Saturday, May 29th, representatives from Grace Baptist Church, St. Paul Lutheran Church, Greater Mount Carmel Baptist Church, First Baptist Church New Orleans, New Hope Baptist Church, and others came together at Journey 9th Ward Fellowship for a “Stop Killing People” ralley. At the event Charles Anderson with United for Peace in New Orleans gave the following inspiriational speech.

People.

We come here, gather today and unite because we love People.

We love the people we know, people like Robert Burnside, and the people we lost, people like JaShawn Powell and Jessica Hawk, Dineral Shavers and Brandon Franklin, Jason Miller and Elie Triplett.

We come here today because the people we know and love are being lost. Over 800 people in New Orleans have been murdered on our streets in the 5 years since Katrina.

Those 800 people were people of our community. They were sons and daughters, mothers and fathers, they were people like Louis Heim, a father of two, a college graduate, married to his high school sweetheart, who after searchng for work in Post-Katrina New Orleans decided to sell drugs to support his family and wound up dead, betrayed by a friend.

These 800 were people we know, they are our cousins, our nephew’s friends, our sons’ classmates. They are our mechanics, our musicians, our deacons. They are people like Willie Simmons, a soon to be retired cab driver, a deacon at his church, who rebuilt his home out in Gentilly after the Storm, who found himself picking up the wrong passenger and wound up dead over the $50 in his cab.

We came here today to save the lives of our citizens because we know in our heart of hearts, that it is wrong for a person to take another person’s life. we know that the God of Love can, will and should triumph over a god of Hate. We know it is wrong because we know there is another path for our people, there is a path of peace for all our people to reach.

Today, our message to the community is simple and singular. Stop. Killing. People. We are not here to conquer the drug culture or ban baggy jeans or rap music. We are here for the lives of our people. We are here to say, “the killing must stop.” Thou shall not kill.

It is a Truth that must be put in the front yard  in every block of this city. It is a Truth that must be shown on shirts worn by every person of peace in New Orleans. It is a truth that must be publicly confessed on every killing corner from Murder Row to MLK, from Gallier to the Treme.

Together, we will stand behind the message to stop the killing. We can walk out on faith that this message can change our city. We can possess faith because we know that a simple and ancient message of Love, when repeated over and over by a multitude of messangers and backed up with unified action represents a truth no killer’s conscience can conquer or deny.