When it comes to police brutality, this is hardly Ras Baraka’s or Larry Hamm’s first rodeo.

In mutual possession of a lifelong past of civil rights struggle, the mayor and activist today showed veteran leadership by coming together on the steps of City Hall and at the Lincoln Statue to stand at the head of a strong, forceful and peaceful rally and march demanding justice for the late George Floyd of Minneapolis, Minnesota.

It’s a bad thing generally in life to be shocked by things, and even worse for those who purport to be leaders, but such is our condition in a country where increasingly we lack context as a consequence of not knowing our own history.

That’s not the case here.

The fact that Hamm and Baraka have worked this issue for decades (including the police killing of Phillip Pannell in Teaneck in 1990) puts both of them in about as prepared a position to offer wise and sane leadership in a crisis tragically upending many other American cities tonight.  The institutional knowledge of police violence against Black men in particular arises out of their own work, in their own city, for Hamm going back to Newark’s own Minneapolis in 1967.

In the words of one Newark source: “Nothing is going to spark up in Newark. Not under Baraka. He stays very very close to the ground. He’d know if anything was afoot well ahead of time.”

The result is that the mayor – all of a piece with his priorities – and as a kindred spirit of the event’s main organizer, helped put his city in position to lead the nation in these horrific times.

But people should not forget that the protest today, while peaceful, was no less forceful, and this stage of an ongoing fight with deep and painful roots in our history, won’t end without justice for George Floyd.