最新杏吧原创

It was September 2017, three years after the killing of Michael Brown in Ferguson by a white police officer. This time, a judge had acquitted another white police officer in the shooting death of another black man. There were serious questions about the possible planting of a gun by the police officer. The image that forever marked those protests was the kettle action by riot police at the corner of Washington Avenue and Tucker Boulevard, when police pepper sprayed and brutalized more than a hundred protesters, bystanders and journalists. At the time, the former acting police chief bragged, 鈥淧olice owned tonight.鈥�

Three years later, civil rights lawsuits that are going to cost the city millions of dollars in settlements are still making their way through the courts. But that鈥檚 not the moment that comes back to me time and time again.

It鈥檚 the one a few days later, at Kiener Plaza under a blazing hot sun when Catholic Archbishop Robert Carlson turned the words of protest into a prayer:

鈥淲hen there is no justice,鈥� said the leader of hundreds of thousands of Catholics in the 最新杏吧原创 region, 鈥渢here cannot be peace.鈥�

Carlson grew up in the Twin Cities of Minnesota, where the nation鈥檚 attention has turned after a white police officer knelt on the neck of a black man named George Floyd for several minutes as he was cuffed and on the ground, while three other police officers watched and Floyd begged for his life, uttering the words 鈥淚 can鈥檛 breathe,鈥� over and over.

The cities where Carlson burned Wednesday and Thursday nights as protest turned to riot, as so often happens when the unheard demand in the most visceral way that the nation listen to their weary voices.

The protest chant that I heard over and over in Ferguson, and then three years later in downtown 最新杏吧原创, echoed again in the streets of Minneapolis and St. Paul, and in other cities across the country, in Denver, in Louisville, in Los Angeles.

No justice. No peace.

After Carlson turned those words into a prayer for action and a prayer for peace, a group of religious leaders from multiple faiths joined protesters in a march from Kiener Plaza to City Hall. An image of that march is the background of .

Carlson isn鈥檛 in it. The most visible religious leader in White 最新杏吧原创 helped calm tensions that day, but he didn鈥檛 take part in the march. I didn鈥檛 write it at the time, but I think it was a missed opportunity from a cleric who I believe takes the cause of social justice seriously.

Imagine the lasting message of unity that image could have sent.

In his , the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. offers a path forward from what the nation has seen since 2014 in Ferguson, in Baltimore and now in Minneapolis. The target of his letter was not racists, not blacks, but white people, especially white religious leaders, men like Carlson, who express a legitimate disgust with racism, but aren鈥檛 quite willing to do enough about it. At the time, many of those white religious leaders thought that King, even as he modeled nonviolent civil disobedience, was an extremist.

鈥淚 have been gravely disappointed with the white moderate,鈥� King wrote. 鈥淚 have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro鈥檚 great stumbling block in the stride toward freedom is not the White Citizens Councillor or the Ku Klux Klanner but the white moderate who is more devoted to order than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice; who constantly says, 鈥業 agree with you in the goal you seek, but I can鈥檛 agree with your methods of direct action.鈥欌��

Decades after King, this is the pattern of protest we鈥檝e seen over and over since 2014.

March in the streets, White America says, but don鈥檛 shut down our highways during rush hour.

Conduct your sit-ins, but not in our suburban malls.

Hold your hunger strike at the University of Missouri to protest decades of systemic racism, but don鈥檛 mess with our football schedule.

Protest police brutality, if you must, Colin Kaepernick, but don鈥檛 you dare take a knee.

In the 鈥�60s, King said the riots would end when White America chose justice over peace.

George Floyd died because the knee of white oppression stole his last breath.

Justice awaits.

This column has been updated to say that a judge, not a jury, acquitted the police officer in September 2017, and to correct the race of two of the police officers in Minneapolis.聽