we, the people of the African diaspora, should not have to find ourselves still resisting. It is long past time for the European colonial powers, for… - Nikole Hannah-Jones

When politicians decided protests shouldn't happen, Black people shouldn't vote, Black children shouldn't integrate schools, they called on law enforcement to enforce their desires, even when courts had ordered compliance with these rights.

We gather here to mark the global trade that took some 15 million beloved human beings across the Atlantic in the hulls of barbaric ships, the largest forced migration in the history of the world, one that would reshape the entire Atlantic world and transform the global economy. We must never forget the scale and the depth of the horrors that people of African descent suffered in the name of profit, profit that enriched the European colonial powers and built the nascent economy of the United States. We must never forget how the systems of slavery collapsed, only to be reborn in other models of violent and racist economic exploitation, such as what we benignly call Jim Crow in the United States, but what is more aptly called apartheid.

White Americans desire to be free of a past they do not want to remember, while Black Americans remain bound to a past they can never forget.