Actor and longtime activist Harry Belafonte accepted the NAACP's highest honor, the Spingarn Medal, in a Friday ceremony. What did the confidant to Martin Luther King Jr., and organizer of the March on Washington, have to say about the pressing issues facing today's African-American community?
At the top of the list was America's obsession with guns, and he demanded to know why it wasn't translating into black outrage. An excerpt from his remarks, from Democracy Now:
… The group that is most devastated by America's obsession with the gun is African-Americans. Although making comparisons can be dangerous, there are times when they must be noted. America has the largest prison population in the world and the over 2 million men, women, and children that make up the incarcerated, the overwhelming majority of them is black. African-Americans are the most unemployed, the most caught in the unjust systems of justice. And the gun game, they are the most hunted. The rivers of blood that wash the streets of our nation flow mostly from the bodies of our black children. Yet, as the great debate emerges on the question of the gun, white America discusses the constitutional issues of ownership while no one speaks to the consequences of our racial carnage.
Where is the outraged voice of black America? Where and why are we muted? Where are our leaders? Where are our legislators? Where is the church …
Read more at Democracy Now.