In the wake of mob violence and mass looting of upscale stores on Chicago’s Magnificent Mile, Jesse Jackson declared, “This act of pillaging, robbing, and looting was humiliating, embarrassing, and morally wrong. It must not be associated with our quest for social justice and equality.”
Jackson should be commended for taking a stand, but he is a lone voice and a late voice. For three months, our country has been ravaged by Black Lives Matter and the minions of a race-grievance movement that, under the guise of crusaders for justice, have steadily escalated their agenda with an ultimate goal of undermining the foundation of our nation’s values and principles and bringing it to ruin.
As peaceful protests have been commandeered by the perpetrators of violence, in cities throughout the nation, the most vulnerable, low-income neighborhoods suffered the brunt of destruction and have been left smoldering in devastation as the protesters moved on to their next target. Even more disastrous was the impact of the rioters’ demand to defund the police and the demonization of law enforcement as a wing of “institutional racism.” As a result, police have stood back, and in lawless inner cities throughout the country, homicides and street violence have soared — with scores of victims who were just children and toddlers. Just last weekend, a mass shooting at a neighborhood block party in Washington, D.C., left 21 people wounded and one dead.
Jackson was right to decry the opportunist thugs in Chicago’s upscale retail district, but the burning question is this: Where are the voices of purported spokespersons of the black community? And where have they been when the lives, livelihoods, and neighborhoods of the poor and defenseless have been lost and devastated? Where is the NAACP, the National Urban League, and the Congressional Black Caucus? Does their silence and inaction signal consent to the agenda of Black Lives Matter and the racial-grievance vigilantes who have taken an incalculable toll on those who have least? Does their failure to speak and act translate into an approval of an agenda that attacks family, faith, and entrepreneurship — the foundation which once empowered black men and women to survive, rise, and achieve in spite of unimaginable obstacles?
In the words of Martin Luther King, Jr., it does. As the icon of the civil rights movement proclaimed: “He who passively accepts evil is as much involved in it as he who helps to perpetrate it,” and “In the end, we will remember not the words of our enemies, but the silence of our friends.”
Those who were the foot soldiers of the civil rights movement and in whose name the cause was championed have been left behind and forgotten by those who stood on their shoulders. Jackson was right in his recent declaration that Medgar Evers, Martin Luther King Jr., and John Lewis “cry together in shame.”
Robert L. Woodson Sr. is the founder and president of the Woodson Center.
