(Y) #BreeNewsome: In Her Own Words Now is the time for true courage. I realized that now is the time

(Y) #BreeNewsome: In Her Own Words
Now is the time for true courage.
I realized that now is the time for true courage the morning after the #CharlestonMassacre shook me to the core of my being. I couldn’t sleep. I sat awake in the dead of night. All the ghosts of the past seemed to be rising.Not long ago, I had watched the beginning of #Selma, the reenactment of the #16thStreetBaptistChurch bombing and had shuddered at the horrors of history.But this was neither a scene from a movie nor was it the past. A white man had just entered a black church and massacred people as they prayed. He had assassinated a civil rights leader. This was not a page in a textbook I was reading nor an inscription on a monument I was visiting.This was now.
This was real.
This was - this is - #stillhappening.
I began my activism by participating in the Moral Monday movement, fighting to restore voting rights in North Carolina after the Supreme Court struck down key protections of the #1965VotingRightsAct.I traveled down to Florida where the #DreamDefenders were demanding justice for #TrayvonMartin, who reminded me of a modern-day #EmmettTill.I marched with the #OhioStudentsAssociation as they demanded justice for victims of police brutality.I watched in horror as black Americans were tear-gassed in their own neighborhoods in #Ferguson, MO. “Reminds me of the Klan,” my grandmother said as we watched the news together. As a young black girl in South Carolina, she had witnessed the Klan drag her neighbor from his house and brutally beat him because he was a black physician who had treated a white woman.I visited with black residents of West #Baltimore, MD who, under curfew, had to present work papers to police to enter and exit their own neighborhood. “These are my freedom papers to show the slave catchers,” my friend said with a wry smile.And now, in the past 6 days, I’ve seen arson attacks against 5 black churches in the South, including in Charlotte, NC where I organize alongside other community members striving to create greater self-sufficiency and political empowerment in low-income neighborhoods.