allowing each of the federal states to operate on their own terms (related to the opening of the states after the corona outbreak).

The second case related to the civil rights movement is the one of Mack Charles Parker[3] and the third one is the Wall Street Case[4].

We also talk about John Africa[5] and the MOVE Organization (Philadelphia). The members of the move didn’t want to participate in the USA government program and went off the grid to train and prepare for the battle. They’re known for two major conflicts with the Philadelphia Police Department, the more brutal one was in 1985 when the FBI dropped a bomb from a helicopter on the MOVE compound, killing eleven MOVE members, including five children!

The question is how do we bring these stories into a modern day context. Gray thinks that it is vital for a black child to know his history, to be proud about it and about themselves because a child that is empowered on that level is less likely to drop out of school or end up in prison and more likely to go to college.

Furthermore, we talk about the Civil War and free labour. Gray mentions worker’s mentality in a black community - even today the African Americans go to work for a slave wage, especially during these hard times caused by COVID-19.

The last thing we discuss is generational curse. Gray believes it can be broken in any moment because we can decide that we’re not going to be the victims of the curse and that will be the day we start living a better life. We have to be more powerful thinkers and more confident with ourselves in order to really break through this stuff.