Reverend Floyd Harris

“If we don’t know each others’ stories, we don’t know each other.”

A group of young people came to me and said, “We don’t know anything about black history.” They asked me, “What is a noose?” So I am teaching them about racism, social justice, organizing, and getting involved in the ACLU.  Each community has a responsibility to teach its young people their own history, and the young people are hungry for it.   I tell them to do like a quarterback, hand this off to each other.

It’s not just the young people who need to know. If we don’t know each others’ stories, we don’t know each other.  Ethnic communities have to tell their own story.  I can support Latinos, but I cannot speak for them. A Hmong can support me, but I must speak for myself.    Then the community at large reaps more unity and strength by relating to each other through our common issues.  The ACLU is a vehicle for this larger community.

I started the National Networking Organization ten yrs ago.  Our motto is, “Educate, motivate, energize, mobilize and organize to take our community to a higher level.”  I teach Know Your Rights presentations nationwide and it’s a joy for me to see people grow through knowledge. Yet when I look at the schools in West Fresno, the system is failing.   A school gave a reading test for 5th-8th graders and two kids passed out of 250.  That’s where stats are made, and that’s how people decide to build more prisons.

We have a lot of good pastors, but a real problem today is our religious institutions.  In West Fresno there are churches 2 minutes from each other.   Between those churches is a war zone.  There’s a lot of, “I’m going to stay in my corner, you stay in your corner, when there’s police brutality I’ll call Reverend Harris, I’m not going to deal with it.” Keep your faith, but let’s not dialogue about faith.  Let’s dialogue about the social well-being of the people.

-Reverend Floyd Harris
Board member, ACLU-Fresno Chapter, and founder, National Network in Action

This interview was conducted and condensed by Katy Fox, volunteer Field Correspondent at the ACLU-NC.