Great stuff

My first thought was "White Like Me," Eddie Murphy's excellent Sat. Night Live bit:
https://screen.yahoo.com/white-000000112.html

Delving more deeply, "White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack" by Peggy McIntosh is a must-read and a real eye-opener for every white American:
http://amptoons.com/blog/files/mcintosh.html

As I read these petitions and look at the photos of these murder victims,

I keep thinking "Black lives matter. It's so maddening that this discussion is so often about Black deaths."

Chances are we never would have known the names of Trayvon Martin, Tamir Rice, Freddie Gray, Eric Garner, Michael Brown, John Crawford III, Eric Harris, Walter Scott, Sandra Bland, and so many others if it weren't for their maddening and heartbreaking deaths at the hands of police (or in the case of Trayvon and Eric Harris, pretend police).

I think of them and the millions of other people of color just trying to live their lives, hoping they won't become a hashtag. Their lives matter.


John Crawford, III

Petition: Black Lives Matter

From an email sent by Latonya Goldsby of Cleveland, Ohio:

When my 12-year-old cousin Tamir Rice was shot and killed by a police officer as he played in a park with a toy gun, our family didn’t know what to do. Shocked and heartbroken, we knew we had to find justice for Tamir. I remembered that Trayvon Martin’s parents started a petition on Change.org when police refused to arrest the killer of their young son and that it helped draw national attention to their story.

So I started my own petition on Change.org and over 50,000 people have signed it.

It’s been one year since the protests in Ferguson, Missouri, which propelled #BlackLivesMatter into a national movement. I never thought my family would be part of this conversation – that my little cousin would become one of the reasons we needed to call for police accountability and racial justice here in Cleveland and nationwide.

The simple act of signing a petition can make a difference and other families at the center of the #BlackLivesMatter movement have started petitions on Change.org. The parents of John Crawford, who was killed in a Walmart while he held a toy gun sold at the store used a petition to secure an important Department of Justice investigation into the death of their son. The brother of Walter Scott, shot and killed as he ran away, and the parents of Michael Brown, have each started petitions to call for body cameras nationwide.

You can view all of these petitions on one page by clicking here. There are more than three million signatures from people like you who have shown us that we’re not alone – and that meant the world to us.