Every week, it seems that another young black man dies. One thousand three hundred died by police in the last year, and at least that number died because of senseless street shootings by other black males. I take each of those deaths personally because I happen to be one of those delusional people who believe that I can make a difference in the lives of those who look like me.
I chose to take each of those deaths as a personal failure because it’s the things we take personal that are the things that we are committed to. Regardless of who pulled the trigger, the cause of the deaths is the same: poverty with hopelessness as its very foundation.
The streets these young men lived on and live on are strewn with broken promises (getting educated did not guarantee success) and feed a private prison complex that demands 90 percent occupancy by contract. Free labor is alive and well again within the walls of those prisons.
Starting this year, each and every story I write will be just a small chapter in a much bigger love story. Sometimes it maybe about the pain and suffering of other African Americans, but it is a love story at its foundation. Sometimes, the story will be about death by authorities or through gang violence, as it is this time, but it is still a love story.
A brighter future
I have reasons to believe now that my lineage in America is far more Native American than African American, but even if we just counted the nearly 400 years we have been in this nation as African slaves (1619-2019) we have established a presence in this land.
So whether it is the voices of 500 generations of Native Americans or the 25 generations of newly arrived Africans, they are ancestors buried in the soil of this land so I must embrace this land with love and everything I do must be part of a greater love story.
You may see me with my head bloodied, my feet swollen from marching or tired and my face frustrated at the slow pace of economic justice, but my fire as an activist will always be more about the things I love than the things I hate. I have learned that you fight harder for the things you love than against the things you hate. Your passion burns brighter and your commitment rarely wavers when it’s about true love.
That love will lead me to try to get some major projects done this year, and maybe we can stem the tide of young black men dying if we can give them more to live for. So as part of my love story, you will see me trying to repeal Initiative 200 in Washington state, raise $25,000 to have a Russell and Lillian Gideon Memorial float for the black community for a Seafair festival in July, organize the African American Political Action Committee (Afri-PAC) into a political force and build a new social service organization for the African American community in Martin Luther King Jr. County. If we can get this modest agenda done this year, we will make a major step in letting our youths know that there may be a brighter future in this land.
I also will shed my inherent shyness and make myself more available as a public speaker because this love story can be explained in vibrations emanating from the spoken word even better than it can be in just written form. Plus, the microphone is a powerful weapon of mass emotional change.
Creating the positive
The Bible says that it takes 40 years to make a man ( ask Moses), but it takes 400 years to make a nation or a people. This nation will see an extraordinary growth in the African-American community in the next three years as we approach our 400th anniversary in 2019.
That growth must be fueled by love, and stopping the death and destruction in the streets of the inner city is essential. Winning requires both the effort to stop the negative and create the positive, and 2019 must be a successful balancing of the two.
There is no greater time to be an African American than the present time we live in.
CHARLIE JAMES is co-founder of the Martin Luther King Jr. County Institute (mlkci.org). To comment on this column, write to MPTimes@nwlink.com.