Treading into Reverends Al and Jesse territory.
Via Philly Com
Some 200 people marched and prayed in Center City on Saturday, the latest in weeks of demonstrations sparked by the deaths of Michael Brown, Eric Garner and other black men at the hands of police.
And while the protest at City Hall and LOVE Park echoed previous rallies – chants of “I can’t breathe,” signs declaring “Black lives matter!” and a “die-in” symbolizing lives cut short – a religious aspect ran through the event. It was organized by Muslims and began and ended with prayers.
“It’s part of black American Muslim tradition to stand for social justice. We need only go back a few decades to Malcolm X. . . and being a part of leading civil disobedience back in the late ’50s and into the ’60s,” said Dash Brookins, 43, who led the call to prayer at the rally’s start.
It began at noon, even as the funeral for Rafael Ramos, one of two New York City police officers killed Dec. 20, was winding down in New York. Rally leaders decried those killings and said demonstrators are focused on improving policing practices and police-community relations, not on protesting the police per se.
Imam Abdul Malik, who delivered an impassioned call for community empowerment in taking charge of education and economic development, called the New York killings “evil.”
“We have to recognize that life is sacred in all of its forms, and that killing men and women in uniform is a crime, it’s unacceptable, and it’s evil. And shooting unarmed civilians. . . is also unacceptable, and evil, unless it’s justifiable, and that’s of course in the sense of self-defense,” Malik said in an interview. “I’m not for putting the police against the people, and the people against the police. We’re all one people.”
HT Blueburb