Beyonce "Formation" Visuals & Women In The Movement: A Tribute to Black History
Angela Davis, Assata Shakur, Kathleen Cleaver, Barbara Easley-Cox, Elaine Brown, Chaka Khan just to name a few.
While everyone is used to seeing our brothers with fists pumped high in the air, we must never forget the ladies that held them down during the days of the civil rights movement.
Most people are unaware that at its height, most of the members of the Black Panther Party were women.
"Everybody knows that all the people don't have liberties, all the people don't have freedom, all the people don't have justice....so that means none of us do."- Kathleen Cleaver
Today civil unrest continues as blacks remain the victims, disproportionately of arrests, disasters, budget cuts, with no aid from the government or the system in power.
Beyonce's visuals in her "Formation" video and subsequent Super Bowl 50 half time performance, shed light on problems that people who don't look like us, seem to not have to concern themselves with.
Black men and women have been killed by the police either in custody, shot in the back, with their hands up or with no weapon at all. There is a need for more police on the street who look like us, there needs to be accountability for taking someone's life in error. There are some who will try to justify all these wrong doings with some excuse, but why then are there no rise in Black police officers killing people-white or black. How come white officers never "fear for their lives" when comfronting a white person (who may or may not be armed) but automatically "fears for his life" when in a situation with a black person?
Beyonce's video also brought to attention the forgotten parts of Lousiana. But we, as a people, won't forget how President Bush was extremely slow to provide relief and support to citizens of this country and hundreds of people were stranded, without help from their government, for days on an expressway. If you go to New Orleans today most of the towns hit by the hurricane are in full recovery mode.Why are they all rebuilding and moving on except the Lower 9th ward? The Lower 9th ward is predominately black.
Today there is a water crisis in Flint, Michigan in which babies and expectant mothers have been exposed to water with toxic amounts of lead. The government once again is slow to act, slow to implement change and even sent out notices for water bill payments while the water still runs brown. They are responsible for this huge catastrophe that they have been well aware of and chose to ignore. Why is there no sense of urgency in the city of Flint? Flint Michigan is predominately black.
So few songs today come with a message of solidarity or uplifting words of empowerment and unity. Beyonce's video was packed with political references from Dr. King to Trayvon Martin. On Super Bowl Sunday, she and her dancers paid homage to the Great Malcom X, who was unaplogetic in his views regarding the unfair treatment of the black man by this country. They wore berets for all the Black Panther memebers and struck a pose of fist pumps for Tommie Smith and John Carlos who did so 40 years ago at the 1968 Summer Olympics as a symbol of Black Power.
As a tribute to those who came before us, we wil continue to "man " the cause of the Black Panther Party. As we can see from current headlines, there are still many injustices- some new, some never changed- that the black man and woman faces, simply because of the color of their skin. And wherever our brothers need us, we will be there to stand in formation and with full support.
“A race of people is like an individual man; until it uses its own talent, takes pride in its own history, expresses its own culture, affirms its own selfhood, it can never fulfill itself.” — Malcolm X
