Everyone Wins When #BlackLivesMatter

“Those who demonize the Ferguson movement and [those who] romanticize the civil rights movement have one thing in common: Neither has studied either subject deeply,” said the Rev. Osagyefo Sekou in the opening of his lecture at the University of Louisville on Jan. 21. Two days after people across the nation observed Martin Luther King Jr.’s birthday, Sekou told the crowd gathered for the sixth annualCenter on Race and Inequality’s King Justice Lecture that “a new generation has reclaimed [King’s] radicality and [his] demand that a nation be born again.”

Until very recently, Sekou was pastor of First Baptist Church in Jamaica Plain, Mass. He resigned his position earlier this month in order to devote his work full-time to the Black Lives Matter movement. In August, shortly after unarmed 19-year-old Michael Brown was shot by former Ferguson, Mo., Police Officer Darren Wilson, Sekou was dispatched to Ferguson by the Fellowship of Reconciliation, which, according to its website, is “the largest, oldest interfaith peace organization in the United States.” Sekou is an FOR Freeman Fellow.

Sekou asserted that the young people leading the Ferguson protests are the embodiment of “the radical gospel of Martin Luther King Jr., a revolutionary and militant practice of public ministry and its philosophical theology.” Sparing his listeners the sanitized and mischaracterized colorblind King who had a dream, Sekou summarized the theology and philosophies that guided King’s radicalism from 1950 until his death into what he called four concentric, “independent, overlapping and inseparable” circles.

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