December 31
GUEST: Anne Ames, local activist and resident of Kingston, NY, co-founder of Wednesday Walk For Black Lives, and member of the End the New Jim Crow Action Network, talks about how she got involved in fighting racism and the prominent role of women in the movement.
Wednesday Walk for Black Lives
Anne Ames never saw herself as a leader. She was well aware of racial injustice, having grown up in the projects and attended the Black Panther breakfast programs as a child.
Her passion for racial justice is all about the nuts and bolts of repression. She is a resource for how the police and the criminal justice system targets people of color in her community. She has the videos and the numbers. If you are poor and black in the city of Kingston, NY, you will most likely run afoul of our police state at some point. And some of the fixes are relatively easy. We can eliminate bail for nonviolent offenders. We can get the police out of our schools. We can end stop and frisk in the Black neighborhoods. We can hire more police who fit the racial profile of the city.
We talked about the unity that Kingston has found in the rallies for Black Lives Matter. The participants are young and old, Black and white, rich and poor. Far from alienating whites, this current movement for racial equality and justice has not scared off segments of the population. Each week Kingston, NY has shown that large numbers of its citizens believe in fairness. Can a society reform itself by marching together? Can we identify white supremacy as the social disease that it is, and collectively end the national scourge of Jim Crow?
