Name: 【TED】Erricka Bridgeford: How Baltimore called a ceasefire (How Baltimore called a ceasefire | Erricka Bridgeford)
Uploaded: 2018-05-29T20:00:31.000Z
Duration: 11 min 28 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

and he often talks about how problems show up in our lives so arrogantly,

with so much confidence, as if there is just nothing we can do about them.

And the murder rate in Baltimore had been doing that.

Year after year, it just kept showing up as this big thing

that there was nothing any of us could do anything about.

is that it has never been the one to just be defeated.

So the story about the Baltimore Ceasefire

is that Baltimore looked the murder rate in the eye

and said, "What you're not going to do is snatch our greatness."

So two years ago, I'm at a 300 Man March meeting.

At the time, I was a leader in that movement.

he's like a godfather of hip-hop in Baltimore --

"Yo, I have this idea about calling a ceasefire in Baltimore,

and I feel like you are somebody I should talk to about that."

And I was like, "I'm absolutely somebody you should talk to about that,

And so we played phone tag and meeting tag,

and two years went by and we never really sat down and talked about it.

My son Paul, he's 19 years old, he's driving me home from work one day,

and he says, "Ma, did you know that the murder rate in Baltimore

And I said, "What you mean it's higher than it's ever been?

Like, I mean, what about people who say they have connections to the streets?

Why won't they use those connections and call a cease-fire or something?"

from my own feelings of helplessness about what other people weren't doing.

and I realized that what I was really angry about

wasn't about what other people weren't doing,

it was that I had heard this message years ago,

So it was about what I was supposed to be doing.

where everybody in the city was committing,

and we're going to celebrate life instead,

all right, I've got some free time the first weekend in August,

we'll do it August 4th through August 6th, right?

So I'm all excited, I start driving to work,

and the more I drive, the scareder I get.

Nobody will ever know I was thinking it if I don't say it."

and I'm always called to stand in my wholeness,

there was a call on my life to say this thing out loud.

and is always yearning to show up in its wholeness,

there were hearts that morning calling all through my chest

that people around this city wanted to do something great together.

And people who had already been killed in my city

as a knot in my throat, "Yo, E, you cannot just let us be dead in vain

when you know how to say this thing out loud."

"But somebody might get killed anyway that weekend."

And that was the moment where I had to accept

that maybe while we're out spreading this message --

"Hey, nobody's going to kill anybody. We're going to celebrate life!" --

maybe somebody will be plotting to take a life right then and there,

but now they would have a rumbling in their spirit.

to have a collective rumbling in our spirit.

So I got on the phone, got around to Ogun,

and I said, "Yo, you said you wanted to do a cease-fire?

So he said, "You know, when I hear about the Israelis and Palestinians at war,

I'm like, that's too bad, they should stop that,

that makes me pause and stop and really research what's going on."

And he wanted Baltimore to get that same kind of attention

but introspection from the inside about what was going on with us.

And we talked about how it couldn't belong to one person.

Not one person or one organization should call a cease-fire.

The whole city had to own it and do it together.

and this is where it gets named the Baltimore Ceasefire,

because you know what that means when you hear the word "cease-fire."

And this is where the Baltimore Peace Challenge was born.

Because it's not just about not being violent.

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【TED】Erricka Bridgeford: How Baltimore called a ceasefire (How Baltimore called a ceasefire | Erricka Bridgeford)

epidemic

audience

applause

commit