Sometimes, there are no words.
The film ended, screen went black. Our ears strained to hear every word sung as closing credits and images flowed across the screen. Through the final words we sat, and as the screen went black and the theater silent for the last time, we were silent.
Silence. That invisible sound filling a space so thick you can barely breathe.
Flashback to the return journey from our first Denver Freedom Ride. Light had broken the heavy darkness of our night with tendrils of sunrise spread across the sky. We barely spoke. The night before had left us without words. BC broke the silence, “How do we go back to normal life after this?” And our response was that unbreakable, unanswerable silence thickly surrounding us.
Sometimes, there are no answers.
And that was what watching Selma was like.
No answers. Just my heartbreak flowing out my eyes in tears streaming down my face.
Heartbreak so
Great I don’t
Know what to do with
Shattered pieces of heart
Cross my arms tight to
Hold it all together
Until
My chest explodes
Broken bits
Couldn’t
Keep it all together
So much
Heartbreak
The break almost
Feels real
Eyes bright with pain
Heartbreak looks like
Tears falling
Streams, rivers flowing
Down face into
Clenched fists
Arms holding
Broken heart together
Heartbreak
So real the pain
You can feel
It was like watching a documentary of Ferguson. Some of the very same things being said from King’s pulpit as I heard from the pulpits in Ferguson (the ones on the streets and coffee shops, and ones in churches).
It was like being there all over again. Tear gas and smoky streets, police in gas-masks and riot gear. The loudspeaker shouting, “This is an unlawful assembly. If you do not disperse you will be subject to arrest and other actions.”
Don’t ask what other actions are.
In the Selma-to-Montgomery March, “other actions” meant Bloody Sunday on Edmund Pettus Bridge. “Other actions” meant beating protestors with billy clubs wrapped in barbed wire - men, women and children alike.
“Other actions” meant a militant attack against unarmed, non-violent civilians.
And I could hear my voice on St. Louis streets crying along with a hundred more, “Who do you protect? Who do you serve?”
I was back to Monday, November 24, the night the non-indictment of Darren Wilson for the killing of Mike Brown was announced. The rows of cops in riot-gear, prepared for a fight before there was even an announcement made. The sound of shots going off, people running in all directions, smoke filling the air from smoke bombs, tear gas and pepper spray. Hiding in a church for hours, watching a live stream, listening to the sounds outside, reading text messages from those outside and those watching the news warning us of rubber-bullets, snipers on roofs, and the potential of police raiding the church we were taking refuge in. People coming in, tears streaming down raw faces from tear gassing. Waiting for teammates to get inside, worried sick they wouldn’t make it.
Words cannot explain watching Selma after being on the ground in Ferguson and Denver.
But what I can tell you is how utterly overwhelmed I am by how little has changed. Police brutality perhaps is not as overt. There aren’t rows of white people cheering on the police force literally beating black protestors and white allies to death.
But police brutality still exists. The product of a deeply flawed, broken, and systemically racist system.
In a speech, Martin Luther King Jr. reminded his congregation they were not fighting racist police, but a racist system.
Nearly the same thing Rev. Sekou told us again and again. This is not about bad apples (cops), this is about a rotten system.
The parallels, uncanny.
A cry from the pulpit for black lives to matter. A cry for no more death. The funeral of yet another killed black boy.
The fair voting act, which the Selma marches and movement was fighting for, may have passed. But we still have so far to go. We still exist in a system that is intrinsically racist and broken. We still live in a society that says, “We have a black president...what more do you want?” “I’m color blind.” Or, “The Civil Rights movement was fifty years ago, we’re past that. When can we stop talking about race and just move on?”
But then Mike Brown and Ferguson, Eric Garner, Tamir Rice...and we have so far to go.
It may seem as though our world has changed drastically in the past fifty years, but watching Selma, I realized in many ways it has not. Half of me feels weighed down by the overwhelming hopelessness of that. But part of me is lit on fire with a passion for justice and a desire to see reconciliation and restoration in this world. That part of me jumps at the challenge of fighting for a better world, a world marked by justice, mercy and compassion.
This is the burden and the joy of walking this journey, especially as one who places their hope in Jesus Christ. Carrying the tension of the pain and hopelessness of our current situation but also living in the light of the reality of hope for a future of restoration and perfect peace.
Rev. Dawn watched Selma with us. After the film we sat and talked for hours. She said, “I need it to not look so similar as it did fifty years ago. Because if it looks this similar as it did fifty years ago, it means my kids will be fighting for the same thing my grandparents were fighting for.”
All the pain we feel at tonight’s realization of how parallel Selma is to Ferguson does not, will not, leave us with unbearable hopelessness or a sense that this task is impossible or this battle unable to be won. No, we will fight. The pain points us to our vision and hope for the future. A future where our children will not fear for their lives because of the color of their skin, but, as King said, “will be judged by the content of their character.”
And so we still march, boycott, protest. Because as King cried from the pulpit, and we are still shouting from the streets, “No more!"
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