“Accountability for Mr. Floyd’s murder is not justice,” write Dr. William Barber II of the Poor People’s Campaign and Repairers of the Breach, and Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove, author of “Revolution of Values: Reclaiming Public Faith for the Common Good.” One conviction is more of a fluke than justice. “If we cannot stop the killings of unarmed Black people before they happen, any collective affirmation of Black life rings hollow.”
On the first anniversary of George Floyd’s murder by Minneapolis police, the New York Times publishes a series on the impact of last year’s on-camera killing that sparked the largest civil rights protests in decades. Barber and Wilson-Hartgrove revisit the Third Reconstruction theme Barber invokes in speech after speech:
As hard as it may be to achieve, the Third Reconstruction is about more than Black people surviving encounters with law enforcement. It’s about America taking steps to protect and value its Black citizens as it has never done before. A Third Reconstruction is about ensuring Black Americans are no longer twice as likely as white Americans to die in a pandemic. It’s about remaking a system that saddles them with student debt and then offers them poverty wages.
A Third Reconstruction will ensure that all Americans can access decent housing for their families and quality education for their children, as outlined in a resolution introduced Thursday by Representatives Barbara Lee and Pramila Jayapal, and supported by our organization, the Poor People’s Campaign. Their resolution seeks to ensure all Americans access to clean and unleaded water and, in the face of widespread voter suppression efforts, a guarantee that their participation in American democracy is expanded and protected.
The Third Reconstruction is about confronting policies and practices that produce death, whether from police killings, poverty, lack of health care, ecological devastation or unnecessary war. It is, in short, a declaration that unnecessary death is intolerable and that democracy is still possible.
Possible but not inevitable. Events since Floyd’s killing demonstrate that unnecessary deaths remain tolerable in a “warrior cop” culture.
Just last week, the Associated Press released 2019 body-camera footage of Louisiana State Police punching and dragging a chained, tazed, and bleeding Black man who apologized for leading them on a high-speed chase. Ronald Greene was pronounced dead at the hospital:
Body-camera footage published by the Associated Press — withheld for two years by authorities — captures Greene wailing and saying, “I’m sorry!” as Louisiana state troopers violently arrest him, deploying what the AP identifies as a stun gun after the Black man appears to raise his hands inside his car. Troopers later punch Greene in the face, drag him briefly by his shackled ankles and leave him to moan alone while handcuffed for more than nine minutes, according to the AP.
Police insisted Greene died when his car hit a tree. That is his car above after impoundment, its air bag undeployed.
There is more. Such stories are by now familiar. Such behavior by police is intolerable.
No Third Reconstruction is coming before some deconstructing of the system that treats white suspects with deference while a traffic stop can be a death sentence for Black citizens.
The Third Reconstruction is about more than any single bill or the agenda of a political party. It is about building power to fundamentally reimagine what is possible in our society. Both the First and Second Reconstructions in American history happened because moral movements reclaimed the promises of democracy and a new, expanded electorate insisted on new priorities. If the Trayvon Martin generation has pricked the nation’s conscience and sparked a moral movement, we believe a coalition of poor and low-income people who have historically been “low-propensity” voters has the potential to shift the political landscape. We must organize around an agenda that lifts from the bottom so that everyone can rise.
No single verdict or election can bring about the racial reckoning America needs after 400 years of building systems that have rested upon white supremacy. But the generation of young people who saw themselves in Trayvon Martin knows that whatever the color of their skin, their lives will not matter in this society until Black lives matter in our public policy.
For that to happen, however, white people, poor and not, will have to see themselves and their children in the Trayvon Martins and George Floyds. Bloody Sunday pricked the conscience of enough Americans that even President Lyndon Johnson of Texas summoned the fortitude to support sweeping civil rights reforms. To be determined is whether there remains enough residue of conscience, virtue and fortitude among Americans to do the work of justice today. Too many will have to be brought to it kicking and screaming.