Demonstrators Hear Talk on ‘Next Steps’ and Economic Change

Acting on pop/soul singer Rhianna’s words at the NAACP Awards show, local protest organizers asked community members gathered at City Hall Saturday to ‘pull up’ and band together in the Black Lives Matter struggle.

The small group of protestors marched to City Hall from Robinson Park in Northwest Pasadena to draw attention to the issue.

As organizer Danielle DeVaughn said at City Hall, “[Rhianna] said it in her speech that this is not just a Black people problem. It’s a white people problem. It’s a people problem.”

DeVaughn continued, “People, they like you. They want to break bread with you then.”

“But,” she said, ‘I say, ‘Pull up and show us why we’re here protesting. Tell your friends, tell them to come there and pull up. That’s the only way I’m going to tell you something. People say we can’t change the world. We are the people, we make the world possible. So why can’t we change it?”

Speaker Brandon Donte Lamar put the change into economic terms.

“The Black dollar circulates in the Black community only one time before it leaves out of our community,’ he said, “but it actually circulates 16 to 17 times in the Asian community and in the white community before it leaves.

“So what if the Black dollar actually circulated in the Black community 17 times before it actually circulated out,” he continued. “We would actually see more young millionaires than we have ever seen. And we’re not just saying support Black businesses. We’re saying support community businesses, because if we support community businesses, then … our whole community goes up. And then we can build back. We can build the block up the way we wanted to see it. Then we could start seeing more youth programs. Then we could start seeing our homeless people coming off the streets and actually having homes to go to.”

“These are the issues that we are seeing,” he said. “So it’s not just about us Black people dying on the street, but it’s about us Black people empowering each other, and having new programs so that when we do see these issues, we have things that we can go to and we have leverage.”

Lamar also pointed out the importance of the youth vote, telling the protestors to register and vote, and that it was millennials who twice voted in Barack Obama as president.

As with most of the previous Pasadena protests during the past five weeks, there were no reported incidents or arrests related to the Saturday event.