The head of the one of the nation’s most venerable civil rights organization, frustrated over recent police shootings of unarmed black men, on Tuesday suggested African-American families should “exercise their Second Amendment rights.”
“You stand there, they shoot. You run, they shoot. We’re going to have to take a different tack,” said the Rev. Samuel Mosteller, president of the Georgia Southern Christian Leadership Conference.
His remarks came one week after 23-year-old Goodyear employee Nicholas Thomas was fatally shot by Smyrna police serving an arrest warrant on a probation violation. Police say Thomas tried to run over officers in a customer’s Maserati, though lawyers hired by the dead man’s family have challenged the official account.
Earlier this month, 27-year-old Anthony Hill, who suffered from bipolar disorder, was shot and killed by a DeKalb County police officer. The officer alleged the Afghanistan war veteran charged him in a threatening manner. Hill was nude and unarmed at the time.
“Nobody is protecting the black community,” Mosteller said.
Bernard Lafayette, board chairman for the national SCLC and a widely recognized authority on nonviolent social action, said he understood the frustration that prompted Mosteller’s remarks.
“Law enforcement is there to make things safer, and many people in the black community do not feel safe,” said Lafayette, one of the founders of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC).
But Mosteller’s comments “do not represent (the SCLC),” said Lafayette of the organization founded in 1957 to promote nonviolent social change. “We need to sit down together and overcome this separation between police and the community.”
A lawyer with the Rainbow PUSH Coalition who appeared alongside Mosteller at Tuesday’s press conference, Janice Mathis, also distanced herself from the SCLC president’s remarks.
“Arming the black community is not Rainbow PUSH’s position,” she said.
The SCLC’s lack of militancy was often criticized by younger activists who came of age in the 1960s. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Joseph Lowery, Ralph Abernathy, Bayard Rustin and others started the SCLC to coordinate nonviolent direct action to hasten the desegregation of public accommodations throughout the South.
Mosteller also announced plans to organize recall efforts targeting the sheriffs of any county where an unarmed African American is shot by police.
Meanwhile, the parents of Thomas said they intend to keep up the pressure on Smyrna police in hopes that the GBI, and not Cobb police, will lead the investigation into their son’s shooting.
“You should be mad about this, America,” said Huey Thomas, the dead man’s father.
About the Author
