Honoring Mothers Of The Movement For Black Lives

Moms around the world were being feted by their children on Sunday to celebrate Mother’s Day. But there were also a growing number of childless mothers who were continuing to mourn the deaths of their sons from senseless violence. They have comprised what has become the Mothers of the Movement, women who were robbed of their motherhood because of killings by figures in law enforcement.

Photos: Remembering Black Men And Boys Killed By Police

While those deaths have ranged from the recent to occurring more than a decade ago, the growing influence of the Mothers of the Movement now stretches from the hallowed hallways of Capitol Hill to the grassroots level from which the efforts to effect change in the nation’s gun laws and biased criminal justice system remain.

Just in April, the Rev. Al Sharpton hosted Mothers of the Movement at his annual National Action Network convention in New York City. Civil rights lawyer Benjamin Crump explained to the audience how the group of courageous women were leading the charge to make sure every officer in each and all police departments across the country can be equipped with a body camera to bring full transparency to law enforcement-involved shootings that many times result in cover-ups to protect cops.

The names of those we have lost still reverberate in conversations having to do with social justice, or the lack thereof: Trayvon Martin, Eric Garner, Michael Brown, for starters. Sadly, a handful of new names continue to be added to the list as law enforcement appears undaunted in how they treat Black suspects versus their white counterparts.

We’ve seen that in just the past year alone everywhere from Pittsburgh to Sacramento to Dallas to most recently in Oklahoma, where a police officer shot Lorenzo Clerkley Jr., a 14-year-old Black child, two times through a fence in less than a second after giving a command. Amazingly, Clerkley survived the barrage of bullets. But many of his predecessors who found themselves similarly targeted by law enforcement were not as lucky to live to tell their stories.

Instead, those narratives have been left to be told and retold by their families, including and especially their mothers, many of whom have led tireless plights to create change centered on how this world and country view young Black males.

Scroll down to see what some of the Mothers of the Movement have been up to recently to understand what motivates them to keep on keeping on.