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Brian Amadi, Precious Familusi and Raven Khadeja are the founders of Black Lives Matter N.L. (CBC )

After the murderofGeorge Floyd, Precious Familusi, Brian Amadi and Raven Khadeja started talking back and forth in Facebook messages.

"It was a time where we saw a lot of people rallying and we decided this was a time to talk about racism here in Newfoundland," said Precious Familusi."People in Newfoundland are really friendly but this doesn't mean that racism doesn't exist."

Those initial Facebook messages became the start of Black Lives Matter N.L., which Familusi, Khadejaand Amadico-founded in June 2020.

Amadi is quick to point out that the organization is more than just an activist group against racism.

"Black Lives Matterdoesn't just mean stopping racism because stopping racism doesn't do much for Black lives that are already suffering from the effects of racism," Amadi said.

For our latest segment of Being Black in N.L., host Ife Alabaspeaks withAmadi, Familusiand Khadejaabout their organization, the importance of having open and honest conversations about racism,and the need for anti-racism education.

WATCH | See Ife Alaba's interview with Black Lives Matter N.L.:

You may already be familiar with Ife Alaba she's one of the charismatichosts ofCBC Newfoundland and Labrador's series Stuffed.

Alaba is host and producer of our Being Black in N.L. segment where she chats with members of theBlack community about their lives,businesses and passions.

Watch out for more Being Black in N.L. right here, on our social media channels and on Here & Now.

For more stories about the experiences of Black Canadians from anti-Black racism to success stories within the Black community check out Being Black in Canada, a CBC project Black Canadians can be proud of.You can read more stories here.

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An open conversation about racism: Meet the founders of Black Lives Matters N.L. - CBC.ca

Cloe Poisson :: CTMirror.org

A protestor holds a Black Lives Matter sign at the start of a protest march at Keney Park to protest the death of George Floyd at the hands of police in Minneapolis.

My life and every other black life matters.

This is every black persons motto in the United States of America. In the past few months, weve seen an increase in deaths among the Black community. Besides COVID-19 disproportionately affecting this community, resulting in many deaths, so has police brutality. Racism is a public health crisis.

The recent killings of Ahmaud Arbery, Breonna Taylor, George Floyd, and now Daunte Wright of Minnesota help reveal the sad truth about how devalued lives of people of color are in the United States. People worldwide are now finally having open discussions about what racism looks like and how it is disproportionately affecting their communities in their day-to-day lives. We are starting to finally hold officers accountable for their actions and speak out against these reoccurring injustices.

Every day, it seems as if another killing or shooting results in the death of another black man. On Sunday, April 11, 2021, 20-year-old Duante Wright was shot and killed after the traffic stop in Minnesota, miles away from where George Floyd was murdered. The shooting was just recently ruled as a homicide, but is claimed to be accidental. Many Black Americans, including me, want to see the officer responsible for this young Black mans death held accountable.

It is no secret that people continue to suffer daily from the trauma we see, such as the deaths of our brothers and sisters at the hands of the police, the people who take a vow to protect us. Black people are not viewed as humans in this society. This is the reality: Black men are afraid of the police. We are scared that if we get pulled over, our lives will be put at stake, and we can be brutally murdered at any given time, regardless of the environment.

To continuously mourn the loss of a Black life every day is draining. We were put on this earth to be conscientious members of society, not to be eternally oppressed.

Today, and every day: Black Americans such as I will continue to say that our lives matter.

Eugene Bertrand is a student at Eastern Connecticut State University.

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Opinion My life and every other Black life matters - The CT Mirror

From the start, the founders of Black Lives Matter have always put LGBTQ voices at the center of the conversation. The movement was founded by three Black women, Alicia Garza, Patrisse Cullors and Opal Tometi, two of whom identify as queer.

By design, the movement they started in 2013 has remained organic, grassroots and diffuse. Since then, many of the largest Black Lives Matter protests have been fueled by the violence against Black men, including Mike Brown and Eric Garner in 2015, and now George Floyd and Ahmaud Arbery.

But it's not only straight, cisgender Black men who are dying at the hands of police. Last month, a Black transgender man, Tony McDade, 38, was shot and killed by police in Tallahassee.

Andy Jean, a costume designer, celebrates Black Trans Lives at the Juneteenth Jubilee in Harlem. "It was powerful to receive that love from our community. We fight and celebrate our freedom each and everyday," Jean said.

On June 9, two Black transgender women, Riah Milton and Dominique "Rem'mie" Fells, also were killed in separate acts of violence, their killings believed to be the 13th and 14th of transgender or gender-non-conforming people this year, according to the Human Rights Coalition.

And in 2019, Layleen Polanco, a trans Latina woman who was an active member of New Yorks Ballroom community, died while in solitary confinement at Rikers Island jail.

"We are a prime target because of our Blackness, and our intersectionality of being trans adds an extra target on our backs," said Jonovia Chase, co-lead organizer of House Lives Matter, a community organization composed of sexual- and gender-minority people of color.

Chase said that although Black Lives Matter was "created by queer folks, [cisgender] privilege has taken precedent over gay and transgender people."

While Chase and other LGBTQ advocates of color clearly condemn the deaths of George Floyd, Amaud Arbuery and countless other cisgender Black men, they're also quick to call attention to other acts of violence against Black LBGTQ people that garner less national media attention.

Jonovia Chase, center, honors native land in an opening ceremony led by Graciela Tibiaquira at the Juneteenth Jubilee.

They often point to Marsha P. Johnson and Sylvia Rivera, a trans woman of color, who helped kickstart the LGBTQ rights movement following the Stonewall uprising of the 1960s only to watch as many hard-fought rights and privileges benefited white gay men and women but weren't extended to people like them.

"It's another example about how the Black queer community has been in the forefront leading, however, we're not being seen or heard or valued," Chase added.

However, organizers say there are clear signs times are changing, and that Black LGBTQ voices are increasingly taking center stage in nationwide conversations about race, discrimination and police violence.

In recent weeks, people have turned out in never-before-seen numbers to support the LGBTQ community of color -- and especially Black transgender people.

Last week in Brooklyn, an estimated 15,000 people turned out for a demonstration called The Black Trans Lives Matter rally, aka "Brooklyn Liberation," making it one of the largest transgender-focused protests in history, according to the organizers.

Protesters stand in solidarity with transgender people at the Juneteenth Jubilee in Harlem.

In Los Angeles, tens of thousands more gathered in Hollywood for the All Black Lives Matter protest, intended to be inclusive and centered on LGBTQ members of BLM.

And on Juneteenth, to celebrate the day the last enslaved people were informed of their freedom, celebrations across the country sought "intersectional" celebrations of the Black experience in the United States

In Harlem, in New York City, hundreds gathered for a massive celebration of music and art intended to "lift up and center Black Queer and Trans folks" in an event co-organized by The Blacksmiths, Intersectional Voices Collective and the Wide Awakes.

"More people are also becoming educated and intentional at this moment," said Niama Safia Sandy, who's on the steering committee of The Blacksmiths, a coalition of artists, curators, culture producers and organizers committed to Black liberation and equality.

"It is just not possible to turn a blind eye away from these things any more," Sandy said.

Dancers gather at St. Nicholas park in Harlem for the Juneteenth Jubilee.

Clad in face masks and handing out hand sanitizer, hundreds turned out to dance, sing and march along historic Black landmarks on a hot day Harlem.

Eventually, the parade-like crowd landed at St. Nicholas Park, where members of New York City's ballroom community greeted protestors with elaborate voguing performances, a dancing style born in the queer ballroom scene that has since been popularized by Madonna, Rihanna and Ariana Grande.

"It's rare that we get opportunities to come together as a Black community and specifically center the trans and queer community," said Chase, who helped organize the Juneteenth celebration in Harlem.

During one performance, model and poet Linda LaBeija, a member of the House Ballroom community, read a spoken-word poem called, "Vogue, bitch," to a thunderous crowd of more than 300 people.

"How many of those beacons of light must we lose along the way?" LaBeija asked the crowd, referring to the Black trans women who have been the victims of violence.

Cotton Juicy Couture performs a stylized dance called 'voguging' for those gathered for the Juneteenth Jubilee at St. Nicholas park in Harlem. "It was so fun and liberating to finally vogue in front of a crowd after [social distancing] for a long time," he said.

And as Black Lives Matter protesters continue to remember George Floyd and others killed at the hands of police, LaBeija asked, "Are you including Black trans women in that list of Black names?"

As a Black transgender woman, Deja Smith said she's learned the hard way how difficult life can be for people like her in the United States.

"It has been a struggle most of the way here," said Smith, a founding member of the Intersectional Voices Collective and director of makeup artistry for DDPRO.

"But over the last three to five years things have started to ease up, leading to this moment today where I just thought I would never see a crowd of Black, queer and trans people of like minds, getting along, and speaking to our ancestry."

Smith credits the founders of Black Lives Matter for creating space for LGBTQ voices from the start.

"It has always been part of their cultural movement," she said.

Continued here:
From the start, Black Lives Matter has been about LGBTQ lives ...

In the summer of 2020, protests erupted across the globe to show solidarity with the Black Lives Matters demonstrations in the U.S., calling for racial justice for Black people like George Floyd, Breonna Taylor and Tony McDade being killed at the hands of police officers.

Months later, while people were still showing up to support this Black social justice movement, the nation grieved the death of three beloved leaders of the last generations Black justice movement.

The late Rep. John Lewis, the Rev. C.T. Vivian, and the legendary baseball player Hank Aaron were a few of the remaining civil rights pioneers of their time. But what set them apart from the protesters in the streets, was what was at the center of their movement decades ago: the Black church. Thats where ideas for certain acts of protest, like the sit-ins of 1963, the Childrens March the same year, and the 1955 Montgomery bus boycott, came to fruition.

In the book, The Black Church: This Is Our Story, This Is Our Song, author and historian Henry Louis Gates Jr. cites the idea of the Black church as a freedom church, as a vehicle for the civil rights struggle and a way of looking at the world.

Some young activists today, are trying to keep that connection between social justice movements and the church. Alexus Cumbie, who attended church service every Sunday pre-pandemic, said she believes the Black church and the Black Lives Matter Movement share some of the same goals of truth seeking and transparency, repentance and reconciliation.

Christian churches, as a whole in the U.S., have been experiencing a decline in attendance. A new Gallup study found the number of Americans who are members of a place of worship has dropped to fewer than 50 percent for the first time since their data collection began in 1940. The Black church has also seen a decline. The study also showed 31 percent of millennials and 33 percent of Generation Z have no religious affiliation.

The desire for institutions to address racial justice and other progressive policies may be the principle reason millennials are currently moving away from the church as an institution, said Bishop Yvette Flunder, senior pastor of City of Refuge, United Church of Christ, and the presiding Prelate of the Fellowship of Affirming Ministries.

Theyre trying to find like-minded millennials who are very interested in doing the work of policy, doing the work of justice, and organizing, Flunder said. And theyre feeling that the church, as it is called monolithically, is not really on board.

These policy issues include justice work, like LGBTQ rights, that Christian churches, as a whole, have historically opposed.

Community members from Brave Space Alliance, Broadway Youth Center, and Renaissance Social Services speak during the Pride Without Prejudice march on June 28, 2020 in Chicago. Photo by Natasha Moustache/Getty Images

Dr. Rev. Gardner, the senior pastor at Plum Grove Baptist Church in Tuscaloosa, Alabama, said that even while young people move away from the church, it remains an epicenter to Black life.

While young Black people are no longer waiting on the permission of the church to go out and take action, those in political power still look to the Black church for direction in the Black community, said Gardner, who also teaches African American history courses on the Black Church and Black protest at the University of Alabama.

Whenever there is an issue in his Tuscaloosa community, he added, whether its over tornado devastation or COVID-19 concerns, the mayor and the police chief do look to the church to help.

So in that regard, when we think about the word epicenter, we think about entities that do more than just one thing, Gardner said. In this way, the church is the prophetic voice of the Black community.

Garnder said faith is what sustained the civil rights movement in the 1960s, and its what the church has to offer in todays movement.

Flunder said she agrees. We [the Black community] are deeply faith-oriented, hope-oriented, she said.

While the Black church as an institution has not always received openly queer folxs, Black queer folxs have always fought right alongside it, Flunder, who identifies as a lesbian woman, added.

Flunder believes that the faces of the fight for Black social justice look more intersectional now than they did a few decades ago.

I have never seen anything quite like the Black Lives Matter movement, she said. The thing that makes it so incredibly unique to me is not just that there are a wonderful group of Black and brown young people out there fighting alongside white people.

Flunder added while she is learning from young people, she hopes they can also learn from the adversities she faced when she was their age.

I am also encouraging the movement not to forget the wisdom trail, the wisdom path, she said. Take a look at our scars, because we still have them.

A Black Lives Matter flag flies near a church on Black Lives Matter Plaza in Washington, D.C. Photo by Jeremy Hogan/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images

Cumbie, who is a Black queer voice in her hometown of Birmingham, Alabama, said she understands the importance of the church.

I think that the Black church is pivotal for Black liberation movements, which is why white supremacists target these gathering spaces, she said. And Ive seen it in my home city of Birmingham, Alabama, where four little black girls were killed at the 16th Street Baptist Church.

On her college campus, she leads a Bible study, and said that many students who attend are queer.

I think that a lot of young Black, queer college students find themselves in these more intimate Bible studies because theyre able to have a more individualized and personalized experience with God and their spirituality when theyre able to ask those tough questions without judgment.

Cumbie said thats one of the critiques of the Black church and all churches not being a space that seeks to answer these tough questions on the minds of young queer people.

Wynston Cornelius is the program director of Gender Bender, an LGBTQ support and advocacy group based out of South Carolina. As a Black trans man, he experienced a lack of transparency in the church.

For most of my life, I heard all are welcomed, and Im welcomed conditionally, Cornelius said, as long as I wear a dress, or as long as my hair is a certain way, as long as Im not questioning whats being preached about, even in Sunday school.

Cornelius said in his own experience, it was not a matter of him struggling with who he is, but the church struggling with who he is.

For most of my life, I heard all are welcomed, and Im welcomed conditionally.

He said that if the church continues not to be accepting of the queer community, it may lead to what he called a devolution, what he described as the continuation of even more churchgoers leaving the institution because of its refusal to meet the needs of all the intersections of Black people.

Flunder said she believes the Black church has work to do on its fragile patriarchy to be relevant to the social justice movements. She explained that Black men have been wrongly diminished and emasculated in various ways in America slavery, Jim Crow, and peonage in sharecropping, and todays industrial prison complex.

One of the few places where our men did have power coming along was in the institution that we created, the Black church, Flunder said.

Within the structures of church walls, women and men are very concerned about making sure that the roles of women essentially dont diminish the roles of men, Flunder explained.

Those strict roles erase the Black LGBTQ community, who are also doing the work for the prosperity of Black people, she added.

The Black churchs role of serving as a gathering site will always exist, and the conversations with that institution will evolve, Cumbie said.

We have to move towards a more radical pursuit of loving, of loving our neighbors, she said.

READ MORE: Black women were vital to the Black church. Here are 2 stories

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Where does the Black church fit in today's Black Lives Matter movement? - PBS NewsHour

Season two of the Omnia podcast In These Times explores Black Lives Matter protests alongside the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol in episode one, while episode two takes a look at the laws and policies that legislated Black lives, movement, and security, and consider the lasting impacts of systems including slavery and colonialism.

Faculty members from the School of Arts & Sciences discuss the events of Jan. 6, while two students reflect on the events of the past year, and share a glimpse of their experiences as young Black adults finding their path in a nation that has yet to come to terms with its legacy of racism and white supremacy.

Herman Beavers, Julie Beren Platt and Marc E. Platt Presidents Distinguished Professor of English and Africana Studies talks with Camille Charles, Walter H. and Leonore C. Annenberg Professor in the Social Sciences, and Heather Williams, Geraldine R. Segal Professor in American Social Thought. They are joined by Breanna Moore, a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of History, and senior Jelani Williams.

The enslavement of Black people was supported by a legal system that included everything from laws preventing legal marriage to those restricting movement and access to education. When slavery was abolished, this system did not go away. Instead, it evolved to include Jim Crow laws and 20th-century policies including redlining and urban renewal. In episode two, two historians and an anthropologist talk about the violence embedded in our shared history and legacies that persist: Heather Williams speaks with history professor Brent Cebul, and Deborah Thomas, the R. Jean Brownlee Professor of Anthropology and Director of the Center for Experimental Ethnography.

Episode one highlights:

5:38: [Heather Williams] I remember saying to a friend a couple of times, This reminds me of the 1850s, the division in the country, but not just division among individuals, but somebody at the helm whos sowing that division and encouraging it. And she said the 1850s? Not the 1960s? And I said, Yeah, 1960s, it was intense. It was powerful, but its the 1850s when the country was so divided over slavery and abolitionists were pushing more and more against slavery. And the pro-slavery people in the South and elsewhere are saying, No, weve got to hold on to slavery.

7:47: [Camille Charles] Certainly, we are a nation founded on the idea of Black inferiority, and because we have never really dealt with that origin story, right, that original sin, we dont educate our children in a way that would address that and then begin undoing it. Right? So that for everything that we might see in society that we would think would make it better, I think theres too much that remains in our society, beginning with K to 12 education, that really just perpetuates that origin story. Or, at least the piece of it that suggests that somehow slavery wasnt so bad and Blacks are to blame for their subpar economic position, right?

12:46: [Herman Beavers] I knew by the middle of 2017 that we were well on our way to becoming a fascist authoritarian state. And by 2021, when 45 left office, thats what we were. So the coup attempt on the 6th, and thats exactly what it was, the coup attempt on the 6th is what happens in a fascist authoritarian state, where people are doing what they think the authoritarian leader wants them to do. So it was disheartening.

The other thing is this, white supremacy and systemic racism have become, if not household words, certainly sort of public watch words. And Im skeptical about how deeply invested people are, particularly white people are, in addressing those things. ... Nothing that Ive seen, including white people participating in street protests, nothing that Ive seen has induced me to think that we have reached at what people are calling an inflection point. Because, January 6 undoes all of that. If we were on our way to it, its all undone. Because for better, for worse, we live on a country whose history is built around the idea that white people are central to everything that happens and everybody else is an add-on or an imposition or an intrusion that needs to be either silenced or erased or removed.

So, the only people that can turn that around is white people. I reject that whole language of white people being my allies, I just reject that because I didnt advance white supremacy, racism. I didnt invent those things. So my expectation is that people who are really serious about engaging white supremacy and systemic racism, they need to take January 6 as the arena in which they need to enter to challenge those things.

Episode two highlights:

9:43: [Heather Williams] The main legacy [of slavery] is, again, the ideology, the belief that I think is, its hard to explain it and describe it. We often think about people like those people who went to those rallies that some of us disapprove of, that call themselves white supremacists, or would not deny being white supremacists, who run around with the Confederate flag and have some excuse for why theyre doing that. And then youve got the masses of white people, including good white people, nice white people, some white people I know and are friends with, who have embedded in them an idea that they are better than other people.

And I think that is the most pervasive, and the most damaging legacy. That more and more, especially young people are trying to throw that off, or trying to question that, or trying to challenge it, but its not so easy to do. And people talk about privilege. Its not so easy to give up privilege. Its just not, even when you recognize it, and a lot of people dont recognize it. They dont even look for it. They dont think about it. But even once you do, when the rubber hits the road, do you really stand by that?

15:13: [Brent Cebul]: We often talk about redlining, the practice of government providing insurance to particular neighborhoods for mortgages, right? And so the classic understanding of redlining is that it denied the benefits of mortgage and lending to black neighborhoods and cities disproportionally, but also Jewish neighborhoods in some southern Eastern European immigrant neighborhoods. But what we often forget is that the white neighborhoods, and the aspirationally white neighborhoods and suburbs, were given favorable status by those same programs. And so not only are they starving poor communities and cities of access to that capital, theyre creating new markets for white families to move out to suburbs. So theres both a stick in cities and a carrot thats pulling white people out. And that it would not be an underestimation to say that that nest egg that a mortgage offers really creates the white middle-class.

23:52: [Deborah Thomas] You asked if anthropology has colonial origins, right? So all disciplines have colonial origins. Humanism as a Western philosophy, of course emerges outside of the scientific revolution, and in the wake of the Renaissance from the 14th to 17th centuries. And central to the emergence of humanism was an attempt to reckon with reason and rationality by developing a new universalism that would dislodge theological conceptualizations of causality in favor of a new idea of man as a secular political subject. And in the process of developing this new secular idea of man, it also located European views of the world as superior to all other possible views.

Listen to the podcasts in full at Omnia.

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In These Times: Black lives and the call for justice | Penn Today - Penn Today