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GREENSBORO CHAPTER |
The Greensboro Chapter of Project 2019 will have several purposes:
1.) to bring the message of Project 2019 to the Greensboro community,
2.) to give voice to the youth in this community, who are living and dying in obscurity,
3.) to resurrect the spirit of activism that has been missing in the Home of the Greensboro 4,
4.) to finally pay homage to the Greensboro 4 by living for what the sit-in movement was all about,
5.) to pay my respects, to the suffering of anybody who lost trying to be free, but especially, Claude Barnes, Willie Grimes, César Cauce, Michael Nathan, William Sampson, Sandra Smith, James Waller, and sixteen other people, who were injured in the last gasp of the Civil Rights Movement in Greensboro.
6.) to ease the aching in the pit of my stomach because I waited so long to be heard,
7.) and finally, because Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr, said, “If a man does not find something he is willing to die for he isn’t fit to live…” and Malcolm X said, “…if a man does not stand for something he will fall for anything.”
It has become a mantra nationwide, that the children are our future, but it is my goal to guarantee that they have a future and are prepared to provide for mine. Presently, I sustain the belief that the adults in this community have to embrace the children in order to turn their lives around, and I will admit. Many of the children I am so desperate to save have been kicked out of school, in jail, had children or all of the above. It is hard to love somebody you don’t know and even harder to love somebody who would just as soon cuss you out as to thank you, but we have to. Adults have to take back their position of authority in this community by showing a little compassion. Loving somebody gets easier when you see they are hurting and these kids are hurting every day. We don’t live in a vacuum and what touches a child’s life will touch us all one way or another.
Melva L. Florance, Chapter Founder