Contemporary Connections: “The Black Civil Rights Movement & Black Lives Matter” -- Section 02 Group C

Glory - Common ft. John Legend
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HUZOKvYcx_o 

I picked this song as one of my connections because this song was wroten for The Selma movie on Dr. Martin Luther King's life and the Civil Rights Movement, but through out the song, Common and John Legend continue to make comparisons between the Civil Rights movement and Black Lives Matter. When accepting his award for this song, Common said ""We say that Selma is now because the struggle for justice is right now".

The specific lyric I was focused on when I made this connection was:

That's why Rosa sat on the bus

That's why we walk through Ferguson with our hands up

When it go down we woman and man up

They say, "Stay down", and we stand up

Shots, we on the ground, the camera panned up

King pointed to the mountain top and we ran up

 https://www.theodysseyonline.com/blacklivesmatter-second-wave-civil-rights-movement

     
       My second connection is an Odyssey article titled “Black Lives Matter Is a Second Wave of The Civil Rights Movement”. This article basically discusses why the Black Lives Matter movement is a second wave of the Civil Rights movement as opposed to being “another” Civil Rights movement. According to the article claiming #BlackLivesMatter is another Civil Rights movement basically implies that the problems from the first Civil Rights Movement have been fixed in this country and those problems ran deeper than just segregation. The article also compares the #BlackLivesMatter movement to the Black Civil Rights Movement. In the article, the author mentions that the sit ins, protests, and boycotts that occur during Black Lives Matter rallies is similar to those that occurred during the Civil Rights movement. These two movements are similar in the fact that they came about due to the oppression of black people. They also have the same goal of wanting to fight for equality and fair treatment of black people. 

I connected the #BlackLivesMatter movement to our Civil Rights movement reading because they are two very similar movements to me. My first reaction when the #BlackLivesMatter movement came about was that the civil rights movement was basically still moving on. When I see pictures of protests from the Civil Rights and I see pictures of Black Lives Matter protest, I feel like I am essentially looking at the same pictures. Although black people are not directly living under Jim Crow laws presently like how it was during the Civil Rights Movement, they are still constantly discriminated against and oppressed based on the color of their skin. While reading the MLK and Montgomery comic, I was able to draw many connections from that comic to the Black Lives Matter movement. For example, in the comic when it was decided that they would boycott the busses, the Media had a huge hand in spreading around that news which helped make the boycott a success. This was also present during the Ferguson rallies after Mike Brown got shot. This was news that spread across the nation like wildfire igniting Black Lives Matter protests all around the United States. Another example of the protests in the comic that I connected with the BLM movement is the nonviolence theme of it all. Like Martin Luther King and his protests, the BLM movement is generally supposed to be peaceful and nonviolent. These two movements came about in the United States to fight for the inequality and mistreatment of black people. I say that that BLM is an ongoing Civil Rights movement because it’s years later and black people are still having to fight to be seen and treated as humans and the equal of their white counterparts. Some people might disagree that these two movements are essentially the same because the Jim Crow Laws were eradicated when the Civil Rights Movement “ended”, but it didn’t end. Segregation/Racism isn’t as direct as it may have been during the Civil Rights Movement but it is still prevalent in today’s society. With things such as microaggressions, discrimination ,police brutality and the disproportionate amount of black bodies in prison (known as the new Jim Crow), the Civil Rights movement will continue to happen in different waves.