The coronavirus pandemic has shed new light on racial disparities in American health outcomes. Economic disadvantage is one reason Black people in the United States are on average less healthy than white people — but there are other causes, including the ongoing stress of systemic racism.
As marchers across the nation and in Metro Detroit protest police brutality against Blacks, one group is on the front lines — young people.
A $10 million fundraising campaign launched Thursday to rebuild Black Wall Street —Tulsa, Oklahoma’s black-owned business district destroyed in 1921 by white rioters — could soon spread to Detroit, organizers said.
The first week of April, the Rev. Kenneth Flowers had a slight dry cough, body aches and a bad headache. His 90-year-old mother he helped take care of had tested positive for the coronavirus a few days earlier, and so he asked his doctor whether he should get a test.
Building on the city’s momentum with its slowing pace of new COVID-19 cases and deaths, residents of Detroit have an opportunity to get tested for free today.
By Rev. Horace L. Sheffield, III, MA, MPA
Over my lifetime there have been several idioms, expressions, and adages that once spoken and repeated often conjure up certain circumstances and historical contexts.
For example, if I were to say “Keep the Faith, Baby” one would think of Rev. Adam Clayton Powell, Jr. and his fight against discrimination in the supposedly free North. Or, how about an adage that addresses our lack of the pursuit of knowledge that suggests that “If you want to keep something secret from black folks, put it between the covers of a book.” And finally, how about Fannie Lou Hammer, who my father, Horace Sheffield, Jr., was asked by President Lyndon B. Johnson not to seat at the Democratic National Convention. Hammer is known for saying, “I am sick and tired of being sick and tired.”
Of all of these memorial quips, “none” I believe will go down in history as the most powerful, and applicable as Rev. Alfred Sharpton’s statement “Get Your Knee Off Our Neck” made during George Floyd’s funeral.
I was around when most of the aforementioned things were spoken, and was there when Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. exclaimed “I Have A Dream”, and I was moved incomparably by each in a different way. However, I was never so moved as I was yesterday when I heard my friend of nearly 50 years retort, “Get Your Knee Off Our Neck!” That powerful alliteration, iteration, and capsulation of words is what we said to our slave masters. It’s what we said to the progenitors of Jim Crow, and it’s what our protest is for. It was being said as to those who made us count bubbles in a bar of soap to be able to register to vote. And it is now what Rev. Sharpton is suggesting we must now say to every economic, social, and political source and force that has its knees on our individual and collective necks.
Donald Trump, “get you knee off our necks.” Police brutality, please “get your knee off our necks.” Economic exploitation and exclusion, “get your knee off our necks.” And apathy, lack of voting, and self-hatred, “get your knees off our necks.”
Written by Rev. Horace L. Sheffield, III, MA, MP
Horace Sheffield, III is a longtime civil rights activist, pastor, and media personality. He is an on-air radio personality for 910 AM/WFDF, as the host of On The Line and an on-air television personality for WADL, as the host of Real Talk Weekly. Sheffield is also the pastor of New Destiny Christian Fellowship and executive director of the Detroit Association of Black Organizations, both in Detroit.
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