Statement of Solidarity with the Black Lives Matter Movement’s Convening in Cleveland, Ohio, July 24-26^th, 2015

The Institute of the Black World, 21^st Century (IBW) sends greetings of solidarity and support to the historic national convening of the Black Lives Matter Movement (BLM) in Cleveland, Ohio.

We commend the organizers of this event for their vision and determination to gather a diverse range of racial justice activists from around the USA for a timely exchange of opinions and perspectives leading to the drafting of a true “People’s Agenda”.

We at IBW have been inspired and excited by the many protest actions, both in the streets and on social media, that the BLM has organized and led over the past several months; from Ferguson to New York to Baltimore, and beyond. This bold, courageous and innovative movement, created by three visionary Black women, has galvanized and mobilized tens of thousands of young people across the globe and now is poised to become the most potent and promising movement for meaningful social change in recent US history.

We are hopeful that the Cleveland convening will consolidate this emerging movement into a permanent force for transformational change in this country and beyond and we are encouraged by the stated intention to convene similar gatherings in other cities across the country in the months and years ahead.

The conference in Cleveland comes at a time of rising vigilantism, terroristic carnage and state violence against Black people all across America, the most recent alarming examples being the death in police custody of Sandra Bland in Texas, the police killing of Samuel Dubose in Cincinnati and another police killing in the past few days of teenager Darius Stewart in Memphis.

We are especially heartened that the creators and organizers of the BLM have framed the urgency of the Cleveland gathering within the context of a “State of Emergency” within Black America.  For a number of years now, IBW has been calling on President Obama and other national political leaders to address this ongoing “State of Emergency.” To date, our pleas have fallen on deaf ears.

The time is long overdue for America and its leaders to honestly confront the living legacy of White Supremacy and state repression. The time of reckoning has arrived and IBW supports the BLM’s call to make the dismantling of structural and systemic racism a presidential campaign issue.

Like all new social change movements, the BLM is not without its challenges.  Among these are building trust between leaders, bridging divisions, overcoming turf battles, forging an action agenda from competing ideas, resolving conflicting perspectives about strategies and tactics and finding the basis for cooperative/collective actions.

We at IBW believe that cross-generational dialogue and engagement is key to determining the direction and future development of young movements like the BLM. The advice/counsel that can be provided to the young leaders of the BLM by veteran leaders of the Black liberation movements of yesteryear can be helpful in assisting them to overcome these challenges.

This process can also serve as a new learning experience for elder activists and as a vehicle to build the kind of cross-generational solidarity essential for sustaining a long-term movement for transformational change.

The Cleveland convening also has an opportunity to build bridges of solidarity and collaboration with the growing social and political movements of Afro-descended peoples around the world who are uniting to struggle for reparatory justice for Black people.

It’s worth noting that in the final communiqué from an historic international reparations summit that IBW convened in New York in April, 2015 hundreds of delegates and observers from 22 countries in the Caribbean, Latin America, Europe and Africa and from 19 states in the US, resolved to, “consolidate and expand the growing African global reparations movement by calling on civil society organizations and governments in countries where there is a legacy of enslavement to establish national reparations commissions or committees. Such commissions and committees should place a particular priority on educating, mobilizing and organizing young people. In that regard, the Summit agreed to connect with and engage the #BlackLivesMatter Movement in the United States and globally.” (ibw21.org/reparations)

Finally, we at IBW wish to echo the words of Maurice Mitchell, one of the leading organizers of the Cleveland convening, who said on the eve of the conference, “we hope to see emerge out of Cleveland a collective vision to build meaningful power and agency in the Black community and to advance a racial justice agenda that shapes our present and charts our future.”

Contacts: Dr. Ron Daniels, Don Rojas

Email: info@ibw21.org; Phone: 410-844-1031

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