They are nurses and doctors, artists, students, construction workers, government employees; black, brown and white; young and old.
Hundreds of thousands of demonstrators have taken to the streets in big cities and tiny towns in every U.S. state – and even around the world – to protest the killing of George Floyd, who died after a police officer pressed his knee into his neck as he pleaded for air.
They say they are protesting police brutality, but also the systematic racism non-white Americans have experienced since the country’s birth. Many say they marched so that one day, when their children asked what they did at this historic moment, they will be able to say they stood up for justice despite all risks.
Most say they do not support the violence, fires and burglaries that consumed some of the demonstrations, but some understand it: these are desperate acts by desperate people who have been screaming for change for generations into a world unwilling to hear them.
Yet suddenly, for a moment at least, everyone seems to be paying attention.
A Washington Post-Schar School poll shows roughly three-quarters of Americans support the protests, and a wide majority, 69%, say they see the killing of Floyd as a sign of broader problems in policing. That is up dramatically from a poll six years ago, that showed just 43% found the killings of unarmed black men as signs of larger problems.
Some demonstrators describe losing friends and family to police bullets, and what it feels like to fear the very people sworn to protect you. Their white counterparts say they could no longer let their black neighbors carry this burden alone.
Some describe institutional racism as a pandemic as cruel and deadly as the coronavirus. One white nurse from Oregon who traveled to New York City to work in a COVID unit saw up close how minorities are dying disproportionately from the disease because of underlying health conditions wrought by generational poverty and lack of health care. So after four days working in the ICU, she spent her day off with protesters in the streets of Brooklyn.
The stories of these protesters, several of them told here, are thundering across the country, forcing a reckoning with racism.
‘THEY’RE SCARED OF US’
Lavel White was a junior in high school, living in public housing in a predominantly black, historically impoverished neighborhood in Louisville, when he turned on the news and saw that a police officer was acquitted for shooting a young black man in the back.
Next time, he thought, it might be me.
The 2004 killing of 19-year-old Michael Newby propelled White to activism. He is now a documentary filmmaker and a community outreach coordinator for the Louisville mayor’s office.
Still, he knows that if he got pulled over and made a wrong move, he could die.
He’s had his own frightening run-ins with police, treated like a criminal for a broken taillight and another time in a case of mistaken identity. There are the smaller slights, too, like white women clutching their purses when he passes them on the street.
“They fear people’s black skin. They’re scared of us. The see every black male as a thug, as a criminal,” he said. “The vigilantes, the cops. People keep killing us and it’s got to stop.”
He’s been at the protests in his neighborhood almost every night, and worries his neighbors will live with the trauma the rest of their lives: the military truck on city streets, the tear gas, the boom of flashbangs, soldiers with assault rifles, police in riot gear.
He and his wife have a 2-year-old daughter and a son, born just three months ago.
“Just because of the color of his skin, he’s going to be set back by the oppression of 400 years of slavery and Jim Crow Laws and injustice, inequalities, racism, he’s going to have to walk and live that life,” he said.
They want him to grow up tough enough to stand up for his rights and his community.
So they named him Brave.
— By Claire Galofaro
‘FATHER FORGIVE THEM’
Once, when George Jefferson was a college student in California, he rolled up to a party with several friends just as people rushed to leave. Sirens blared.
“I hear, ’Get out of the car,′ and so I swing my door open. I look to my left and there is the barrel of a gun pointed in my face,” said Jefferson, who is 28 and now a fourth-grade teacher in Kansas City, Missouri. “And I am like cold sweating, it’s not visible, but I feel it. My heart is racing. He said, ‘I said don’t get out of the car.’ And at that point I realized I misheard this cop.”
He was let off with a stern warning to follow police instructions. But his unease grew after another encounter with police soon afterward, in which a friend was pulled over and forced to sit on the curb. Police said the car’s tag was expired; his friend argued. The advice they got was to file a complaint.
“But that didn’t address the feelings and dehumanization that came with it,” Jefferson recalled. His experiences led him to protest, teach his students about race, demand change.
In his classroom, he has posted pictures of unrest in Baltimore and Ferguson, Missouri, where Michael Brown’s death at the hands of a white officer in 2014 sparked intense protests. He has asked students for their observations, and assigned books, like “One Crazy Summer,” which is set in Oakland, California, in 1968, after the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr.
Fred Hampton was one of two Black Panther Party leaders killed in a 1969 police raid in Illinois; in February, Jefferson had his face tattooed on his arm. He plans to add to another tattoo — a line from scripture, Luke 23:34: “Father, forgive them; for they know not what they do.”
It is a reminder to fight for equality.
“That,” he said, “is a life worth living.”
— By Heather Hollingsworth
