From July 24-26, the Movement for Black Lives Convening will take place at Cleveland State University, uniting for the first time on such a scale the vast activist community that is working toward equal civil rights and racial justice in the U.S.
That the Convening will be set against a backdrop of intense police scrutiny in Cleveland and U.S. Department of Justice negotiations has not been lost on attendees and organizers. Established problems with equitable law enforcement in Cleveland mirror the same in cities all over the county. And the group recently published a brief history of organizing in Cleveland, which includes frequent visits to the city by the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. in the 1960s.
But the event this weekend is very much a forward-thinking momentum-builder toward racial justice.
“We have established a decentralized, but coordinated, movement that has already changed the discussion about racial justice and police violence; and now it is important that we gather, continue the discussion and build alignment,” said Maurice Mitchell, an organizer with the Movement for Black Lives. “At the Convening we hope to see a collective vision emerge to build meaningful power and agency in the Black community.”
Earlier this year, the New York Times Magazine published a compelling feature about the social-media infrastructure of the #BlackLivesMatter movement.
Registration has maxed out for this event in Cleveland.
This article appears in Jul 15-21, 2015.
Eric Sandy, tell us which one of your black staff writers you’re going to send to this event. Oh, wait a minute! You don’t have any black staff writers. Or female staff writers. It’s a white boys club at Scene!
Why send anyone? Until I see you protesting in the streets because of all the crime in your own neighborhoods your talk and riots are just a waste of time. But of course it’s the police departments fault that your dropout rate in high, that your kids kill each other over 20 bucks, and drugs are on every corner.
When will the losers who have never run a business, managed a candy store, flown an airplane, written a prescription or accomplished anything for the human race understand that in this country we don’t hire people based on their skin color? Judging by the school results in Cleveland, there is not much talent to choose from.
Cleveland is scraping the bottom of the barrel to have this kind of convention. I doubt they spend much here. Are we trying to follow Baltimore or Ferguson? Hopefully, police out in full force.