The mission has always continued for Richard Rose. The community leader and former Atlanta NAACP president is still hosting local meetings with fellow community leaders to discuss how to create a better future for Black residents.
After one of the meetings, Rose spoke to rolling out about his idealistic future for the Black community and his thoughts on other hot policies often discussed.
What does political justice look like to you?
It looks like sharing power with our community and doing away with the civil war based on race. The government must be out of the racism business.
What has it been like connecting with the younger generation of activists?
What we have to do, and what we hope to do, is to lead by example and be inviting to all members of the community.
I realized the civil rights leaders of the 60s were all young people. Dr. King was only 39 when he died. Diane Nash led the Freedom Riders and coordinated that while she was a junior at Fisk University.
Some of us who have been around have learned from them, and we’re anxious to help lead his new generation and turn it over to them.
We have to have respect for history. That history informs us of what we must do to make it better for the next generations.
What should Black people know about right now?
One of the initiatives I started was taking down Confederate monuments and Confederate-named places. There’s no other country in the history of the world that celebrated a failed insurrection against itself. That’s what the Confederacy is all about. The claim that we lost the war, but our cause was just.
Realistically, they have won the war of the narrative. Celebrating the Confederacy has been accepted and sanitized. People forget that no monument is history. A monument is a political statement. No matter whose political statement it is. Whether it’s the monument of Jesus, the monument of Buddha, of Lenin, of Dr. King, or Robert E. Lee, they’re all political statements. And we must not be confined and limited by the political statements of the past.
What do you have to say to people who no longer believe in the power of voting?
Collaborations work.
It starts with the family structure. You’ve got a great Thanksgiving dinner because you bring everybody together, and everybody wants a piece here, a piece there, a ham and a turkey. We have to do the same thing in the communities. We have to ally together to talk about our common interests, our common aspirations, and our common goals and present them as a group. That’s what works.
