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From Black Star News:

Why do we sell our history so cheap?

I have heard too many allude to Occupy Wall Street as being “just like the Civil Rights Movement.” OWS should align itself with specific causes and use its clout and shine light on issues of unfairness.

However, not all of us are willing to equate our historic struggle over decades albeit centuries to OWS. Black people who placed their lives and livelihoods in jeopardy for civil rights are the topics of my books.

Criminal cases of murdered Blacks, who “forgot their place,” remain unsolved. I am old enough to have been bused across town for integration’s sake. The n-word is not foreign to me; it was spewed in my face and written on my locker in high school. This was not in the 1950s or 1960s.

After talking with protesters at Occupy Wall Street in Zuccotti Park, I understood what was so different between OWS and the 1960s Civil Rights Movement. The gripe of OWS is with those who stole too much and left too little for others. Millions feel this way. But, that does not place OWS protesters in the shoes of Fannie Lou Hamer.

At Zuccotti Park, I heard shouting about the homeless. I read signs about student loan debt. Anti-war buttons were sold. I bought t-shirts deriding invasion of privacy with caricatures of Uncle Sam. One tourist from France asked, “Why are you here?” A young man with a bull horn, tan skin, and curly brown hair, stood on a short stone wall, and shouted this nonsensical line, “The fact that the government does not want us here is reason enough to be here.”

Full piece here.

Gloria J. Browne-Marshall, an Associate Professor of Constitutional Law at John Jay College in New York City, is the Director/Founder of The Law and Policy Group, Inc., and author of “Race, Law, and American Society: 1607 to Present.”

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