A CALL TO ACTION TO BUILD BELOVED COMMUNITY
SOUTHERNERS ON NEW GROUND & ALTERNATE ROOTS
CHARLESTON MARKET HALL
Charleston, SC
MONDAY, JANUARY 21, 2013
Today, as we commemorate freedom fighter Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., and as President Barack Obama is inaugurated for his second term, we gather on contested ground to promote Dr. King’s vision of Beloved Community. We gather because the current symbolism of Charleston is rooted in its history as a pro-slavery Port City and it does not reflect our histories, our struggles, or our resistances. We gather because the face of Charleston should show the diversity and complexity of our lives and histories. We do not glorify the bloodshed, violence and horror of chattel slavery that built this city. We recognize this history as people of color, and as lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer people, and we know that we have a shared stake in transforming this city. We gather today because, in this time of great peril and great possibility, we believe in redemption!
We call on all Southern people to build King’s vision of Beloved Community! We must undergo a transformation of our collective values in order to end what King called “the giant triplets of racism, materialism, and militarism”. We need a revolution of our values that spans in scale from the conversations we have with our kids over breakfast to the way whole communities relate internationally. To do this, we must weave a strong new social fabric between us. We call on our communities, locally, nationally, and globally, to step boldly over the lines of race, gender, class, religion, and sexuality that isolate us from one another. We call on you, our sisters and brothers in struggle, to meet each other as neighbors and friends, to collaborate to make King’s dream of Beloved Community come true.
We dream, too. We dream of an end to racism, an end to poverty, an end to military terror. We dream of queer liberation, of community gardens that grow where prisons and detention centers have closed. We dream of safety for all children, we dream of a place where every person is able to achieve their full humanity. We know that these dreams are not impossible or idealistic, but absolutely necessary if we are all to survive and thrive. In the word’s of Fannie Lou Hamer, “Nobody’s free ‘til everybody’s free!”
It is with increasing urgency that we gather today to make visible our renewed commitment to Southern Freedom Movement, the same movement that swept the South in the 60’s and broke the back of Jim Crow. On this day, hundreds of other organizations and communities are gathering in their home towns, sharing their dreams for their lives and the lives of their children. We stand in solidarity with people all over the South who are organizing to solve problems in their communities, who are resisting poverty, resisting racism, resisting obliteration of our lives and our cultures. We will not be erased! We are your neighbors, your family members and friends; we are your teachers, your grandmothers, we are people of faith; and we are queers, we are sex workers, we are youth in the streets, we are undocumented and unafraid! We will leave no one in our Beloved Communities behind!
We stand in solidarity with People’s First 100 Days Actions today in Jacksonville, FL; San Antonio, TX; Atlanta, GA; Durham and Greensboro, NC; Dothan, AL; Knoxville, TN; Houston, TX; Asheville, NC; Tunica, MS Little Rock, AR; and all other cities and towns where Southern Freedom Movement is rising to the call of a new day. And, because we know that Southern people are not alone in this struggle, we stand in solidarity with oppressed people everywhere. In a time of charismatic leaders, we decide instead to look to ourselves, because we are the leaders we have been waiting for. Together, we will rise and transform the South’s legacy of division, fear and hate into a New South, a Beloved Community that we can ALL be proud of. In the words of Dr. King, “We shall overcome, because the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.”
