“Celebrations last for a moment. But the struggle for justice, for peace and civility goes on from one generation to the next.' While The City commemorates Juneteenth, Rev. Amos Brown has his eyes fixed towards intergenerational change.
The Farish Street Baptist Church in Jackson, Miss., to be precise, in the heart of the Jim Crow South.
Brown — whose great grandfather, Patrick, was born enslaved in Roxie, Miss. — has experienced the deepest evil that racism breeds. He’s lived through much of the agonies and triumphs in the fight for racial justice as the struggle has taken twists and turns over the decades. Brown — who was arrested alongside Martin Luther King Jr. during a lunch counter sit-in at an Atlanta restaurant in 1961 and was a member of the Freedom Riders who bused from state to state through the segregated South — has seen too much attempted action that has amounted to inaction.
From 1882 to 1968, 581 Black people were lynched in Brown’s home state of Mississippi, the highest in the U.S., according to the NAACP. That history has weighed heavily on Brown, who has lived his life much like the Sankofa — pushing progress forward while keeping a sharp eye on the past. That’s where Brown met King, Thurgood Marshall, Rosa Parks and other icons who laid the foundation for his lifelong commitment to social change.
“So as that prophet my Sunday school teacher told me to be, I’ve always fought anything that treated persons as things,” he said. Ex // Top Stories SF pays out $2M in Laguna Honda patient abuse lawsuit Victims alleged that staff committed mental, physical and sexual abuse “It’s always been in the DNA of this state, this Bay Area and more specifically San Francisco to be mean to Black folks,” Brown said.
“John Steinbeck once said, ‘I wonder how many people in this world have I just looked at, but I did not see,’” Brown said. “San Francisco just looked at my people and tolerated us. But it’s never seen enough, to make sure that all along this pilgrimage, we would have justice, inclusion and be respected.”
Part of that work starts with California’s Reparations Task Force, which Brown — a member of the nine-person committee — called “our last major opportunity to do the right thing.” But Brown knows all too well that progress is hard-fought: The task force recommended that every Black person in San Francisco be awarded $5 million in reparations. But the controversial proposal comes amid a budget shortfall, pitting Mayor London Breed against the more progressive leaders in San Francisco.
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