BBC Radio 4: Thought for the Day - 21 April 2021
This is the transcript of the Thought for the Day I delivered on 21 April, the morning after the jury returned guilty verdicts in the trial of Derek Chauvin, convicted on all counts relating to George Floyd’s death. You can listen to the audio on BBC Sounds here.
Good morning,
“Let the people see what they did to my boy.” These were the words spoken by Mamie Till-Mobley – the mother of Emmett Till, after viewing the brutalized body of her teenaged son in 1955.
He was murdered – like many other black men and women have been for years and decades and centuries.
Mamie Till held a funeral with an open casket in the hopes that when the world saw – really saw - the violence committed against her son, that it would wake people out of the slumber of inaction on racial justice.
Last summer, the world saw police officer Derek Chauvin kneel on the neck of George Floyd – while he cried out for his mother - for 9 mins and 29 seconds, until he died.
His chilling words, ‘I can’t breathe,’ echoed the final words of Eric Garner in 2014 and Javier Ambler and Elijah McClain and Byron Williams, all of whom died of positional asphyxiation during their arrests between 2018 and 2020.
Yesterday we saw Chauvin convicted of his crimes; guilty of all charges over George Floyd’s death. Beyond a reasonable doubt.
When it comes to seeing guilty parties convicted, doubt has long existed among black communities – my community. We have seen generations of trauma, necks on the line, justice denied.
We know too many names of black people killed because their lives were viewed as lesser, resulting in a culture where even while jogging or waiting at a bus stop or going to the shops or even sleeping in their beds, black bodies are rendered at risk. The bodies of Breonna Taylor, Ahmaud Arbery, Trayvon Martin and countless others in the US. Stephen Lawrence, Sean Rigg, Sheku Bayoh, Joy Gardner and many more in the UK.
And yet many black communities have kept the faith, even in the face of unimaginable horror and injustice, recognising in the biblical narrative a story of a God who sides with the oppressed rather than those who hold on to a power that corrupts.
Black theologian James Cone describes the gospel as “a story about God’s presence in Jesus’ solidarity with the oppressed... “What is redemptive,” he says, “is the faith that God snatches victory out of defeat, life out of death, and hope out of despair.”
While it will take more than one conviction to end injustice, we wait to see if this is the watershed moment, the turning point that has been longed for. But we can’t rest.
Because as – echoing the Old Testament prophet Amos - Martin Luther King said: “We are not satisfied and will not be satisfied until justice rolls down like rivers and righteousness like a mighty stream.”
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I write extensively about George Floyd and Black Death in my book God Is Not a White Man: And Other Revelations (Hodder & Stoughton, 27 May, 2021). You can order your copy here.
