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By Kahmille Burroughs

Glenn Beck's descent upon Birmingham with his league of 20,000 on August 29 as part of his Never Again Is Now/All Lives Matter Campaign may be heralded by some as a powerful display of interfaith unity, but it was problematic for a couple of crucial reasons.

Beck's covertly planned and executed march and the decision to employ the historic route of the 1963 Birmingham Campaign made a resounding statement, a resoundingly irreverent statement.

First of all, Beck rallied thousands to pour in from out-of-state to participate in a Birmingham march that largely excluded the residents of the self- same city. It appears that Beck and local co-organizers did little to reach out to the people of the community before executing march plans guerilla style. Many residents were clueless as to what was even going on.

Why the sneakiness?

Also disconcerting is the collusion of Birmingham's black church leadership, primarily Bishop Lowe of Guiding Light Church, with Glenn Beck, a man who has demonstrated repeatedly that his ideals and politics cannot address the concerns of the black community. It might appear that some black pastors are more interested in respectability politics than in representing the communities that comprise their churches.
Beck's strategic choice to have supporters chant "All Lives Matter" along a march route where thousands of black people, primarily black children were hosed, attacked by police dogs and carted off to jail in the fight against institutional racism and the terror of white supremacy was insensitive and dismissive at best.

The All Lives Matter movement has shown itself repeatedly to be a counterfeit movement, a blanketed response to drown out the voices of those crying out for justice, and an attempt to blur the individual faces and specific identities of those suffering, making it easier to ignore their very explicit requests.
Perhaps the largest issue is Beck's hijacking of the civil rights platform, a movement rooted in black folks' ongoing struggle against persecution on this soil, to raise funds for a campaign to aid Christians overseas. It is pure arrogance on his part and perhaps pure ignorance on the part of his supporters to use the name, energy and history of a movement, come to the city that was a pivotal point of the movement, and virtually ignore the descendants of that movement, their voices and their concerns.

Beck's cleverly disguised political agendas, craftily marketed slogans and white-washed religious rhetoric may have fooled some, but hopefully not the city of Birmingham.

As writer Jonathan Bass once stated, "It was the citizens of Magic City, both black and white... that brought about the real transformation of the city." Beck treated Birmingham like simply another notch on his belt and her residents should say right back at him and with one voice "Never Again, Glenn Beck, and Never Is Now."

Kahmille Burroughs is the co-founder of the Magic City Chapter of Black Lives Matter