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Published 10/12/2020 | Reading Time 1 min 36 sec
By Nehemiah D. Frank, founder and editor-in-chief
The City of Tulsa and the Tulsa Police Department has finally done it. It socially labeled two White allies, who were accomplices in an anti-racist action, ‘n*gger lovers.’ Okay, so the city didn’t quite literally use the phrase ‘n*gger lovers,’ but its attempt to publicly shame anti-racist White allies who protected a diverse group of Black Lives Matter protesters and painters on Facebook definitely classifies as a social-modern-day lynching.
The Tulsa Police Department posted the photos of anti-Racist White activists, Jess Eddy and James Lease, followed by BIPOC anti-Racist activist Leigh Ann Johnson. All three were arrested when they used their bodies as human shields to protect those exercising their constitutional right to peacefully protest, coupled with those participating in civil disobedience whose crime became painting a Black Lives Matter mural in front of Tulsa City Hall on 2nd St.
These three arrests come less than a week after Tulsa became the first US city to immorally remove a Black Lives Matter mural from its city street.
I can imagine John Brown and Rev. Robert Graetz smiling from heaven on these three modern-day abolitionists.
Rev. Robert Graetz with Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
Anti-racist White allies are a gift to humankind, and America is better because of them. After all, it took anti-racist White allies who were willing to put their necks on the line, literally, to help enslaved people get to freedom via the underground railroad.
In those dark days, White allies who were caught helping enslaved “fugitives” to freedom were lynched publicly. And here’s an important point. The lynching wasn’t for them breaking laws. Their deceased White bodies would hang for hours, sometimes days, used as an example for the living — who so much as showed an inch of humanity to a Black person who saught liberty in the north.
Moreover, these public lynchings were a source of entertainment for racist White mobs who would gather beneath their swinging White lifeless bodies. They’d angrily scream racial epithets and obscenities until our White allies’ souls were released from the wicked taunts of the mob and delivered into the hands of the creator.
Although death is no longer the penalty for advocating for Black lives, the ignorant racist White mob mentality continues to exist — taunting our anti-racist allies via social media sanctioned by the Tulsa Police Department via its Facebook page.
Because the Black Lives Matter movement is political, the Tulsa Police Department has undoubtedly placed the lives of these activists in further danger — and that’s the lash system of White Supremacy.