UI Meme of the Day, a daily series…

The Ella Baker Center for Human Rights is named after a largely unsung hero of the civil rights Freedom Movement who inspired and guided emerging leaders. Ms. Baker played a key role in some of the most influential organizations of the time, including the NAACP, Martin Luther King’s Southern Christian Leadership Conference, and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee…

Quote from The Ella Baker Center:

Until the killing of black men, black mothers’ sons, becomes as important to the rest of the country as the killing of a white mother’s son—we who believe in freedom cannot rest until this happens.” —Ella Baker

Ella Baker spoke those words in 1964, but nearly 50 years later, as George Zimmerman walks free after killing Trayvon Martin, her call is still sadly, urgently relevant.

But justice and freedom will continue to elude us so long as we have a legal system that cares more about broken laws than it does about harm done to people, families, and communities.

So where, when, and how can that harm actually be addressed?

 Because without that, it’s only a matter of time until the next unarmed, young Black man is brutally killed.

Ella Baker, 1964