It Is Hard For Me To Get Behind Black Lives Matter By Barbara Reynolds

Paige Stierle
Dr. Shawn Temple
English Composition 1
16 February 2023

Discrimination has been and continues to remain an underlying issue in society today. The author of “I Was a Civil Rights Activist in the 1960’s. But It’s Hard for Me to Get Behind Black Lives Matter”, Barbara Reynolds, and the author of “An Open Letter to the South”, Langston Hughes, discuss the means in which individuals should go about eliminating this issue. Hughes and Reynolds motivate their readers to create change and end this issue, focusing on three specific ideas. These points include: inequalities in society today, the importance of unity, and the value of nonviolence. Because of the issues produced by discrimination, it is important to look at the differing groups

She emphasizes the idea that the Black Lives Matter movement focuses particularly on racial discrimination and aims to end it through both online and in person campaigns. She identifies the differences between this movement compared to movements of the past, and declares “The civil rights movement was not exclusively a black movement for black people. It valued all human lives, even those of people who worked against us… In a sense, even the slogan ‘Black Lives Matter’ is too broad because the movement overlooks black-on-black homicides, the leading cause of death for black males between the ages 15 and 34” (Reynolds 985). The Black Lives Matter movement struggles to include all groups of people who are discriminated against, which takes away from its main objective of eliminating discrimination. Not only does Reynolds address discrimination, so does

She approaches this point by looking at how the Black Lives Matter movement members do not exist harmoniously with one another, which could ultimately lead to its demise (Reynolds 983). She declares, “To reach their common goal of ending this unequal treatment, baby boomers and millennials must overcome their differences and pair the experience of the old with the energy of the young to change a criminal justice system that has historically abused both” (Reynolds 985). There is a prevalent generation gap where millennials and baby boomers fail to hear out the other side. Similar to Reynolds' recognition that people have to begin taking in account what others have to say, Hughes also gives his view on