Charles Cameron points to a story in the Chicago Tribune about the protest Thursday in Jena when Rev. Jesse Jackson, Rev. Al Sharpton, Martin Luther King III and others protested “to what they regard as unequal treatment of African-Americans in this racially fractured Deep South town”.
[Thank you Charles for submitting !!]
“Many black bloggers say the Jena demonstration is more about a new generation of civil rights activists who learned about the Jena case not from Operation PUSH but from hip-hop music blogs that featured the story or popular black entertainers such as Mos Def who have turned it into a crusade.
In traditional civil rights groups, there’s a pattern — you call a meeting, you see when everybody can get together, you have to decide where to meet,” said Shawn Williams, 33, a pharmaceutical salesman and former college NAACP leader who runs the Dallas South Blog.
“All that takes time,” Williams added. “When you look at how this civil rights movement is working, once something gets out there, the action is immediate — here’s what we’re going to write about, here’s the petition, here’s the protest. It takes place within minutes, hours and days, not weeks or months.”
This new viral civil rights movement still benefits from the participation of well-known leaders — it just doesn’t depend on them, bloggers say”.
(..) “Yet this will be a civil rights protest literally conjured out of the ether of cyberspace, of a type that has never happened before in America — a collective national mass action grown from a grass-roots word-of-mouth movement spread via blogs, e-mails, message boards and talk radio”
Charles Cameron points to a story in the Chicago Tribune about the protest Thursday in Jena when Rev. Jesse Jackson, Rev. Al Sharpton, Martin Luther King III and others protested “to what they regard as unequal treatment of African-Americans in this racially fractured Deep South town”.
[Thank you Charles for submitting !!]
“Many black bloggers [...]
