Some of the great movements in history, the real game-changers, have started when people who are passionate about a problem sit down and talk about solutions.

Some of history's worst moments have festered because of a failure to talk.

On Tuesday at 6 p.m. at the OIC building on Hempstead Street, the New London chapter of the NAACP will open its monthly membership meeting to anyone who wants to talk about the racially connected violence that reached a new and terrible level last week. The Day urges people of good will on all sides to consider attending.

No doubt similar meetings are taking place in thousands of communities around the country, not just in Minneapolis and Baton Rouge, the metropolitan centers where police killings of African-American men prompted street protests like the peaceable rally Thursday night in Dallas that suddenly erupted with sniper bullets and the slayings of five police officers.

The local chapter is putting out the word that anyone can come and speak. Members are inviting chiefs of police and school superintendents because, in the words of the chapter president, former New London elementary school teacher Jean Jordan, "sometimes you just need to sit down and talk."

The NAACP is looking for a joint effort broad enough to encompass the sentiments behind "Black Lives Matter" and "All Lives Matter." The conversation will no doubt have to include a hard look at why African-American males are so often the ones who die in confrontations with police officers, the point raised by the Black Lives Matter movement.

The conversation must also face honestly the evidence of Dallas, that the killing spreads when someone, in this case a black man, claims revenge on whites.

Many Americans can recall the racial violence that ripped apart the country in the late 1960s and early '70s. Many have noted that the videotaped police shootings of Philando Castile in Minnesota and Alton Sterling in Louisiana and the executions of the Dallas officers seem to have brought the country to a new and frightening sense of gloom.

Don't let that be the end of the conversation. Americans on all sides, come together and start talking.