The voices of protest are voices filled with pain. It’s time for you to listen to us.

It’s time to run.

South Carolina is broken just like every other state in America.

The old system is not working.

The whole point of our protesting here in Columbia is to raise public awareness, to hold a spotlight on injustice and to make our elected officials uncomfortable.

There are certain things that happen in your life that make you pick up the pace.

There are certain things that happen in your life that slap you out of your stupor.

And there are certain things that happen in your life that make you say: “There ain’t no time to cry. I’ve got to run for my community. I’ve got to run for my freedom.”

We need to run.

And that’s why we don’t deal with elected officials who can not pick up the pace.

We don’t need you to be strolling when you have a job to do.

We need you to run.

As a 26-year-old man in the Deep South, I know that I would rather aim for the stars and not reach them than not aim for them at all.

I know that I would rather try and fail than not try at all.

And I know that I don’t want to wake up each morning wondering what I could have done to change the system or someone’s life.

We need young people to run for it.

And when old leadership sees young people falling, it should lift them up — and run with them.

There are many voices and cultures within the black and brown communities, and I am just one voice. But the pain of knowing that history is being repeated over and over again is shameful.

How do you call a nation to peace without any guidance?

Why is it that 10 men in the country can buy the world — yet 10 million can’t buy enough to eat?

How can we heal a community when our own leadership won’t even stand up?

We as young black people are standing up, and we are raising our voice.

The voices of pain that were heard across South Carolina on Saturday night represented an eruption of pain. Despite this reality, I saw important figures rush to denounce the protests as “riots” because of the positions that they hold — yet these same powerful figures did nothing at all to stand with us young people on the front line to help strengthen the barrier between the protesters and the police.

We talk about the property that was damaged in the Vista, but we don’t talk about the fact that most of the people in those neighborhoods can’t afford to eat in the Vista.

We talk about property damage in Charleston, but we don’t talk about the huge number of people who have been forced out of Charleston because of gentrification.

We talk about businesses that, honestly speaking, have the resources to rebuild or repair any damage, but we don’t talk about the residents who are being pushed off streets like North Main Street — or who have seen their homes and properties deteriorate because of generations of failed leadership.

We will never have a truly civilized society until we have learned to recognize the rights of others.

That’s why the most powerful statement we can make as young black people — whether we are male or female, whether we are straight or members of the LGBTQ+ community — is this one:

We must run.

We must vote.

We must work together, and get involved together.

How do we move our state forward?

We must put policies in place that benefit our black and brown communities — and not policies that take rights away from them.

We must be the first state to issue a statewide ban on the use of chokeholds by law enforcement officers — and we must have cities in this state that also ban this overuse of force.

If we want to move forward, we must move forward together.

And if we want to see change, we must run to make it happen.

We must run as though our lives depend on it.

Because they do.

Lawrence Nathaniel is the lead original organizer for South Carolina I Can’t Breathe. Nathaniel wrote this piece exclusively for The State Opinion page.

This story was originally published June 2, 2020 at 1:02 PM.