'People go to protests to be heard:' Reflections on the '60s and today

In 1972, when Moore was in high school, the mysterious death of a well-known black football player at a local police station further inflamed mistrust among Lancaster's black residents.

For Moore, then, that decades-old slogan is true: The personal is political. His work has ranged from organizing local civil rights marches in the 1980s to taking on the role of the South Carolina political director for Bernie Sanders' 2016 presidential campaign.

I recently spoke with Moore to situate the current sorrow and fury over George Floyd's killing by a Minneapolis police officer into a more expansive history of race and racism in America.

The following conversation has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

Breonna Taylor, Ahmaud Arbery, George Floyd: The threat of white vigilantism and police violence looms over black Americans. Have any moments in your life clarified this antagonistic relationship?

What happened to Floyd has been happening over and over for decades. For instance, when I was in high school, there was a man named Jim Duncan, from Lancaster, South Carolina. He was a football player at Barr Street High School, which was a black school, and he eventually played for the Baltimore Colts and the New Orleans Saints. He died in 1972. He was 26 years old. Police officials said that he died by suicide. But many of the black residents in Lancaster didn't believe the report, suspecting instead that the police killed him.

(As a 1972 New York Times headline describes it: "Jim Duncan, 1946-1972: The Case is Closed, but the Mystery Remains." The story shines a light on how, despite the coroner's announcement that Duncan "came to his death by a self-inflicted .38‐caliber gunshot wound," black residents thought otherwise.)

When I fast-forward to the present, I see how police brutality has been part of my life as a black man. I grew up in the 1960s -- I was 12 years old when the 1968 riots happened -- and was moved by watching figures like Stokely Carmichael and John Lewis and Martin Luther King Jr.

Over time, how have these personal experiences translated into political engagement?

I've been involved in protests since the late '80s. For instance, in 1989, in Winnsboro, which is just north of Columbia, an officer shot and killed a 25-year-old black man named Samuel Owens, who was autistic, after his parents called the police for help following a dispute.

(According to the Spartanburg Herald-Journal, a flier from the time said: "Given that these police officers had knowledge of Sam's mental problems and his history of violence, we believe that the police acted irresponsibly and must be held accountable for his death.")

I was helping to head up (the civil rights organization) Rainbow/PUSH here for the Rev. Jesse Jackson, and we organized a march in Owen's name. About 600 people participated.

What have the recent Black Lives Matter protests looked like in South Carolina? What's been your reaction to them?

They've been inspiring. There were protests in Greenville and Columbia that had large turnouts. It's made me feel good to see people speaking out against the problems around them.

I want to be clear that protests aren't "looting." People don't go to protests with the intention of breaking windows. People go to protests to be heard -- to support a particular cause. I've been involved in marches myself, and I've never gone expecting to fight somebody.

I've noticed that the crowds seem more diverse now than in the past -- it's not just black Americans doing the work of anti-racism. In a way, Black Lives Matter crowds have always been diverse, but they still feel different this time around.

Personally, I think that it's significant that "Black Lives Matter" is the rallying cry of the protests. I've always been concerned about police brutality, and got involved with the movement after George Zimmerman was acquitted in 2013 for the murder of Trayvon Martin, and after Michael Brown was killed the next year, in 2014.

I was especially horrified by what happened to Brown. The facts themselves are shocking: a young man who had just graduated from high school was in his own community and was shot six times by a police officer. And his body was left on the street for hours. That reminded me of how inhumanely this country treats black people.

It's a struggle. But with the recent protests, it at least seems like we're struggling forward.

Speaking of direction, what are your thoughts on progress? Have things gotten better? I often fall into a sort of pessimism: On the one hand, it's inspiring to see the signs of change -- all over the world -- that have come from the past couple weeks of protest. On the other hand, I think that it's difficult to be a black person in America and not be keenly aware of a history that tells you exactly what your fellow citizens are willing to sacrifice for their own comfort and status.

To an extent, things have gotten better: Civil rights protesters in Birmingham, Alabama, were attacked by dogs and had fire hoses turned on them. We don't see that today, though we've seen police officers brutalize protesters in other ways.

But I also want people to pay attention to the obstacles black people face even when the issue doesn't involve someone being killed on the street -- inequality in the criminal justice system, in the health care system, in the education system. Someone on TV the other night talked about the "challenges" of policing. But it's not that challenging: Treat me the same way you treat white people.

How do we keep up the momentum of what's happening now?

I think that it's important not to lose focus. Protesters are confronting rampant state violence. For organizers on the ground, it's important to push back whenever people start talking about "a few bad apples," or whenever people start using "law and order" rhetoric without acknowledging the danger of it.

Journalists have a responsibility, too. It's easy for them, as it is for everybody, to see things only from their perspective. But in doing that, they can create inaccurate coverage, and a situation where they're not telling the full story -- where they're not including the voices of the black and brown victims of police brutality. If your job is to tell the truth, now is the time to step up.