Mobilization for Justice strongly condemns the unjust and senseless murder of George Floyd by a Minneapolis police officer. We stand with Mr. Floyd’s family, loved ones, the Black community, and all those mourning and protesting this egregious act of police brutality.
Instances of police violence against the Black community caught on film have become much more commonplace in recent years; the list of African American martyrs to the cause of racial justice seems to grow weekly, yet there are so many whose names we will never know.
Mobilization for Justice provides critical legal services to communities of color to challenge specific instances of institutional racism. All of our work, from stopping evictions, to helping immigrants navigate city, state and federal requirements, to challenging foreclosures on low-income homeowners—virtually all we do as an organization—is aimed at combating the effects of centuries of disenfranchisement and discrimination against people of color. This work combats the most immediate and tangible effects of legalized racial injustice.
Overcoming the broader effects of this legacy and building a nation based on true justice and equality will take many years. While we go about our daily work protecting individual clients from the effects of institutional racism, we rededicate ourselves to examining and working on our own racial biases and internalized prejudices. This too, like the struggle for racial justice throughout society, is a lifelong pursuit—the ongoing improvement of our own behavior as we work to further social justice at large.
This is a historic moment—both tragic and imbued with great possibility—in our nation’s and the world’s progress. Let us all rededicate ourselves to the long-term struggle for equality and justice. This is the only way we can bring about the more just world of which so many of us dream, and which is everyone’s right. This is, indeed, the only way it can and will be built. And while it is true, as Dr. King said, that the arc of the moral universe bends towards justice, we ourselves, each and every one of us working together, must be the ones to bend that arc. This may be the only way we can ensure that George Floyd’s death will have not been in vain.