Posted on 01/31/2017 11:07:38 PM PST by 2ndDivisionVet
What do you call a mother whose child has been brutally and irrevocably snatched away from her? Usually, we call her an "advocate." And that's what Sybrina Fulton describes in her new book, Rest in Power: The Enduring Life of Trayvon Martin, a biography of her slain son, which was released on Tuesday.
An "advocate" is the modern characterization you can give a woman like Mamie Till, who in 1955 insisted that her 14-year-old son, Emmett, be buried in an open casket. Emmett had been lynched by two white men in Mississippi and, as the world had clocked to the Till's hometown of Chicago to see the fruits of Southern racism up close, Till urged that world to look even closer.
"I wanted the world to see what they did to my baby," she famously said, as tens of thousands of people filed by the boy's casket and peered inside at his mutilated face.
That moment changed the course of American history. No longer were white Americans able to deny the existence of a brutal system of racism that, at its core, denied black people the right to live.
We're in the middle of another one of those moments. Police and vigilante violence have long terrorized black communities, but now it's being caught on camera. The mothers of the victims have been dubbed — by supporters and, notably, Hillary Clinton's presidential campaign — the "Mothers of the Movement," and they've appeared on stages, at town halls and in the streets demanding change. The movement for black lives stands on their shoulders, and their words have provided devastating proof that America isn't all that different from the society that called for change in 1955.
But it's an unforgiving battle, one that no mother wants to wage. Instead of advocating for the worth of their children's lives, these women would rather be mothering the children they brought into this world. Here, in their own words, several loved ones explain how they'd prefer to spend their time.
In their own words, the loved ones of #TrayvonMartin, #AltonSterling, #EricGarner, #SandraBland and others explain what they'd rather be doing with their loved ones — if they hadn't been the victims of senseless violence.
What will this new administration do to change things?
(VIDEO-AT-LINK)
It’s a shame she wasn’t an advocate before her son started stealing, doing drugs, and attempting murder. Sweet Little Trayvon never had a chance given the neglect he suffered until his death made it profitable to mourn.
But yet, they don’t bring up Miriam Carey.
A little drug addict punk that thought he could go around beating people up. That’s all Trayvon amounted to. He was on his way to prison anyway.
I am a lawyer. I see plenty of people intimidated, pushed around, overpowered, treated like trash by the police. I also see police who are very professional and treat people decently.
Even with all of the bad behavior dad’s gf saw from St skittles, she still went out for the evening with his father and left her own young son alone with him. Can you imagine how scared that poor kid was when no one came back for hours?
It’s a miracle when some of these kids make it to the other side as productive responsible people with not a role model in sight.
Yeah, the racist white man is making the black man so poor he has to rob, rape, murder, and sell drugs just to be able to get pizza delivered so he can rob, rape, and murder the delivery man
Dude, this is a racist country!!
In fairness to budding Black thugs, a great many suffer neglect and maltreatment by their mothers, who often raise them alone as divorced or single mothers. A common pattern of Black such mothers is that they treat their daughters as princesses and their boys as nuisances and troublesome reflections of their no-good fathers. To an extraordinary degree, the problem of Black juvenile criminality is at root due to boys being raised without their fathers, and then being drawn into the thug life by their peers and Black youth culture.
Well...I’m tired of the “mothers of the movement DIARRHEA ...
You surely also see a few like Trayvon who resist arrest
and run from the “po-po”.
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