Absolutely not. There are 2 million people incarcerated in the U.S. and a huge portion of them are African-American people and Latino people and prior to me sitting down and writing this book 2 years ago all of these situations were already happening. In fact, the situations of people being executed by the police based on race—or based on injustice is only a big thing because the young generation doesn’t necessarily know the history of our presence here in the U.S. So it’s been very shocking, very awful.
It’s been an era of terror for young people who previously thought that this was a very liberal, very open, very democratic, very justice-oriented country—where people of all races had equal protection under the law, so they find it shocking. But for people who have been alive a bit longer or have studied the times of when they weren’t living—we have the names of people who have been executed by the police kind of etched in our memory—or in our souls, in our hearts.
For New Yorkers, we all know the name of Eleanor Bumpurs, the grandmother that got shot by the police with a shotgun. We all know the name of Michael Stewart, Yusuf Hawkins, of Amadou Diallo who simply put his hand in his pocket and got blown away in his doorway. We know the names of Michael Griffith from Howard Beach—all of these different race issues. Race assassinations. This is not shocking for us.
But the new era, the digital era has allowed people to capture these kinds of activities on film, on their cell phones. You know and it’s the evidence that older people never had when we were young. The evidence that older people never had when we were young but the condition and the circumstance was the same. And so we couldn’t get any conviction or any just conviction for the things that were happening to us in that era and now that we have it on film, we still can’t.”
Will this new book be adapted into a movie?
“Well The Coldest Winter Ever is presently under option. It has been optioned to become a film. And we have the full intent to make it an independently produced film that everybody in the world can enjoy.”
Do you have any tips for aspiring writers?
“If you want to be a great storyteller you have to live a rich life. Not rich in terms of money but rich in terms of experience. I think you have to be the type of person who is unafraid of life, who is unafraid of walking off your block, unafraid of exploring different people, different cultures, different languages, different places. I think that a storyteller can only give what he has to offer and if you don’t have anything to offer, then you won’t have anything to give.”
How can people contact you?
“You can find me at my official website HERE.. There you find out about my book tour. You can also follow me on Twitter at @souljahbooks.
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Sister Souljah Talks ‘A Moment Of Silence’ – The Third Book In ‘Midnight’ Series was originally published on blackamericaweb.com
