“America is weeping,” said Congressional Black Caucus chairman G.K Butterfield on July 8. He was referring to the racial violence and bloodshed that had spilled over into the consciousness of all America.
That week, two defenseless black men had been killed by police officers — one in Louisiana and one in Minnesota. Then came the “retaliatory” assassinations, by angry black men, of five Dallas police officers and, a week later, three officers in Baton Rouge, La.
Though I was horrified by all the accounts I read about these incidents, it was an in The Denver Post on July 10 that hit me the hardest. “WE HAD BETTER OVERCOME” pleaded the caption above Jim Morin’s drawing of an African-American man and a white police officer, facing forward together, arms around each other’s backs, and a lone tear falling from an eye of each.
Suddenly I was catapulted back 51 years, when I, along with a plane load of other white and black Coloradans, flew to Alabama to march from Selma to Montgomery, demanding voting rights for black Americans.
Our marching song, of course, was “We Shall Overcome.”
Sadly, we have not overcome.
In all fairness we have progressed in some ways. Fifty years ago, the articulate and brave Dallas police chief, David Brown, who is black; the African-American surgeon, Dr. Brian Williams, who at Dallas Parkland hospital worked frantically to save the white police officers; and Tim Scott, the first African-American U.S. senator from South Carolina, who gave a passionate speech about being black on the Senate floor, would never have been in those esteemed positions.
Yet the average black man has not “overcome” prejudicial and structural barriers that we whites do not suffer. It is a nationally known fact that black men and boys are more likely to be arrested, charged, searched, mishandled and even killed by police, for the same minor traffic offense or petty crime for which white men and boys are not. Itap a burden that each black male shares by the factor his black skin.
(The Denver Police Department, responding to citizen demands, will begin collecting its own racial data on arrests soon.)
It is also true that the vast majority of police officers, still mostly white males, do not abuse people of color. The fact that they are blamed for the actions of a very few is their burden, one which each shares by the factor of his blue uniform.
Letap recall that the Dallas police officers who were killed on July 7 were actually marching in unison with Black Lives Matter demonstrators, some of whom were even taking selfies with the officers. The tragic irony is that a lone black crazy man with no connection to the group, who simply wanted to “kill white policemen,” could end the peace and the genuine attempt to “overcome.”
When a white politician answers the chant of “Black Lives Matter” with the phrase “All lives matter,” he or she is met with fury.
And I’ll admit that at first I didn’t understand why that was.
But when I try to stand in the shoes of a black person, and recall our country’s 200-year history of violence to that person’s ancestors, I finally get it. The collective cultural memory of those lives not mattering feeds the imperative that their lives, and the lives of their children, must matter now. And they must.
On July 12, nearly 500 white people attended a public Showing up for Racial Justice meeting in Denver to protest the violence.
The Rev. Anne Dunlap, an organizer with the group, says it is urgent that white people show up. “As long as white people are silent, the killings will continue,” she says.
She’s right.
It’s time to stop the weeping, and, once again, get out the marching shoes.
Dottie Lamm (dolamm59@gmail.com) is a former first lady of Colorado and a retired adjunct professor at the University of Denver.
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