Steve Harvey Calls BLM Protests ‘One of the Greatest Movements Since the Civil Rights Movement’
Steve Harvey is likening the Black Lives Matter protests around the world to the Civil Rights movement of the 1960s.
Speaking on Facebook Watch's STEVE on Watch, the 63-year-old talk show host said that he believes the ongoing protests "will go down as one of the greatest movements since the Civil Rights movement."
Harvey invited Kimberly Jones, an Atlanta-based activist, to his show on Juneteenth.
Of the recent protests, Jones said she is "not surprised at all that this happened on the back of the pandemic."
"Because people are always in the middle of the hustle and bustle, they're always going, they have to work, they're watching sports, they have all of this mental stimuli that allowed them to really sit down and process everything that's happened in the country and in the community," explained Jones, who is an NAACP Image Award Nominee.
Related: Where to Donate to Support the Black Lives Matter Movement
"And I think that on the back of pandemic, people actually sitting at home and having time to watch things instead of just flip through it on their phone, and watching how quickly we had so many cases back to back — Breonna Taylor, Ahmaud Arbery, with George Floyd, and that 8 minutes and 46 seconds is so brutal that there's no way you could grapple with that and not be upset. And I think that's what triggered everything."
A video of Jones explaining Black history recently went viral, and Harvey asked her about what she thinks will come out of today's movement.
"I’m so sick of racism. I’m so sick of having to have dealt with it my entire life," Harvey told her.
"I think the only way something is going to come out of this is if we start making the necessary changes ourselves," Jones said. "Because it's been proven time and time again that we're on our own. The saddest part about that is that racism is not a Black issue that white people need to empathize with. Racism is a white problem. They caused it. They need to fix it. But I don't have faith anymore that that's going to happen."
A post shared by Steve Harvey (@iamsteveharveytv) on Jun 19, 2020 at 4:43pm PDT
"We're going to have to dig deep and look at some of the ancestors that were able to be successful on their own," Jones added. "And we're going to have to borrow some of their tactics."
Harvey told Jones that he saw a glimmer of hope.
"This is the first time in my life that I've seen white outrage over a Black cause," he said, adding that "pain always leaves a gift."
"And in this quarantine moment when the world was frozen, for the first time, they saw what we saw," he said.
To help combat systemic racism, consider learning from or donating to these organizations:
Campaign Zero (joincampaignzero.org) which works to end police brutality in America through research-proven strategies.
ColorofChange.org works to make the government more responsive to racial disparities.
National Cares Mentoring Movement (caresmentoring.org) provides social and academic support to help black youth succeed in college and beyond.
