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My guest is a PhD candidate at Union Theological Seminary, right here in New York. His name is Nkosi Anderson and he’s involved in the planning of what looks to be a large protest event on October 22-24, here in New York, called #Rise Up October. #RiseUpOctober is a national protest, focused here, where the largest events will be happening. I’m not in the habit of inviting people on to talk about their upcoming political activity, but this particular protest is important to all of us Lovers for two reasons.
First, it’s addressing a very important problem in our society, the relentless killings of mostly young Black & Latino men by the police. We experienced a lot of activity late last year, after the non-indictment of the officers who killed Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri and Eric Garner, here in New York. Since then there have been killings on an average of 3 per day. An important feature of #RiseUpOctober will be the 100 Families program, where the relatives of the victims of police violence will be coming to New York to join the protest. The leaders of #RiseUpOctober are pulling people together to say, very dramatically, that this simply must stop.
The other reason this these events are important to us Lovers is that one of the two co-conveners of the events is none other than Dr. Cornel West, probably our leading academic activist Christian leader. #RiseUpOctober has established a Faith Task Force, led by Rev. Jerome McCorry, of Dayton, Ohio. The task force is charged with mobilizing people of faith to come to the events and to host and take care of the 100 families who will be here to protest the death of their loved ones.
Cornel West and Carl Dix, a spokesperson for the Revolutionary Communist Party co-founded The Stop Mass Incarceration Network (SMIN) a few years ago, and SMIN is calling for
#RiseUpOctober. So then we have to think about who we can work with in this turbulent world.
As a Christian, my overall outlook is that our job is to create a new world within the old. Cornel West calls himself a “Revolutionary Christian.” That’s something that we need to think about.
We’ll start thinking about it in this episode.
Websites:
Stop Mass Incarceration Network
Contribute to #RiseUpOcbober’s Indigogo fundraising campaign. (Be sure to watch the video of family members telling their stories.
Martin Luther King’s Letter from Birmingham Jail
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