ATLANTA — Jason Woody immediately recognized a shared struggle with many of the Occupy Wall Street demonstrators: The 2007 college graduate has been out of work for two years, and it’s been longer since he’s seen a doctor. He also noticed something else: the lack of brown faces on the front lines of the Occupy movement.
“When I started out here … I realized there was not a lot of diversity out here,” said Woody, who is Black and graduated from Morehouse College and has camped in a downtown Atlanta park with other protesters for more than a week. “It’s changed in the course of the past week. I’d like to see that grow.”
The outcry against the nation’s financial institutions that has swept the country in recent weeks has crossed many boundaries, including class, gender and age. But a stubborn hurdle in many cities has been a lack of racial inclusion, something noted by organizers and participants alike.
“We, the 99 percent, have to be reaching out to the cross section of the communities that we live in,” said Tim Franzen, one of the organizers of the Occupy Atlanta movement. “If you come down to the park and spend a day I think you might have a hard time saying this is an all-White movement. We are reaching out, but we’ve got some bridges to build.”
The absence of diversity is particularly notable given that some of the larger issues surrounding the Occupy movement including the economy, foreclosures and unemployment are disproportionately affecting people of color. And the legacy of activism present in some minority communities seems a natural segue for such a cause, which has been linked to the strategies of the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s.
African-Americans are more inclined to rally around social justice than financial literacy causes, said John Hope Bryant, founder and chief executive officer of Operation HOPE, a non-profit organization that educates underserved and low-income Americans about personal financial responsibility.
“If this was about someone unjustly being brutalized, that’s an easier thing for us to mobilize around,” said Bryant, who is Black, citing the recent Troy Davis death penalty case in Georgia, a diverse protest that attracted global attention last month.
