A Call to Action

At the invitation of her family, I was seated last week in the pews of Abyssinian Baptist Church in NYC for a memorial service to honor the courage, sacrifice, and leadership of Claudette Colvin, a founding mother of this nation's rebirth in the civil rights era.

It was a beautiful morning, filled with love, respect, and religious fidelity, honoring a woman motivated by deep Christian belief who, at 15, tipped this nation closer to its promised freedoms.

During the morning ceremony, the news that our president put out on social media, the vile tropes about the Obamas, our forever president and first lady, began to spread on our phones.

On top of our president’s earlier social media attacking Justice Jackson. On top of, well, everything else out of this administration's divisive platform.

The lamentation is less about how calculatedly disgusting some people can be, but more about how many more, in the center — in business, in faith, in elected office — stay silent. Kudos to a few conservatives for speaking out and pushing back. But most? Crickets.

This is the core of the Letter from a Birmingham Jail; that of all the things that bring us evil, it is the center's silence which matters most.

You cannot beat back the sheriff, er, president, and his firehoses and attack dogs without the center staying put.

At the memorial service, we talked about Ms. Colvin's fearlessness. How her teenage refusal — Rev. Frederick Douglass Haynes described her as “Unsung and Unstoppable” — inspired Mrs. Rosa Parks, and, well, you know the story.

It called to mind the stark question for us all — on whose side are you?

Those of us who love this country enough to tell the truth about our greatness and shortcomings. Those of us who know that to improve in any relationship, it helps to be honest about what has happened and what is going on.

Or those who insist on not just lying about our history but punishing those of us who tell the truth.

What immaturity at best, criminality at worst, compels people to insist that we lie about our history?

To stop this madness, which, of course, we have seen many times before, we call on the center to speak out and push back.

This Black History Month, the call to action is not again to the Black communities who have carried this burden for generations, but to the mostly white center — the business leaders, the faith leaders, the elected officials who care about the country as much as themselves. Your silence is complicity.

You doing something — anything — is compelled.

And now.

Not after those like Ms. Colvin with more courage than you have already sacrificed.

Now.