Thursday, March 28, 2024

Sen. Elizabeth Warren Defends Black Lives Matter Activists: They’re In a ‘Fight For Their Lives’ (Watch)

Elizabeth Warren
Elizabeth Warren speaks about racial inequality at the Edward M. Kennedy Institute in Boston

*During an address at the Edward M. Kennedy Institute in Boston on Sunday, Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D) of Mass. praised the Black Lives Matter movement, comparing it to the civil rights movement of the 60s, and calling its activists a “new generation of civil rights leaders.”

She’s not a candidate for president, but the popular Democrat called for broad policy reforms to post-Civil Rights era racism in the United States including body cameras on all police officers, restoring parts of the Voting Rights Act, and closing the wage gap between white and nonwhite workers.

She also pushed back on criticism that BLM activists are responsible for instigating more violence.

“Watch them march through the streets, ‘hands up don’t shoot’ – not to incite a riot, but to fight for their lives. To fight for their lives,” she said.

“The first civil rights battles were hard fought. But they established that Black Lives Matter. That Black Citizens Matter. That Black Families Matter. Half a century later, we have made real progress, but we have not made enough progress.”

According to the AP, Warren organized her speech around three key issues on race: police brutality, voting rights, and economic equality. And her defense of the BLM movement was much more forceful than that of any presidential candidate thus far.

“Fifty years later, violence against African Americans has not disappeared,” Warren said Sunday. “Today, the specific tools of oppression have changed – voter ID laws, racial gerrymandering, and mass disenfranchisement through a criminal justice system that disproportionately incarcerates black citizens. The tools have changed, but black voters are still deliberately cut out of the political process.”

“Senator Warren’s speech clearly and powerfully calls into question America’s commitment to black lives by highlighting the role that structural racism has played and continues to play with regard to housing discrimination and voting rights,” said DeRay Mckesson, a prominent activist in an interview with the Washington Post. “And Warren, better than any political leader I’ve yet heard, understands the protests as a matter of life or death – that the American dream has been sustained by an intentional violence and that the uprisings have been the result of years of lived trauma.”

Watch Warren’s full speech below:

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