The Patriot Post® · Black Lives, Businesses, Neighborhoods, and Monuments Matter

Apparently, for some “protesters,” the irony of their unmitigated ignorance knows no limits. As Peter Heck notes at Discrn, “Exactly 123 years to the day that it was dedicated, the Shaw Memorial, a monument honoring the first all-volunteer black regiment of the Union Army in the Civil War, was defaced by rioters demanding justice for African-Americans.” Heck recounts, “One of the soldiers, Sgt. William Harvey Carney, carried the American flag throughout the battle, never dropping it despite being shot 7 times. Carney was the first black American to [receive] the Congressional Medal of Honor for action.”

The 54th Massachusetts Regiment of Colonel Robert Gould Shaw was memorialized in the 1989 movie “Glory.” According to Derrick Wilburn, executive director of the Rocky Mountain Black Conservatives, “They’re out there defacing the memory of the original Black Lives Matter crusaders. They gave their life’s blood for black lives.” Perhaps these “peaceful” protesters should learn some history.

Vandals in Washington, DC, weren’t any better. The U.S. ambassador to India issued an apology after “protesters” defaced the memorial to Mahatma Gandhi. Clearly, they don’t believe, as Gandhi did, in peaceful protesting.

Historical ignorance and criminal vandalism is certainly bad, but it only scratches the surface of how riots over black lives have mostly devastated — and taken — black lives. Black-owned businesses have been burned to the ground, costing the life’s work of those entrepreneurs. Black neighborhoods were torched, destroying the homes of poor blacks. At least 17 people have been killed during rioting, and the vast majority were black.

In Chicago, the weekend after George Floyd’s death was the deadliest in the city since at least 1961 (murder data doesn’t go further back than that), as there were 18 murders in 24 hours and 24 dead throughout the weekend. The victims (and perpetrators) were predominantly black. Ironically, the race-baiting and gun-grabbing Reverend Michael Pfleger, one of Barack Obama’s Chicago cronies, said it was “open season” because, as people told him, “There’s no police anywhere.” Remember that Democrats want to defund police in Democrat-run cities that will become even more dangerous killing fields without any presence of law and order.

Robert Woodson, a conservative civil-rights leader and founder of the Woodson Center, says, “The contradictions and the hypocrisy of these so-called social justice warriors — they are more concerned about their own virtue-signaling, even if it means the continued destruction of black Americans.”

Black lives DO matter. So do black businesses, neighborhoods, and monuments to past achievements and sacrificial service. Someone should clue in the rioters, vandals, arsonists, and murderers.