WHEN THE EDITORS of this magazine began to talk about how to address this summer’s uprisings—hundreds of thousands taking to the streets in hundreds of American cities and towns—we initially assumed we would commission someone to write an article with a thought-provoking analysis of what the protests meant, or revealed. And yet, in deliberating over who this person might be, we noted that, already by early June, we felt inundated by analysis and interpretation. Every magazine and newspaper, every journalist, every politician, podcaster and activist organization, seemed to have their own “line” on what the protests meant. What seemed to be missing, oddly enough, were the voices of the protesters themselves. How could we know what the protests meant until we found out what they meant to the different people who participated in them?

With that question in mind, and inspired by some of the famous oral histories of the civil rights movement, like Howell Raines’s My Soul Is Rested, we embarked on a project early this summer to interview as many protesters as we could about their experiences, their motivations and their hopes and fears. As the protests continued into late summer and fall, the project grew to encompass unfolding events like Jacob Blake’s shooting and its aftermath in Kenosha, and the response to the handling of Breonna Taylor’s case in Louisville. The process has not been scientific, or systematic; often we had to start with personal acquaintances, and some areas or groups are undoubtedly overrepresented. But it was not random, either. In line with our magazine’s commitment to exploring the full range of ideas and values that animate American experience, we sought out a wide diversity of perspectives both political and personal: in what follows, you will hear from experienced organizers in Minneapolis and first-time marchers in Maine; lawyers in Baltimore and youth dance instructors in Chicago, civil rights leaders in Alabama and college students in New York, newly passionate organizers in Oregon and a former pro-life picketer in Tennessee.

The survey is organized into seven categories: “The Video,” “Into the Streets” (divided into three chronological subcategories), “A History of Violence,” “White People,” “Cops,” “Policy and Politics” and “Hope and Pessimism.” Like the participants in the survey, these categories were not preselected: they emerged out of our conversations and therefore out of the words of the protesters themselves. But we believe that, placed together, they illustrate something about the causes, the breadth, the anxieties, and the internal tensions that continue to characterize our political moment.

We would like to thank everyone who spoke with us for this survey, as we know it was not always easy. To our readers, we hope you learn as much from them as we did.

—The Editors

COVER IMAGE
Protesters gather outside of Cup Foods the day after George Floyd was killed by police. Photo by Tim Evans.

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TABLE OF CONTENTS
THE VIDEO
INTO THE STREETS
[The First Night]
[Early Days]
[Protest Summer]
A HISTORY OF VIOLENCE
WHITE PEOPLE
COPS
POLICY AND POLITICS
HOPE AND PESSIMISM

THE VIDEO

https://thepointmag.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/8-minutes-46-seconds.mov

Nekima Levy Armstrong, 44
Minneapolis

On the evening of May 25th, I remember being tagged in a Facebook post by a woman named Ashley Quinones, whose husband, Brian, had been killed by the Richfield police last year. She talked about how the Minneapolis police had crushed someone’s throat, or killed them somehow with a throat-type injury. After I read the post, I started looking online to see if there had been any news stories, any news coverage around what happened—there was nothing. I then reached out to the chief of police to ask him if Minneapolis police had been involved in killing someone and he said he hadn’t been aware of anything like that. From his understanding, someone had died in police custody due to some kind of a medical issue. So I went on Facebook and said I’d talked to the chief: this is what he is saying has happened, according to what officers told him, and he has turned the case over to the Bureau of Criminal Apprehension. After that, another fellow activist went to the scene and started interviewing witnesses. And witnesses told him that the police caused George Floyd to die by, you know, having one cop have his knee on his neck, and then not listening to the bystanders telling them to stop, and then not listening to the man in question telling them that he couldn’t breathe. When I heard those accounts, I reached back out to the chief to say, “The witnesses are saying something different happened. Can you try to find some video of what happened so that you will know what happened?” Then, at that point, I went on social media and I let people know that a man had died in police custody. Within minutes of that, I was tagged in another Facebook post. This time it was a bystander video. And from my review of the bystander video, it was very clear that police had intentionally killed George Floyd.

Christopher “Mad Dog” Thomas, 35
Chicago

I was in my living room with my son. And it came through on my phone on my Facebook feed. And so I just clicked the link, and then I paused it. And the reason why I paused it, before even I watched the whole thing, is I wanted my son to see it. So it was only one of my sons that time but I wanted to watch it with him. You know what I’m saying? So he can have an understanding of how systems operate and move.

Police are there to serve and protect us, but what are they serving and protecting? They’re not serving and protecting the people they’re supposed to serve. So like, if you’re a human being, a Black human being, it’s okay for them to take you out. A police officer’s an executioner, he has all the power and the right to take a life at any moment. And in this country, Black lives, right, are at this point—to me, have always been—disposable or used as some form of currency or capital.

And so I wanted to make sure that my son had an opportunity to see what it looks like. Like, this is what it looks like in live action, and this is happening right now. This happened in the last 24 hours.

He’s eight. He was a little frustrated with it. You know, like he felt like the people around them was telling them that he couldn’t breathe and the police officer just disregarded that. Right? Like, he didn’t care.

Now you have full power, he’s in handcuffs. There’s not really too much he can do and you couldn’t let him stand up or get off his back, right? So that’s what my son was mostly frustrated with. And he noticed when he wasn’t responsive. He said, “Daddy, he’s gone. He’s gone out.” Like, right now he’s gone.

Alsa Bruno, 30
San Francisco

I intentionally did not. I’ve yet to watch it because I mean, one, I’m not confused about what’s gonna happen. I’ve seen too many lynchings. And I don’t feel like I need to watch this man take his last breath to know that his breath is important.

Barbie Jones, 32
Chicago

I saw the video and I was just watching, and I’m like, all of these people standing around and no one stopped the officer… and then when I saw the paramedics and everybody pull up I’m like, is this okay, like why isn’t anyone stopping him, like why is his leg still on his neck while the paramedics are right there? So I was just kind of confused, actually, watching the video.

Ézé Amos, 46
Charlottesville, Virginia

I just saw clips of it on Facebook. What happened to that man—I just don’t get it. When I was moving here from Nigeria, coming to the U.S.—for me, it was like the place where you’re guaranteed safety, everything works, people know what they’re doing. It’s America—there are crosswalks! And to see things like this happening, it’s like… what? How could anyone ever do that to another human being?

Josie Stanfield, 28
Prineville, Oregon

I believe I was at my house the first time I finally just caved in and watched it, because it was months of people talking about it… And I was like, okay, I’m just gonna watch this. Just gonna suck up and watch it. So then I watched it here at my house. I can’t believe the video, you know—him calling out for his mom. And I was just enraged and heartbroken and just confused—how that happens in broad daylight.

Sylvie Thode, 21
New York City

I was in quarantine, and I think I saw it on Twitter and watched it and was just horrified, obviously, just physically revolted. And it was an odd moment, though, because I remember I saw it the day that I had my first college graduation event—all that sort of coincided. So I saw it in the morning and I had to go and have a whole celebration later that afternoon.

I wanted to make sure that my son had an opportunity to see what it looks like. Like, this is what it looks like in live action, and this is happening right now.

Justin Williams, 37
Baltimore

I was working from home and I was sitting in my home office till late that night trying to think through what was happening. I was seeing reactions to the video, and as someone who is policy-minded and used to dealing with politicians, I think—and I’ll say it publicly—I’m worried about the reelection of President Trump. I mean, as a Black land-use attorney I know that Baltimore’s problems can be traced to both parties, but President Trump called Baltimore a “disgusting, rat-and-rodent-infested mess.” And so I was trying to think about how—I mean, obviously, I felt terrible about what happened and was thinking through, Can people on the outside who have some platform, can we shift the debate a bit? Can we help shift debate in a way that will help improve things locally on specific issues, but also more broadly, and at the same time make sure that Donald Trump doesn’t get reelected?

James Gabriel, 35
Brooklyn, New York

The video, which I have not seen, is almost nine minutes long. I forget how long the Rodney King video is, I think it’s shorter, but it’s still quite long and there’s no escape. Whereas we’ve seen other videos where it’s 45 seconds. And so I think that there was a length and inescapability. You know, if you had seen that at work, you might not have watched the whole thing if your boss was coming around to pick up your latest assignment.

Emily Wolfenbarger, 38
Knoxville, Tennessee

I’ve never watched the video. Which I feel like is privileged, to not have had to see that, but I began seeing images from it. I was working from home on my laptop like I do every day. And for some reason, that moment was different than other violence I’ve seen before in the media. Maybe I was a different person. So I saw it through different eyes. I saw that image of the officer on Floyd’s neck, and it was just so brazen that it hit hard. And it made me cry and made me realize there’s no misinterpreting what’s happening. This is a problem that is bold, and it’s going to require some action to bring resolution.

Glen Ray, Sr., 68
Anniston, Alabama

I was at my house and it came over the news. And I just couldn’t believe what I was seeing. Here’s a man that’s on a person’s neck, and I noticed water was coming up from under the car, so I knew that his bladder had bust on him. I worked at a hospital for 38 years, so I knew that he was dying. And I just couldn’t believe it. And I’m saying, for twenty dollars?! They’re killing a man on an alleged twenty dollars?

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INTO THE STREETS

[THE FIRST NIGHT]

Nekima Levy Armstrong, 44
Minneapolis

We put together a rally and march in honor of George Floyd and demanding justice for George Floyd, that the officers who did this be fired, as well as charged for their crimes. We posted it right away, and we started getting a response from people, and ultimately thousands of people showed up at the first rally on March 26th. In between that time, as Black community leaders, we met with the chief, we met with someone from the FBI, someone from the Bureau of Criminal Apprehension. And as the chief gathered more information, he made the decision to fire the four officers. We were a part of that press conference, we spoke, we affirmed the chief’s decision. And then we also demanded that those four officers be charged. And so hours later, we held the rally and the march and we marched from 38th and Chicago, where George Floyd was killed, two and a half miles to the Third Precinct police station.

As we’re marching, of course, everyone’s upset. Thousands of people are out there, from all walks of life. A lot of young people of color are out there, young Black people—clearly we’re outraged about what happened to George Floyd, the fact that his death could have been prevented at any moment during those interactions with law enforcement, and that didn’t happen. And so once we got to Third Precinct, we had a rally in front of the precinct. People were speaking, people were chanting. And then we had some young people who were kind of hitting the glass of the precinct with little rocks. But the rest of the demonstration was peaceful. Even those young people were banging on the glass, they’re just, like, taking rocks and hitting little pieces of the glass.

And then people came and tapped me on the shoulder because they said that there was a crowd at the back of the Third Precinct, that was back there agitating. And they asked me to come back there, take a look and encourage those people to join the protest. So I went back there. And it was very clear that those folks were not interested in coming around to the front that they wanted to call the police out—you know, justifiably so. There were some folks back there doing graffiti, some folks who were banging on the glass of the precinct, they were understandably very angry. And then when the protests ended they stayed back there. Because we encouraged people to leave after that, if they want to march back or get a ride. And so some folks left and some folks didn’t, and we were in the parking lot across the street from the Third Precinct, waiting at the Target store over there, we were waiting for our ride. And then the next thing we see tons of police show up in riot gear. We see these flashes of light, like, these flash-bangs. And apparently they’re pepper-spraying people and people are running and screaming. And then at that point, we decided to leave because it was getting dark out there, and we didn’t know what to expect. And our protest was over, so we left. So that was all that happened the first night.

James Gabriel, 35
Brooklyn, New York

I heard that people were going to be assembling at Barclays Center. So I hopped on my bike, threw on my mask, went to Barclays. The energy of the people there was electric and inspiring. This was a spontaneous generation of activity. You saw people taking the bullhorn, saying they had never been to a demonstration before—and these were Black and brown youth who were saying, “Enough is enough.” Seeing someone who’s 21 years old, taking the power back… At that first demonstration at Barclays, I think that the police had made Barclays, basically, their sort-of HQ. There’s a precinct nearby as well. And so there were already metal gates erected and people were up in the policemen’s faces.

I take photographs, so in part I had the documentarian spirit of wanting to photograph, bear witness, in addition to participating in this. The first confrontation with the police at Barclays where there was pepper spray— none of that, to me, was shocking. Some of the protesters were at the metal barricades and were rocking them while chanting, and policemen close by, who may or may not have told them to stop rocking, advanced closer to the kind of picket line. It was hard to tell in the melee as everyone was shouting, but one of the gates started to shake, and there was a tussle over keeping it in place. And that was the first time I think I saw pepper spray being used on the crowd. Pepper spray, I think by its nature, or at least the way that police deployed, it is a little bit indiscriminate—the spray itself is in a projectile trajectory, but it tends to be sprayed with a wide radius, so multiple people were affected.

I guess the most surprising thing was the presence, the immediate presence of people on site who were ready and willing to help. There were protest medics. They had put a medic sticker on their back and were there with water and milk, which I think we’ve now discovered is not the best thing after a pepper-spraying, but people were there ready and willing to help.

Anonymous, 25
Seattle, Washington

It all happened very quickly. I mean, the first demonstration I went to was the day after the video came out. Ten thousand people showed up in downtown Seattle and the police were already there, ready to fight. And they just blocked the march so that we couldn’t march anywhere. And it turned into a confrontation with the police and police cars were burned. The Cheesecake Factory was looted. I got tear-gassed, pepper-sprayed, everything. They weren’t having any of it. That sort of started the ball rolling on everything that’s happened since in Seattle.

Sylvie Thode, 21
New York City

The first night, I actually figured out where protests were happening based on helicopters in New York, because you could see helicopters sort of hovering over a certain area. In the city during the height of the pandemic it was very, very quiet except for the odd ambulance siren. And now, you hear this quietness, but now there were helicopters interrupting that eerieness. So we heard the helicopters and wanted to go see what was happening. My dad was a photojournalist for many years and my mom is still in the journalism industry, so they were very interested in going and just seeing, getting the story. So all three of us went together.

First we saw helicopters heading downtown, along Broadway. And Broadway south of Houston Street, the downtown area, is essentially where a lot of the big-box stores in Manhattan are—Bloomingdale’s, Uniqlo, that kind of thing. We walked south on Broadway first and we started to see a lot of smashed windows. We saw a police car that had been burnt out. We walked south for a while, and then we saw more helicopters that looked like they were hovering above Union Square. We wanted to find an actual protest to show our support, so we walked north. We made it to maybe 12th Street, right around where the Strand Bookstore is—and then we started seeing a bunch of people with signs chanting. The police way outnumbered the protesters—there were maybe 75 people, and there were probably one hundred policemen. Then the police announced over a loudspeaker, “This has become a violent protest, disperse now,” etc. At this point, the curfew was not yet in place. So they didn’t have that as a reason to disperse us.

They started to move us down onto a side street on 12th Street that cuts across. Now I know that that’s something called kettling, I didn’t know it then. But basically they herded all of the protesters onto this small side street, where they blocked it off. There were police in front and then another band came along the avenue on the other side. So we were kind of trapped. At that point all the protesters took a knee on 12th Street and it basically stopped there for, I would say, maybe fifteen minutes—with people taking a knee, chanting George Floyd’s name and demanding justice. And there was a band of protesters towards the front, which is where I was. And then a band of policemen facing off directly for the protesters. It was truly just two lines facing each other. We were just chanting at them, and they weren’t saying anything back, so it was kind of paused for a while.

As we were there another protest group sort of came up from the back—and I’m not quite sure how that happened because there were police on the other side—but somehow they got through and this other group came from the back, chanting more things. So we had more people now but at some point, from that group in the back, someone threw a plastic water bottle over the protesters and onto the police side. At least I think that’s what it was. And the minute that projectile went over, all hell broke loose. Those front two lines broke, and the police charged at the protesters. And people started screaming and running away. I was alarmed because I was right next to two women who were wearing hijabs—and I’m a white woman for context—and I knew that if the police were going to really hurt anyone it would be those two women; they’d also been pretty vocal during the chanting. So I stepped forward to pick them up. Because at that point the police had knocked them down to the ground with that charge. And then as I stepped forward and broke that line to pick the two of them up, just to help them off the ground, a policeman smacked me with his nightstick across my ribs a couple times. I was fine and I was able to help them up and we ran the other way.

Meanwhile, while this had been happening—I didn’t know this at the time, but I heard from my mom after—she was on the side of the street. She wasn’t in the main group that was kneeling. Because she’s a journalist, she’s actually technically not allowed to protest because it’s a demonstration of political belief. Still, she is very pro-Black Lives Matter and wanted to do it anyway, in essence, but she was on the side so she wouldn’t be photographed. And the minute the police charged she tried to run into the center of the street where all the protesters were because she was afraid for me, that I was going to be hurt. And she was yelling my name and running towards me. And a policeman took his nightstick and held it against her chest and pushed her back against the building on the side of the street and said, “Get out of here. Back up, get out of here. Don’t go in. Don’t charge in.” I should say here, my mom is 64, she’s maybe 105 pounds. She’s tiny. And she was, obviously, understandably, very freaked out by that.

I got up and ran down the street, sort of following everyone running from the police that were now charging. And we found each other again—I found my mother and my father and a friend of my parents who we’d seen and joined up with along the way. And we ran and we turned down the avenue. At this point, there were people around me who had been maced and you could see the white chemicals on their faces, they were crying. And we were running down the street, and that continued for a while. Running, and then you’d pause and sort of regroup. And then they would charge again and you’d run again and then you’d pause. We were making our way down… I believe it was 4th Avenue at that point, trying to get out while staying together as a group and asserting our place in the streets and the right to protest peacefully.

Josie Stanfield, 28
Prineville, Oregon

Hearing the story about George Floyd, seeing the posts that were going around about it, and just the energy that was created from it really motivated me—because I have three children. It really pushed me to stand up and do something. So when I organized the first protest, I actually had the intention of just going out there alone. Because I live in such a small town, I really didn’t think anyone was going to go anyways. It’s 0.8 percent Black where I live. So I was like, I’m just gonna organize this and just go out there alone, me and my friend, and you know, that’s gonna be it. But it ended up being much bigger than that. Over a thousand people showed up.

Greg Edwards, 31
Bangor, Maine

Everyone was still pretty much in lockdown at that point and I hadn’t been in any sort of crowded situation. I hadn’t been around more than, like, two people for months at that point and I had just come out of the woods, so I knew I wanted to go but also was nervous about attending such a populated gathering at a time when we’re not supposed to be having large gatherings. I spent a lot of time making sure I had a mask and bringing hand sanitizer and making a sign. And then I went.

I definitely felt uncomfortable, probably from a white-fragility standpoint of like, “Should I be here? Do I have any authority to be here on this issue?”—before realizing that, you know, we all need to do something. But then when I was there, for the first time in two or three months I saw everyone that I know in Bangor—you know, through masks and signs and a really crowded, weird place. It was reassuring, that all the familiar people I know in Bangor were there. And then there was a talk. It was not super well organized, so you couldn’t hear the speakers from more than twenty feet back, and I think they said there were a thousand people there, so most people didn’t actually hear what was being said.

Then we walked through downtown on Central Street and Main Street, and Bangor PD shut off the streets—police were there. They closed down the roads so that we could walk through downtown. And then we met at another park right by the Bangor Police Department, where there was a choir singing. And there was a moment of silence and then there was one point where everyone white in the crowd took a knee. For once in Bangor, I saw—you could clearly identify, here are all the people of color, so that was kind of unique and powerful.

Tristan Taylor, 37
Detroit

On May 29th, I think it was a Friday, it was the first rally. I almost didn’t go because this was when I was technically cleared to get out of the quarantine, but I was wanting to be extra cautious and someone was like, “Well, as long as you have your mask and stuff, you’re good, and besides you’re out of the range. So we know that you’re no longer contagious.”

And it was funny because we wrote a statement—Detroit Renter City—that we wanted to pass out. And we were saying to ourselves, “Well, how many copies do you think we need?” And I’m like, you know, “A couple of hundred would be good,” because I was like, I don’t want to make more than what we need, because who knows how many people are going to come out. So we get there, and it’s like a fucking sea of people. Thousands. Well, clearly, we needed more than just a couple of hundred. And I remember going to Kinko’s and making the copies and seeing a friend, a longtime organizer who also does stuff around housing justice, making copies as well.

At a certain point, the rally begins. The rally, by the way, begins inside the parking lot of Detroit Police Department headquarters. A section of the crowd started to leave because they couldn’t hear. And as is the case with these big crowds, they’re there to take action, they’re not necessarily there to be an audience, in the sense where they are just there to listen. And so a huge section of people started to make their way down the street, Michigan Avenue, and the rest of the people stayed for the rest of the rally. I’m actually the last speaker at the rally. You know, I’m just like, “Let me keep this short because people came in to march and we should march. And if we’re serious we should use this moment to be just the beginning.”

We marched a long-ass time. It was exciting—it was like the energy just won’t fucking quit there. So at the end of the march, we do open mics so that people can say stuff, and people just don’t want to go home. And I’m like, “Oh, okay, well, I guess we’re gonna march some more—but also, what are we doing for the future?” And people were like, “We want to show up tomorrow.” And so tomorrow they did show up, and the next day and the next day and the next day after that.

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We were saying to ourselves, “Well, how many copies do you think we need?”… So we get there, and it’s like a fucking sea of people. Thousands. Well, clearly, we needed more than just a couple of hundred.

[EARLY DAYS]

Emily Wolfenbarger, 38
Knoxville, Tennessee

It was a really, really hot day. I remember that because a few people got heat stroke and it was early on, at least in Tennessee, where masking was becoming more common. We walked about two and a half miles from the civic center to the courthouse downtown in Maryville. And one of the big things I remember is just wearing a mask in that amount of heat was physically difficult.

My parents were really active with the pro-life movement in the late Eighties and early Nineties. And they both protested full-time for a couple of years there. So I kind of grew up on the picket lines, holding signs and making marches and whatnot. But not as an adult. It’s not something I ever chose for myself since I was just a child. And since Trump was elected I hadn’t read hardly a headline. Then, with COVID, I started feeling like I needed to have a sense of what was going on nationally and globally. So I started plugging back in and listening to what was going on in current events and kind of just trying to become more active and get my bearings again. And then, the week of George Floyd’s death was a real pivot point for me to just realize I had sat in a lot of privilege of being able to turn this off and walk away from it. And I needed to somehow find a way that I could engage that would make a difference, to stand shoulder to shoulder with my neighbors.

At the march, for every Black person, there were two whites, maybe three whites. Thankfully, the police were very supportive and some of the police officers even marched with us and that group of people that was with the NAACP in Blount County, they have done a lot of work with the police officers there, long before George Floyd, to try to bring some changes into the regulation. So they had already started a positive relationship, so it didn’t feel scary.

Because they closed the streets, there were a lot more families that were standing on the sidewalks beside us as we were walking. It was very emotional to see them stand there, mostly Black people, mostly in the Black neighborhood, just crying. Old, old people—even little grandmas were getting pushed up in their wheelchairs just to witness something that I’m sure none of them had really seen before. It was very humbling to have so many people watching and encouraging and just witnessing that, you know, we’ll stand with you until we get this job done.

Koerri Washington, 32
Kenosha, Wisconsin

The George Floyd protest started down at the municipal building, which is in downtown Kenosha. There was a really large crowd down there. People were just letting their voices be heard, playing music, all different types of stuff. Eventually, the protests turned into a march. March happened. Went on for a few hours. Eventually, I’d say it turned into, you could say, a soft riot, I believe. Buildings weren’t set ablaze or anything like that. I believe one place did have a Molotov tossed into it, but it was put out fairly quickly. And there was a couple buildings that had some windows broken and stuff like that, but it was mainly just a lot of people in the street. It was a pretty massive crowd—I’d say at its peak it was probably anywhere from 2,500 to 3,500 people. I didn’t expect it to be so large here.

Barbie Jones, 32
Chicago

What really pushed me to come out was I saw that the kids I work with at Youth Matter [a youth dance team and community center on the South Side of Chicago] were actually posting on Facebook. And they were really getting emotional, and you have to train those emotions. Someone has to control those emotions. And so with that being said, that’s what made me get involved. So I was in the streets trying to make sure that my kids wouldn’t be outside looting or getting involved in anything or being involved in a negative way.

I had them cleaning up after the protests and the looting as well as I had them doing a peaceful march, which they were marching for the youth, and dancing and everything up the street. I just turned it into something positive. The police were actually out there, and they were actually protecting the kids. They knew it was kids. They helped block off the street. They were doing a good job with protecting the kids.

George Floyd’s death was a real pivot point for me, to just realize I had sat in a lot of privilege of being able to turn this off and walk away from it.

Glen Ray, Sr., 68
Anniston, Alabama

I organized a protest. And my thought process was that I know a couple of police officers, the police chief here and the sheriff. The police chief in Oxford, not in Anniston, ’cause the one in Anniston’s crooked. So I got with the police chief in Oxford and got with the sheriff and I wanted to keep people from rioting, because everybody was getting so upset.

My reason was that enough is enough. That people got to let people know that we’re not going to stand around and let you just lynch our brothers and sisters and our neighbors. Because the Bible says we got to look out for our neighbors and that ain’t somebody living next door. Our neighbors can be in New York or whatever, wherever people have been done wrong, you doing our neighbors wrong. And so we have to come out and speak out against it.

We probably had close to a hundred people there and most of them was white, and I had some white preachers and Black preachers. And I told the minister that someone’s got to take the lead. “If you represent God, the Lord,” I said, “you should be out front,” and I said, “Before we start I want each of you to come up and speak and tell the people here why we are here and why we shouldn’t be here.” They did a good, lovely job.

Brandon Kilbourne, 37
Berlin, Germany

The immediate weekend after George Floyd was murdered, there was a protest by the Brandenburg Gate. It was a pretty large crowd. If I had to guess… several hundred. Given that this story blew up in the previous week, this was kind of short notice for a protest. And I mean, you saw Black people, white people—clearly some expats, U.S. foreigners, Black Germans, all there. There were a few central speakers who spoke about other victims of police brutality in Germany, basically taking what some people try to pass off as a U.S. story and say that this is also happening in Germany. [The next weekend] about fifteen thousand people converged in Alexanderplatz.

Lydia Bodine, 21
Knoxville, Tennessee

I went into the protest thinking that it was going to be basically like a war. I think a lot of videos that are shared on the news—like Fox News and everything—make it seem like every protest is really hateful and really dangerous and scary and a lot of rioting and everything. And Maryville, where the march was happening, is a pretty racist city. When I told my friends we were going, they got worried because there’s a lot of KKK people still out there. I think that’s what scared my sister and me the most, but that’s also why we felt like we had to show up. So I went in expecting the worst. I was expecting to be beat up. We were expecting to be sprayed and everything. And we went in and there was no conflict, really.

We marched all the way down to the courthouse, which was about two miles one way. There were even some police officers that were marching with us, which was really cool. I did not expect that. Usually there was a Black person saying the chants, and then everyone around them would repeat it. Once we got to the courthouse they had a little event. They had some speakers come. That was really powerful, to hear their stories. And they had people walking around with a clipboard if you needed help registering to vote. It was a very positive event. Then they had a part at the end at the courthouse where we took ten minutes in honor of George Floyd’s death. Just a silence. That was really emotionally hard, but it was really powerful and cool to see everybody respect that.

Louis Moench, 19
Santa Monica, California

It started at city hall—the Santa Monica city hall and courthouse. Which is, you know, the courthouse to the stars—like, that’s where O.J. was tried—and a ton of my friends from high school were there. And everybody was masked. I was with my girlfriend. Well, the reason I went was because my girlfriend was like, “We should go.” Because it was a couple days after there was like conflict, really physical conflict in Santa Monica, in the downtown area, which I’ve been hanging out in since I was like six. It was in a little bit of a disarray. So there were a lot of boarded-up windows and stuff like that. And so we thought, you know, we should go—like, this is big. There hasn’t been, ever, in the history of Santa Monica, any kind of instability in that area. Like literally, like ever.

The promenade is where the real craziness happened—where they broke into an REI, which is hilarious. People were stealing camping gear. So we were like, this is obviously a major historical moment. Or at least that’s how I was feeling, like we should definitely go and partake and also, being on the left, like, I do support Black Lives Matter—at least, yeah, I do support them.

Alsa Bruno, 30
San Francisco

Early on I went to this huge, poorly communicated protest in a big park. And when I drove up, there were police blocking me off, so I was like, okay, this might be a real protest. Then I realized the police were there to protect the protest. And then I realized, this is not a protest—this is a picnic. Like, We’re all here together with you. Somebody signed a form at the Government House saying we are going to protest you. At this time. Is that good for you? Please send the police that we were protesting. And I remember specifically, right as I was parking, I saw this sister walking with her daughter—this Black woman walking with her daughter. And there was a traffic cop making sure that you walk by. And this woman talked to the officer as she went across the intersection, and then I heard her because she passed by me, on my side. I heard her tell her daughter, “It’s okay to talk to the police. Because sometimes that keeps you safe. Sometimes that keeps you alive.” So at this protest against police brutality, she was one of maybe six Black people I saw at this protest. So not to say we weren’t there, but it was like, this is not by us. And therefore it can’t actually be for us, it’s not really trying to serve us.

Ézé Amos, 46
Charlottesville, Virginia

Richmond had something happen that was quite similar to George Floyd. There was a gentleman named Marcus David Peters. He had a mental breakdown. And he was out in the streets, he was actually naked, in the street. Police responded to that, and instead of trying to help him, they just shot him in the back. A man running around the streets naked—he wasn’t running at them, he was just running around the street. And instead of them trying to help him, they decided to put him down, like a dog. So apart from the whole protest of George Floyd, Richmond also had that to protest against.

I remember the one I went to, the protesters actually went to the police station and surrounded police headquarters and demanded change and to defund the police and all that. And the police came up and started tear-gassing people and beating them. At one point, some of the protesters burned down a dump truck up the road from the station. They broke the windows to some of the big-box stores, Whole Foods was vandalized—a lot of people shopped there—and the windows and glass were destroyed as well. And they set some buildings on fire. I think they were arrested and the police arrested and shot at everybody. They shot at everybody. After that very first protest I went to in Richmond, I quickly realized that I needed a helmet and a bulletproof vest.

Tristan Taylor, 37
Detroit

So day three is Sunday. Sunday, the city of Detroit announces that they’re going to impose a curfew. It is very clear that the curfew is related to just the protesters. And they said that, in a way, but they were also saying that it was a citywide curfew. You had to show what your business was in order to be out—because of the marches Friday and Saturday, continuing into the night, and the resistance that people were giving to the police trying to arrest and beat marchers out of the streets. Because that Friday and Saturday night, the Detroit Police Department had a vicious policy toward the demonstrations at night.

Monday, when people came out, the person who ended up leading the march that day sent people home. And that’s because when people were marching back to the downtown police precinct where the marches have been gathering, they were met with police in riot gear and tanks. And so they were convinced to go home, but people were really angry. They actually didn’t want to go home, but they didn’t know what else to do, because they just knew the curfew was wrong. So they said, we got to oppose the curfew. And we get arrested for opposing the curfew.

People are really outraged to see the force that was used to arrest us—because all we were doing was marching. And because of that, more people showed up the next day. And we had like two hundred people march to oppose the curfew. And that number doubled the day after. And so the city refused to enforce the curfew, and that was a big moment for people. People were on cloud nine and they were like, “Okay, this movement, we can actually achieve something.”

Timothy Findley, 41
Louisville, Kentucky

There was one particular night in the very early days when the mayor, from what I understand, sent the National Guard down to the West End, which is a predominantly Black neighborhood, and that’s when the killing of David McAtee happened. I remember getting the call and going down to 26th and Broadway. A large crowd had already started to gather. His body had stayed on the street, I want to say, a total of eight-plus hours. And it was just a very difficult situation—the community was extremely upset. That’s when the police really started to take an aggressive tone and approach with the neighborhood. It was such a long day; I just was very frustrated. And on the expressway driving home I said to myself, “You know what? We need to start protesting. There are things we need to do.” So I decided that I was going to go out to Shelbyville Road—which is in one of Louisville’s most heavily trafficked areas, a white area—and I would do a protest.

About twenty people showed up. We’re walking down Shelbyville Road—it’s a major street, three lanes on both sides. So we knew that we were quote-unquote breaking the law, but we really believed in what we were doing. We understand that protest is civil disobedience. I remember seeing the police behind us in the distance. And because there was so much traffic, they were having a hard time getting to us. But the police finally got through, and they sped in front of me. They jump out—some are in fatigues. Others are in their police officers’ uniforms—and I remember there was a gentleman who screamed, “Get out of the road!” I took maybe two steps. And I remember he said to the other guy, “Get him”—something like that. Then, not even a few seconds afterwards, when the guy grabbed me—and it’s clearly on tape—he immediately starts screaming, “Stop resisting!” As a matter of fact, I had my hands up in a position that, you know, I am not a threat. But he grabbed me and said “Stop resisting.” I’m a bigger guy—so I’m 6’4″, about 250. And I remember him trying to yank my arm down and trying to throw me on the ground. I’m not fighting against them but it’s pavement, so I’m not going to allow myself in that situation to be thrown down in that way. But before I can start going down on my own, they start trying to leg-sweep me, kicking my ankles. So I remember saying to the guy, “Hey, you don’t have to do that. I’m gonna go down.” I go down on my own, get on my knees. The moment I get to my knees, they push me down, face-first to the ground, really hard, and they put my arms around my back. One guy puts his knee on my legs, the other guy puts his knee in the top of my back. And from what it looks like on the video he took out—of course, I couldn’t see it—some sort of high-powered weapon, it might have been one of those Tasers—and he had it pressed to the back of my neck.

What’s striking is that this was right after George Floyd. And there were people, not just the ones who were protesting, who at that point had started getting out of their cars, and recording with their phones. I remember saying to the guy, “You’ve got to be tone-deaf. At this moment, you’ve got to be aware that this is going to go everywhere. This is not what you want to do.” So they get me up, they take me to the back of the squad car, and by that time people have livestreamed it, they’re taping it, they’re uploading it to social media. And all I know is there must have been some significant people in the city that started calling based off what they were seeing. I was in the back of the car for maybe ten minutes, and then they came back with a bottle of water, saying, “Hey, Rev”—so their tone changed, my title was suddenly instituted, and I was asked if I wanted water. That’s when, for me, I understood what the summer was going to be like.

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[PROTEST SUMMER]

Anonymous, 25
Seattle, Washington

The day after that first demonstration, they imposed a curfew and called in the National Guard. And we planned a march from the same spot downtown. That was the first time I actually felt frightened at a protest because there were all these National Guard soldiers standing around looking at us, eyeing our crew. It was quite scary. I remember the first time I saw people pouring milk on themselves and all these strange remedies people have for tear gas. I never encountered that before, and seeing people who had been exposed quite severely injured, that was very frightening as well. I remember walking home from the first protest and being soaked and covered in tear gas and like, waiting at a crosswalk and it was disorienting.

I was going every day for a while. Every day there was a large protest outside of one of the police precincts where they had stopped our march on the second or third night. And we were just going out there every night. Trying to continue our march, basically. They’d tear-gas us and, I mean, they filled the whole neighborhood with tear gas. And that was really what changed people’s attitudes a lot in the city.

The issue is very visceral. People—my neighbors—are being murdered. And it’s just this whole bloody mess. Going out every day was, I don’t know, it was the right thing to do. I couldn’t just look away.

Scott Daniel, 25
Chicago

I had a lot of free time. I’m a musician and therefore about as unemployed as any freelancer can be in pandemic and therefore possessing a lot of extra time and mental bandwidth. Also I don’t know if this is because of the pandemic or because of the egregiousness of the initiating event or whether it is some sort of threshold that was reached for people… I can’t count the number of times I heard friends or family ask me or each other, “What do we do? What can I do?” And I’ve been acting in a way that I feel reflects my faith in the power of the moment in various ways, fairly consistently since May. But occasionally that’s looked like doing mutual-aid work and doing food deliveries and stuff like that, or doing jail support, which I did once or twice. And occasionally that looked like going to protests, but more than occasionally.

Maya Pendleton, 27
Washington, D.C.

The bigger and bigger the crowds get, the more tension there can be, in some ways, because the demands are not always the same. It’s almost similar to what happened when the current president first got elected, and people were protesting in the streets and there was this feeling that, okay, some people are protesting against white supremacy and the U.S. system generally, and then some people are out here because they’re upset that Hillary Clinton didn’t get elected, and those are two very different perspectives. There are some people who were, you know, protesting and kneeling with the police, hugging, all these things. And then there are people who are like, “No, I’m an abolitionist, I believe in abolishing the police.”

Emily Wolfenbarger, 38
Knoxville, Tennessee

We did have one moment that almost turned into an encounter at the Juneteenth rally. We started from a park and took a route through the Black neighborhoods in downtown and East Knoxville. So we probably only walked about a mile, mile and a half, but as we were walking we did pass a house that had a Confederate flag up. They had a skeleton noosed in the tree. They had a skeleton hanging off their house and they had a lot of signage up that just was threatening like, “We will murder you, we know where you live, we will find you.” And that house, thankfully, didn’t seem to have anybody home that night—all the lights were out at least.

But I’ll remember it because the NAACP team stood between the marching crowd and this house—partly to protect that house from people who were very angry and wanted to destroy it and partly just to protect the people. But to see those people volunteering to be that buffer and see them telling—I mean, physically having to drag some people away because it was such an emotional experience. They wanted to throw something at this house. But the NAACP folks were so deliberate in their peacemaking that I feel like they prevented a significant problem, while still giving voice, still giving an opportunity to experience that emotion.

To watch that, as just a white person, to see that this house has been standing for who knows how long, the house is like ten minutes from my house—blazing, just unapologetic, very much stirring up trouble that’s completely offensive… I appreciated to see that the process of this team of organizers was to be proactive and protect each other and stay focused: get back on track, get back on the march and bring attention to how we’re bringing change, not how we will bring destruction.

Josie Stanfield, 28
Prineville, Oregon

I went to a protest in Portland the night of Emmett Till’s birthday. It was amazing—there were ten to twenty thousand people out that night. People were lighting off fireworks, they had drum circles going, speakers, music, dancing. And then things shifted, kind of, later in the night. The feds had put up a fence around the Justice Building. It was illegally constructed, and so the Portland residents are trying to take it down. So once they started shaking a fence and banging on it, the federal officers—like a movie scene—lined up across the street and came out, just shooting projectiles and fireballs at people. It was really like a war zone. They shot me in the leg. My husband got shot a couple times. It was shocking. You know, I’m a little bit of a rebel myself. So I had my leaf blower. They put it on really heavy with the tear gas. So we had like a line of like fifty people with leaf blowers and we were just blowing the gas back at them.

Sylvie Thode, 21
New York City

I went to a march on the day that would have been the Pride march in New York City. It was called the Queer Liberation March. And it was a Black Lives Matter-oriented march specifically centering Black trans lives, and we marched up towards Stonewall and past Stonewall and near the AIDS memorial. That was a very moving experience for me, especially because I ended up joining up at that march with a professor of mine who was involved in ACT UP. I wrote my thesis on poetry in the AIDS crisis. And so being there and sort of feeling this lived history at a place I’d written about, with a person who had experienced it thirty years ago… He was talking about how this moment felt like it felt then.

Ézé Amos, 46
Charlottesville, Virginia

Right after the whole conversation about the monuments started, the Lee statue became the focal point for any kind of resistance or protest in town. We all start from there and spread around town. During the summer protests, people just started writing stuff on the statue. It became a community gathering place. So people would come every evening, every afternoon, and they came with their spray paint. And they’d write whatever they wanted to write—a lot of profanity, you know, “F You Police,” “Defund Police” and all that. People came with different colors, and then before you knew it, the entire statue was covered with graffiti, and it’s just crazy and ridiculous. It’s a work of art—it’s so beautiful.

I’m a little bit of a rebel myself. So I had my leaf blower. They put it on really heavy with the tear gas. So we had like a line of like fifty people with leaf blowers and we were just blowing the gas back at them.

Anonymous, 25
Seattle, Washington

Outside of the East Precinct is where there were these daily protests, lots of tear gas. Eventually, one day, the police just packed up and left. And it’s kind of interesting: no one will admit to having given the order to abandon the precinct. We think it was the police union actually telling officers not to show up to work there. But yeah, so they left one day. There had been a 24-hour protest there already, basically, so when they went away people were just there in the street, thinking, “Oh, okay, now we have this.” And I think what really got it started was the mutual-aid groups that were taking donations. There’s a big park right there, and you could get free food there, in the park. So people started camping and it became just a protest that never ended.

The idea for the autonomous zone—it had many different names, but there was graffiti that started popping up that said, “Welcome to Free Capitol Hill,” and I think that people were very excited by that concept. It was a really exciting experiment in mutual aid, in cooperation. For my involvement, I volunteered a bit. I picked up trash. I moved supplies around. I painted. I unloaded cars, and sometimes I was just there to witness it and listen to speakers and things like that. I remember being there the night before the police abandoned the area, and they had brought some trucks in and started moving things out. But no one thought that they were just going to leave.

The atmosphere was jubilant at that time, and there was no organization to it. None. I mean, these protests were not like the kind that are organized by the civil society groups in Seattle, these were just people showing up from Twitter, basically. As far as I’m aware, the whole time, there was never even really an attempt at governance. It wasn’t even really like Occupy, where people were trying to make decisions. I never saw a real political vision coming from it, other than that we were going to provide services that the state refuses to provide to people who don’t have anywhere to live or are facing food insecurity. I think it’s also important that this happened in the middle of the pandemic. There’s a tremendous amount of economic uncertainty. And a lot of people lost their jobs in the restaurant industry—here the restaurant industry is very big. So a lot of young people were out of luck.

There’s something called the No Cop Co-Op. Basically people asked, “Hey, bring food and hand sanitizer and whatever to the tent,” and Seattleites sent so many supplies that we had to stop taking supplies. We got trash service, porta-potties and hand-washing stations through the local utilities departments. There was a big gardening operation. The garden is still there.

It got less busy. After a while, there was less tourism, people just coming to see it. You could still go, and marches were still being organized from there. And people were speaking and livestreaming and doing all these things. I suppose it was less vibrant than it was at first. But yeah, so things kind of wound down a little bit. And one morning, a couple hundred police officers showed up and kicked everyone out. I think they arrested fifty people, threw everybody’s belongings in the garbage, closed the park. They closed the whole neighborhood, essentially. You couldn’t travel through the main area in the neighborhood without being a resident and showing your ID to these lines of riot cops. That was a disturbing experience. That’s how the main occupation ended. And the police presence went on for maybe a week and then people set up in the park again, basically doing on a small scale what was going on before: mutual aid, people living there, protest staging. And it’s been cleared two or three times, the most recently was last night [September 2nd]. They came in and cleared everybody out. There’s a small bathroom facility there that people were using as a distribution point for goods and supplies, and the police put a huge fence around it and locked everything up. And they’ll be back tomorrow.

Koerri Washington, 32
Kenosha, Wisconsin

The video [of the Jacob Blake shooting] was sent to me. I had literally just finished dinner, left the restaurant, walked into my house, and got a notification. It was the video. I saw the video and then my phone kind of was blown up afterwards, and from there it was just… people asking me what I was up to, and telling me where I should go, and where the protests were and where the crowd was at.

I got near the Blake residence probably around 6:30 or 7 o’clock. There was already a decent sized crowd there, but it was mainly locals. By the time, around 8:45, 9 o’clock came, a caravan from Milwaukee had arrived. There was a way larger group there now. Someone from the caravan was one of the heads from the Black Lives Matter chapter in Milwaukee. So, officially affiliated with the organization, not someone that’s holding a sign that says Black Lives Matter but someone that actually has affiliation to an actual organization—they come. Things get heated. People are yelling at the cops. Cops are kind of standing there, more of a police presence is built up. People started standing on top of cop cars.

I noticed a leader from Black Lives Matter goes and talks to the sheriff. After he talks to the sheriff, the sheriff decides that, “Hey, we’re just going to leave.” So they’re now going to try to retrieve all the vehicles. At that point a group of police get close to a vehicle to try to get into it. Someone throws a brick at the back of a cop’s head. The cop gets knocked out and things go really, really crazy—a massive flood of cops come in to come save the officer. And then they basically pull him out. They get in the car, they speed off. And the crowd then marches all the way downtown to the courthouse, as well as the public safety building and the jail.

Once they get there, out in front of the public safety building, there’s kind of a clash that happens. There’s garbage trucks set up at all the entrance points around the courthouse kind of, you know, making a blockade, for about an hour. So there was a clash between the protesters as well as the riot police. Eventually tear gas gets deployed.

Once we get out to the main road, I realized that all the garbage trucks have now been lit on fire incredibly fast. I don’t know who was the person that lit all the garbage trucks on fire, but now there’s just fires blazing everywhere. Trucks blowing up. People trying to set the courthouse on fire. Eventually, there’s people rummaging around through the burned-down trucks looking for things to throw and stuff.

We have a dinosaur museum that is in the vicinity of the courthouse and the Civic Center Park. I go over by the dinosaur museum and I see someone throw something on fire at the museum—I realize that they’re trying to burn it down. I basically involve myself and try to get them to stop—a massive group of people, of individuals that I’ve never seen before. I questioned them and asked them where they’re from and what the heck they’re doing, and basically starting to yell at the people that are trying to go and throw more stuff at it. I was pleading with them: “Hey, this is—my kids go here. Like, let’s not burn this place down. You don’t like the police. There’s cops standing right there, but you want to burn down the dinosaur museum?” But them not being able to answer the question. It’s like, “Okay, are you even from here? What school did you go to?” And them just saying, “Oh, I went to all the schools.” That’s when I was like, Oh no, this is what the crazy people on the internet are talking about, probably.

So the next day, would’ve been Monday, I get out there, probably around four, maybe even earlier than that—there’s another protest happening. For the most part, things are peaceful until later in the day, later in the night I should say. Then you have the National Guard and you have cops and they’re just firing tear gas. People are getting riled up. Eventually people got pushed out of the park, and they went down the road and caused more destruction. That was the night where they knocked down a bunch of light poles. They burned down the car lots that were here. They burned down the parole office building. And they also burned down an appliance and furniture store that night too, as well as a bunch of other buildings in the Uptown area. The first two nights were pretty hectic.

Jerrell Griffin, 31
Kenosha, Wisconsin

I ended up seeing the video—I was on my way to the store to get some milk for my baby. And I ended up turning on Facebook and I see everybody out there on Live like, “Yeah, man, somebody just got shot.” So I came up snapping, you know, I come mad. I’m cussing the police out. There’s people between 40th and 41st. They got tape from the half of the block to the other end of the block. So when I come up, I’m pointing at the police, I’m calling them all out, telling them that this shit ain’t gonna happen down here in Kenosha, and people are yelling at them from behind the yellow tape. And the police was trying not to tell the Jacob Blake family where he was. A cop ended up getting hit with a brick, and their car got on fire. It was just crazy that night, but people was mad, frustrated, you know?

The first time when we did the George Floyd protest, it was too wild. People were pulling out guns on us. We were running up on them, throwing bricks. So this time, I’m like, “Man, we can’t get nobody else hurt.” Because we needed them to hear us. That’s what made it different for me, and made me step up instead of me just indulging in the same activities that some people were indulging in—the negative.

Djuan Wash, 36
Waukegan, Illinois

That first night, as they were marching and protesting, I saw the videos online, since I was in Waukegan, and fairly close—I knew one of the people that was livestreaming it. And so I traveled up to Kenosha. I sent the video to Ben Crump [Ben Crump is a prominent civil rights attorney who has represented the families of Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown, Ahmaud Arbery, Breonna Taylor, George Floyd and others], and my friend, Adner [Marcelin], who works for him, and called and let them know that I was headed up there and would be on the ground. After arriving, you know, things had kind of already died down. And I returned home to Waukegan. I was told that folks would be meeting up the next day at noon. And so I returned to Kenosha and joined up with Jerrell, Jesse, Nick and a guy named Jeremy, to lead a march. And we marched on that Monday, to the point to where crowds grew into the thousands. I introduced myself to them as a national community organizer. I kind of explained that this is all going to happen very fast, and it’s gonna be very heavy. So I’m here to help. I’m not here to lead you. I’m not here to be in front of your cameras and to take interviews. I’m here to support your leadership and help develop it. Over that first week, I assisted them with some organizing trainings. I helped them to do some issue cutting, power mapping, those sorts of things, to help understand who are the decision-makers: Who can actually give us what it is that we want? We’ve been up and running ever since.

Jason Lopez, 42
Kenosha, Wisconsin

Every day people would show up at the police station or the courthouse. And we would organize nonviolent marches. We would usually start the march by the courthouse at the Civic Center Park and then we’d end our march there. Whenever we would get back to the park, the police would either tear-gas us or shoot us with rubber bullets. And pretty much every night was the same thing: it would be peaceful marches and when the march would return, people would end up getting tear-gassed—which would incite everybody to turn violent. Now, I’m not saying that the peaceful marchers were the ones doing that. Because there would be people that weren’t marching that would just be in the park the whole time while we were gone. So it could have something to do with what they were doing before the peaceful march would make it back to the park. So then when they would see these marches of hundreds or thousands of people show back up at the park, they would just gas us. I feel like they were acting out of fear. And once they would start using the gas and the rubber bullets, that’s when the riots and the arson and the looting, that’s when that would start.

This time, I’m like, “Man, we can’t get nobody else hurt.” Because we needed them to hear us.

Koerri Washington, 32
Kenosha, Wisconsin

A lot of people were upset. A lot of people were disheartened. It depends on the type of people that you’re talking to, if they’re just like normal locals that, say, have no affiliation, and are really more concerned about the town itself. Their reaction is… they’re distraught because of the local businesses. It’s a very tight-knit community, although we’re fairly large, but it still seems like a small town. A lot of people are close with their neighbors and things like that and shop at local businesses, and would rather go to the local shops than the big-box stores. And the reason why I feel like outsiders are the ones that committed most if not all of the damage is because the businesses that were burned down, at least majority of them, all serve the Black and brown community. So it really did a number on the community. But then also depending on who you talk to, a lot of people are like, it’s wrong. I wish the city didn’t get destroyed, but in a way, what can you expect when, you know, people have been shouting about these things and shouting for so long, and then these things continue to happen?

Timothy Findley, 41
Louisville, Kentucky

[When they announced the judge’s decision] I was actually at the square—that’s where the memorial is for Breonna Taylor, and it’s been the rallying point for the protest. Myself, those other protest leaders, Until Freedom, we were all there. And we listened to the list of charges and the lack thereof—we listened to it there live, at the square. It’s hard to explain just how much of a gut punch that was. That’s the best way I can put it. What grabbed my attention was that people didn’t react immediately. It took probably about ten minutes for most people to actually grab hold of what just happened. And then after it began to sink in, I was sitting there like, “Nah, I mean, somebody’s coming back on. Somebody’s gonna say something. They’re not ending with that. I know they just didn’t give a $15,000 bond. Oh, and by the way, did they just put us on a curfew? This is—no, there’s got to be something more coming.” And when it was clear that was not going to happen and what we had heard was their idea of justice in this moment, about ten minutes later, you just heard crying, there was visible emotion, anger. You know, you have people who, for 120-plus days, have done nothing but protest. They put their families and other things on the side to join into this cause. And that was a potentially deflating moment.

But our city is very resilient. We’re still disappointed. We’re still very skeptical of what’s going to happen tomorrow. But I’m holding out hope that this has opened the door for more accountability. The fact that the attorney general did not even recommend manslaughter, or murder, that he recommended wanton endangerment—that is a dereliction of duty. And now, he’s under fire. And I’m hearing about calls now for the attorney general to step down. There’s been calls for the mayor to step down. And I think that depending on what happens with this case, those calls are going to intensify. This community is not going to heal until justice is done.

Tristan Taylor, 37
Detroit

We just celebrated day one hundred. I’d say we had about three or four hundred people at it. And we wanted to connect people who are in the march to different struggles and the history of struggles in Detroit. One of the most phenomenal things I’ve done so far was to do a march to the site of where the 1967 riot took place. [On July 25, 1967, a couple days after the start of the Detroit race riots, police and National Guardsmen sped to the scene of the Algiers Motel after reportedly hearing gunshots and assuming them to be sniper fire. The authorities rushed the motel annex in pursuit of the “shooter.” (According to witness testimony, there was no sniper—a seventeen-year-old had been shooting blanks out of the window with a starter pistol while hanging out with friends in one of the rooms.) By the end of the incident, three Black teenage boys had been shot dead, and two white women and seven Black men were wounded.]

Once we got there, we had people who were part of organizing in Detroit during and after the riots speak about their experience and about the movement. That was really powerful and included a professor who wrote a book and did a study on the Algiers Motel where the incident happened. And so people got a whole history of what took place, what came out of it, who were the people involved.

There was a moment where it was almost like the baton or torch was being passed, too, because the older generation was telling us, you know, “You gotta stay out here. Y’all ain’t done nothing yet.” Like, “Y’all gotta reach day eighty before you think you’ve achieved something.” So it really motivated people. And it made us—I was crying during one of the speeches. Monica Lewis-Patrick, who’s been part of the struggle since she was a teenager, gave such an impassioned speech. And she told us: “Don’t you kneel. Don’t you kneel until you win something, don’t you fucking kneel.”

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A HISTORY OF VIOLENCE

Barbie Jones, 32
Chicago

I was driving my rental car. They were looking for a stolen vehicle; they didn’t run my plates; they didn’t ask me my name. They just saw it was the same—well, they thought it was the car that they were looking for. Immediately, they pulled my car over. They said they were looking for a stolen vehicle. They didn’t ask me my name or anything, they pulled the car over, they put guns to my face. They put me on the ground. I was, like, scared—you can see me on their dash cam puking and everything because I don’t know what’s going on. And then they told me to get in my car. Once they found out that they pulled over the wrong car, they told me to get in my car and go. They still never asked me my name. And then I sued.

Kerstin Arias, 24
Bend, Oregon

When I was seventeen—my mom was very abusive, and I have a white mom. She was beating the crap out of me. All I wanted to do was leave the house and I kept trying to leave the situation, but she wouldn’t let me—she kept saying she was going to call me a runaway. So all I did was push her off me, and I tried to take off. She called the cops. I had a whole black eye, my glasses broke off my face, I had scratch marks all over my arm. When the cops got there, they didn’t even ask me the situation that happened. They didn’t ask if I was okay. They didn’t ask my side of the story. They just put me in handcuffs. And I spent 32 days in jail. At seventeen years old. And you know, that was the sucky part about it. When you have a crazy-ass white mom, who are they gonna believe? The white victim or the troublemaker, you know, teenage problem-child that’s of color.

Alsa Bruno, 30
San Francisco

The first time I can remember… I was three years old, and I remember looking out at the boys playing basketball right at the bottom of our driveway, and the police rolled up. And they invited the kids to play with them. They were like, “Oh, let’s do that.” And they suck. They, like, miss a shot and the kids started clowning them. And I mean, I’m three, so what I saw was just a missed shot—a point of fun and like some laughing, but that to me is a situation where we’re all in it together: “Ah, yep, I missed it. Ah, damn. All right, kids, see you later.”

And what happened was I guess they got offended—the police—and just beat the shit out of them. These are my neighbors. They were kids I knew, they played ball with my brothers, right? My brother had literally just come inside, one of my brothers, and literally just left the court. The court being our fucked up—like, our street was built on an incline, right? Yeah, when we played basketball, everything was a fadeaway [laughs]. Anyway, and yeah, they parked on our side of the street. And they started whaling on the kids, but they were doing it because they knew the kids weren’t gonna fight back but you can see them flexing and flexing. And they smacked the first kid—an open-palmed smack in the face. The other cop took somebody and slammed… I can’t forget all the red that exploded out of that face as he slammed it on the car, and I think they took two of them to jail—or something, took them away.

And for me, I mean, I had learned that the police were heroes, and I wanted to be one. There was a cop at my church. He was a—I forget his station, but he was pretty high up, and he was just, you know, a good guy, very straitlaced, and his daughter was fine. So I thought, why not be near that? Talk to his sexy daughter—I mean, I’m six, she was cute—and lo and behold, right? Like, I have to hold all these same realities at once. I have to believe that they were criminals, I had to pretend that to be an officer is to constantly find the bad guy, as opposed to constantly meet a quota or constantly have the power to enforce whatever the fuck I feel moment to moment.

Glen Ray, Sr., 68
Anniston, Alabama

I remember we were out playing baseball—right behind our house we had a baseball field. And my father came out and said, “Man, tell people don’t go up in Anniston because they just burned the bus.” [On the afternoon of May 14, 1961, a Greyhound bus carrying Black and white Freedom Riders was attacked by a mob of Klansmen who set the bus on fire, attempting to kill everyone inside. When later asked why none of his officers had intervened in the attack, which occurred a block from the police department, the police chief said they were busy celebrating Mother’s Day.]

But I come from a family of civil rights fighters. My mother right now is 95 years old and you would look at her and you would think she’s in her thirties. She’s still fighting.

Josie Stanfield, 28
Prineville, Oregon

My last relationship was very abusive. I worked, so I got a house, and he lived with me in my house—it was in my younger days, I’ve learned better, okay? But in one of our abusive moments, I called the police to ask for help, and to ask them to remove him from the home. I lived in northern Idaho at the time in a really, really small town. And I was shocked because the police actually ended up making me leave. I was confused. At the time his little sister, who is now like my little sister, had been also staying with us. And her and I had a conversation the following day. And she said, I just had to let you know that after you left, they were joking with him and saying that “we don’t like n*****s around here.” That hugely influenced me to stand up. Being in that situation, calling them with blood on my face, and getting kicked out of my own home with nowhere to go and then them joking with my abuser, saying that “we don’t like n*****s around here.”

Timothy Findley, 41
Louisville, Kentucky

Being a Black man, we don’t necessarily have positive police experiences all the time. Now again, I’m not one that’s against police officers themselves. I’m against the police structure. I’m against the policing system. And the way that we police Black and brown people, but specifically Black people in this country, I’m against that. So when I say what I’m about to say, hopefully that’s the lens through which people will understand this. The majority of my life, I’ve been taught how to interact with police, and not simply interact but more so how to survive police. Because the thought is you can die in any encounter with police. And as we’ve seen through social media, as we’ve seen through videos, that’s a reality. I’ve told young men that “the system is not broken. The system is doing exactly what it was designed to do. Your job is to try to survive the situation.” So my history with police has been one that is, in my adult years, to hold accountable. But yes, I’ve had experiences with police, going back to my teenage years—being cuffed, being profiled. A lot of Black people have. “You fit the description”—I mean, all of that, that’s all happened to me. “Can you step out of the car? There was a car that looked like yours and robbed a local gas station a few minutes ago. We need to search the car.” I’ve had guns pulled on me. That’s sort of the day-to-day experience of Black men and women.

Koerri Washington, 32
Kenosha, Wisconsin

My relationship with the police is like, I don’t know—they’re really nice to me now. I’ve had situations with police individually. I tell people all the time, when I was eighteen, at my place, I had a graduation party. Cops come. You know, I’m not 21 and people are drinking and stuff. So I don’t know what to do. I go to my bathroom—so I’m just sitting on my toilet. I was like, man, what am I gonna do? My brother was my roommate—I didn’t tell him that we were having a party or anything. I was young, I didn’t know what I was going to do. A cop comes in, and first thing he says: “What are you doing, flushing your crack?” And I’m like, “Whoa, all right. I don’t know why you would say that to me. But I’m literally just sitting here and not doing anything.” So it was the first time I had ever dealt with, I guess you could say, “subtle racism.” To me, it was racist as hell, honestly, because I had never seen crack before and, like, had a 3.8 GPA and scholarships and was a great person but, apparently, I’m a drug dealer.

The majority of my life, I’ve been taught how to interact with police, and not simply interact but more so how to survive police.

Brandon Kilbourne, 37
Berlin, Germany

In April 2009, I was in Fort Collins on a research trip. I was staying in a motel and I’d just gotten to town. I went and bought some lunch food for the week from Albertsons. I’m crossing back across the parking lot and as I look over my shoulder, I see a cop car slowly pull to a stop behind me, and the officer is suddenly yelling something at me. I turn around and look at him. I hadn’t heard what he said. I saw he was yelling. He says, “Put your bags on the ground, and put your hands on your head.” I’m just staring at him. And then he gets out of his car, pushes the door open, his hand goes to his right hip, and he says, “Put your bags on the ground, put your hands on your head.” I figured he’s on a power trip, so I’m just going to comply and we’ll sort this out. I put my bags down, put my hands on my head. He comes over and then he takes one of my arms and puts it in a lock. He frisked my body and put that hand in a handcuff. He tells me there’s a warrant for my arrest. And I’m like, “What?” He’s frisking everywhere on my body, has my arm in a lock, and he cuffs me. “How do you mean to arrest me if you don’t know my name?”

He didn’t ask me who I was—at least not that I’d heard. But he says, “Then why did you stop when I called you McFadden?” I said, “I didn’t hear you call me McFadden. I just saw you lean out the window and yell something. I didn’t hear what you said. So I stopped and I turned around.” He just kept repeating the same question. I said, “Look, my wallet’s in my back pocket, you can check my ID. My name is Kilbourne.” He pulls out my wallet. By this time, three or four other squad cars had come out of nowhere and slammed on the brakes. They’re getting out. But I’m focused on this one officer. I think he finally realized that I’m not gonna change my story. And he uncuffed me, and said, “Oh, I guess you just misunderstood me.” And it was like, that’s what I’ve been saying for ten minutes. Right? He’s trying to be friendly all of a sudden. And so I asked, “Oh yeah, this McFadden guy,” you know, “what’s he look like? What did he do?” He didn’t say what he did, but he said, “Yeah, he’s a suspect and he had your height, build and facial hair.”

So I mean, that’s the thing: If I had refused to put my bags on the ground, to put my hands on my head, if I had tried to thrash or pull away when he was cuffing me, how would that have ended?

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WHITE PEOPLE

Kerstin Arias, 24
Bend, Oregon

A lot of people thought this was a pro-ally group [the Central Oregon Diversity Project, which Arias leads alongside Josie Stanfield]. That this was about giving white people a chance to show that they’re not racist. And then once they saw what we really deal with, and they kind of got a taste of it, they just didn’t want to do it no more. We just had one here lately where, you know, this woman didn’t like the fact that a woman of color was yelling at cops. We eventually did have a conversation, which was: You don’t understand the hurt and anger that we carry on our shoulders—four hundred years of oppression that weighs down on our shoulders. We’re angry, and we have every right to be angry. It’s not your job to tell them that they need to sit down and shut up. It’s the other way around—you need to sit down and shut up and listen. So she went and made a whole Facebook post, and she wrote it to Josie personally and said, “You’re more Malcolm X. And I supported Martin Luther King.” She doesn’t realize saying something like that is racist. Like, “Oh, you’re not a good enough Black person. I don’t support you.” It’s like, if we’re not the good little quiet Black girls that they’re hoping to see and we’re the angry Black women, they don’t want to hear it. And we’re no longer good enough for them. So, you know, I think doing all this has shown me the colors of people who consider themselves allies.

Alsa Bruno, 30
San Francisco

I kept showing up to different demonstrations and there was one particular moment when I thought, “This is just not for me. I shouldn’t be here.” Well… I’m a big-chested guy. You know what I mean? I’m a big-chested Black man. So I know that when I go into spaces, if I’m not actively smiling, there’ll be a little bit of like, “What’s his goal? What’s he gonna do?”

And I remember going to this event right at city hall. I believe the mayor was speaking, at some point—London Breed—a Black woman, right? And I thought, cool, this will be—at the very least, we know it’s a Black woman who’s the emcee, who’s the main speaker. When we got to the event, there was an eight-minute-46-second moment of silence.

It was sort of sparsely attended. But I remember this young Black kid who had a blue bandanna on his head, mask on his face, and a homemade shield, a police shield. And I believe it said, “Police, stop killing us”—each word had its own line. And people are walking up and taking pictures of him. Like, left and right. And when I say people, I mean white people. Like, we were at this event, it’s sparsely attended. The Black mayor is going to speak and weigh in on what this city is doing and this crisis, this seven-layer cake of death that we’re in. And look, no one spoke to the boy. No one asked him if they could do it. They just walked up, stood from a certain distance. I saw one person put themselves in the picture, which to me felt like, you are literally… like this is—what a, what a pun! What an example of what this moment is! Like, you’re not in the picture. Like, you’re being a bystander in this shit. And you’re pimping his Blackness, you’re pimping his voice, I don’t know, to get an extra follow on Instagram or some shit, like it makes you look woke, because you saw a Black man, which is… that’s how I feel when I see—God, I’m mad, I’m so sorry—that’s how I feel when I see these videos and everyone gets so excited about it.

Niles Schwartz, 41
Minneapolis

The anger here is justified, and yet, honestly, also alarming. A lot of friends and acquaintances—all of whom are white—want, or say they want, a violent overthrow of the current system. Some other friends—who are otherwise far left—who have voiced skepticism about the idea of clandestine lynchings or how the police are supposedly psyopsing us with fireworks, have either been ostracized and unfriended or unfollowed by peers. While things have calmed down, the city simmers with fear of white supremacists watching them, while in the suburbs I visit my gullible relatives, in fear of anarchists and looters branching out of the city. All of this then has this underlying element of how a lot of the people arrested in the subsequent weeks have been dopey white kids from the suburbs, who may not subscribe to any ideology and have probably seen Joker too many times.

I mean, the anger is justified, but it can also feel evangelical. My Instagram feed is filled with Orwellian “I see you” posts, which remind me of my adolescence in an Assemblies of God church where those who weren’t speaking in tongues and raising their arms while singing were “revealed” as those with lesser faith. On that note, all this makes me think of The Last Temptation of Christ, as Jesus is caught between the zealotry of Judas and John the Baptist versus the airy and more amorphous idea of Love.

Meanwhile, this has caused soul-searching on my own part. I see people post things that feel like struggle sessions, committed to a revolutionary line of thought that I admire and yet also find scary. How do I make this a better world? A more just world? I’ve mainly only had bad experiences with cops myself, and yet isn’t it a deterrent for criminal behavior? From my own childhood experience in an abusive household, the thing that got my drunken stepfather to step aside (after he’d already thrown my mother through a wall and kicked down the door of my sister, on the phone with a dispatcher), was the realization the police were coming. When I voiced this to a friend, her reply was identical to Lisa Bender of the city council: it’s a sentiment that “comes from a place of privilege.” While I understand that, it doesn’t sit well with me. I didn’t pursue an argument, but is my distemper an example of Robin DiAngelo’s “white fragility”? Some, with undaunted certainty, would say it is.

Christopher “Mad Dog” Thomas, 35
Chicago

We’ve been protesting for years and doing things, where police officers have killed folks. And there’s not… A lot of times there’s not a lot of white folks out there, or any other race. You know, a lot of times we’ll be out there by ourselves. It was very interesting to see so many white folks come out and support and address issues. I didn’t have a big problem with it. I dunno, I think it’s good what’s happening in those white communities, right, like, that they are showing up.

Racism wasn’t even a topic growing up. So everyone was like, “Racism doesn’t exist, it’s gone.” I grew up thinking that.

Barb Campbell, 56
Bend, Oregon

Our city is, boy, around 89 percent white. And then most of the people of color are Latinx people, not Black people. And so I found it heartening that so many people came out in support of the Black Lives Matter movement, right in our city. And this is kind of what I hear from people who write to me on the city council—it came up in the last election—you know, there certainly are people who believe our city should stay tranquil and not involve ourselves with problems that are across the country or something. And I disagree. My opponent in the last campaign said she just didn’t think it was appropriate for an elected official.

Glen Ray, Sr., 68
Anniston, Alabama

We had a young lady that spoke that day [at the Anniston protest] that wasn’t so nice but I gave her the opportunity because everybody needs to speak their mind. She was crying and she was saying “white this” and “white folks this” and “white folks that.” I can understand how she’s feeling, but when I got the mic back from her, I told them, “If you come to the table everybody needs to be fed.”

And I said, “She spoke her mind and so I’m not gonna hold her accountable of her speaking her mind, but she needs to understand that when you go to another person’s house you respect that house. And so you don’t do the thing that you are telling white people… because all white people are not bad. And so right now you’re doing the same thing that white people have been doing to us for years. So what’s the difference? You looking out and you calling all these people around here racist—you don’t even know these people.” But you know, I can understand her being upset and crying. And Black Lives Matter, they brought their signs and stuff. And that was good. That was a good thing because people need to know how people feel. But I just try to do people fair. Just do what’s right.

It got quiet as a church mouse when she was talking about them. And the way she was doing she put all of them in the same basket. And what I’m saying to myself is, “You doing to them what they have done to us all our lives.” I came up with white-only signs at service stations. We only serve whites, and all of these things. And so I’ve been fighting injustice all my life. One of the reasons I’ve been fighting is because no one is to be juried by the color of their skin, or the race they are born in.

Justin Williams, 37
Baltimore

I played football in college. But I had teammates of all races and that’s really been evidence for me about how things can change because there’s people there, white guys, conservative, but by no means racist. And who probably voted for Trump. And I don’t believe they have any racial animus, but they didn’t see or didn’t really believe the claims people were making about Trump’s statements being outrageous and racially loaded. And despite that, after the Floyd video, I got a call from one of my teammates. I hadn’t talked to him in a couple years, and he was like, “Hey, man, just wanna talk through some things about something that happened in like 2006.” And I was like, “Something happened?” I didn’t even remember it at all. But he was like, “It was at a house party and someone said something or accused you of something. And I just want to say I’m sorry I didn’t speak up.” I thought to myself, “Wow, that’s really impactful.” That solidified for me that some people who I wouldn’t have otherwise expected are listening and open to thinking about things differently and that’s why I’ve been pushing to get people to use that openness to start teaching and start talking about what’s going on instead of just wasting the opportunity by just leveling, like, blanket accusations of racism, “that’s racist” statements—really dig into like, “Okay, well, let’s get into why things are the way they are.” And explain to people that while there may not be racial animus, it connects to something else with a racial history, or it’s a prior legacy of actual overt racism, and that’s why the situation is the way it is today.

Scott Daniel, 25
Chicago

As an upper-middle-class white person, police make my life easier, whether I like it or not. So the world that I think we’re in the process of imagining is one in which I have to work harder in order for the fabric of the society around me to remain intact. I think the world these protests are imagining is one in which everyone is truly better off and everyone feels better deep in themselves, but it’s one in which a lot of people have to work harder. So I’ve been trying to figure out how to practice that, and going out to protest is a very easy ramp onto a practice of work for other people because at the end of the day, it is kind of fun, especially in pandemic when you don’t see other humans in large groups basically anywhere else.

Lydia Bodine, 21
Knoxville, Tennessee

I grew up in Jefferson County, which is about 45 minutes out of here. It’s a small country full of farmland. Racism wasn’t even a topic growing up. So everyone was like, “Racism doesn’t exist, it’s gone.” I grew up thinking that. It was a very white, very conservative town.

There was a lot of passive racism in our church—you know, turning a blind eye. A lot got swept under the rug—people just refusing to acknowledge racism by saying, “It’s not my problem.” And at the time I thought the Christian thing to do was to not confront, or not make a big deal of it, especially as a girl. Even in our youth group, whenever they would say something bad, I didn’t know how to be like, “Hey, that’s not cool to say—what the heck?” One of my friends in a youth group got called a “dog”—like, literally—and I don’t know why I thought that was okay. I knew in my heart it wasn’t right, but I guess I didn’t know it was wrong not to say something.

I didn’t realize how toxic it was until I left. I lived on my own a little bit before going to Berea College in Kentucky. Berea was the first interracial college in the South. It’s a very diverse school and they had a lot of classes about Black history. So it opened my eyes to so much—all this stuff I had never been exposed to or ever thought about. And I had a couple different friends there that would tell me that there are little things that may not seem racist but are still offensive. So I started to have conversations with people and they’d be like, “Hey, that’s not cool.” And I think I realized how much I should have stood up for, and against, in my community—things that I didn’t realize were racist until now. I think that’s what moved me. It made me want to start standing up and speaking.

Koerri Washington, 32
Kenosha, Wisconsin

I actually went and talked to the Kenosha Guard [an armed citizen-militia group] before any protesters got there. Like I said, I’m pretty much cool with everyone. They greeted me, they said hello to me. They told me exactly why they were there. I noticed Kyle Rittenhouse is there. [Rittenhouse, a seventeen-year-old from Antioch, Illinois, shot three protesters in Kenosha that night, killing two of them.] It didn’t seem like he was with anybody. He looked young. He had gloves on, which is weird, kind of, because no one else was wearing plastic gloves. Maybe it’s COVID but, you know, it was kind of weird. He was chain-smoking and stuff. So he definitely stood out in the crowd of them. Also, he didn’t really seem to be with anyone. He was, like, taking orders from people but he wasn’t necessarily—it didn’t seem like he was with anyone. So yeah, it was weird. I filmed pretty much everything that led up to the shooting. He ran by me. I noticed him running away or running by with no one chasing him, which was sketchy to me. So, like ten seconds after he ran by me, I went in the direction that he went in. And not two to three minutes later there was gunfire that was going off. It sounded like a shoot-out. Everybody ran away. Everybody was yelling. People were scared for their lives. I mean, I’m pretty sure—I’m almost 100 percent sure I filmed someone dumping a gun in a bush. So yeah, it was a very, very, very crazy situation that happened.

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COPS

Greg Edwards, 31
Bangor, Maine

During the speeches outside the public library, they were talking at the bottom of the hill and people were standing on the top, going up the hill. And at the very top there was a very menacing kid in a patriotic clown mask with an assault rifle watching over us for like 35 minutes. We’re in an open-carry state so he was technically not doing anything wrong. Except the Bangor PD was there, having a conversation with him the whole time, like within five feet of him the whole time, which is good. I mean, we were at an event disparaging—not disparaging but, like, calling for major reforms and calling for the defunding of the police—but then also because of America, I’m glad somebody with authority is standing there to protect us from some menacing white kid with an oversized gun.

Djuan Wash, 36
Waukegan, Illinois

They were targeting Porche [a fellow organizer in Kenosha], at one point, and they sent two plants to her front yard. I told her not to engage with them because I knew that it was a setup. Prior to me pulling up on scene, thirteen cars full of Trump’s secret police hopped out of their cars to harass her. And later that night, they were watching where we were staging at, and because the curfew was in effect, we wanted to make sure that Porche was safe. And not even five minutes after I left, I was pulled over, snatched out of the car. I was trying to call someone to notify them what was going on. And they kept yelling, “Stop resisting, stop resisting, stop resisting”—even though I was literally just standing there. They had three people that had their hands on my arms. So I mean, I wasn’t resisting, I was literally laughing at them. And just, you know, explaining how fucking ridiculous—excuse my French—just how ridiculous this entire situation was. Sat on the curb. And one of the federal marshals told me, you know, “This is what it looks like when the federal government shows up to help.” None of them would tell me who was in charge of the scene, whether it was the local people or the federal government. One of the local cops called me an asshole. Because I was explaining to them—you know, I said, “You guys must not love the Constitution like y’all claim y’all do.”

Tristan Taylor, 37
Detroit

I remember going down to check on the situation and having this police officer… I was with a friend who was white, who I’ve known for years, who lives in a nearby city. There was a white police officer that said to us, “Get the fuck over there. Don’t come this way.” We were like, “Okay.” And he said to my friend, “What are you doing here, white boy? You don’t even live here.” And I said to him, “Oh, because you live here?” Because over 70 percent of the police department in Detroit live outside the city.

Then I said some smart-aleck remark, and he says, “Why are you walking away?” I was like, “’Cause you told us to.” And he’s like, “Yeah but you’re talking shit while you’re walking away.” And he started talking about my shoes. He says they’re like the shoes that a third-grader would wear. And I thought, “Wow. Isn’t it interesting that this police officer is, in reality, trying to get me to react.” And being so personally vile and petty, and of course, as he’s having this exchange with me, I see police in riot gear. And one officer in particular is using the baton and hitting his shield and hitting his helmet. And they just looked like they were ready for the battle. And I was like, “Oh, okay. So these police, they mean to do damage.”

Sometimes people are asking for protection, but we have been sold the idea that protection is synonymous with the police.

Sylvie Thode, 21
New York City

As a white woman, I’ll never quite understand how it feels to walk in the street and be immediately afraid of a police officer when you see them. That’s not the experience I had growing up. When I was first taking the subway alone my parents would always say, “If you feel unsafe, find a police officer.” And that’s just not the experience of so many other New Yorkers, so many other Americans. I think that being in the streets with so many people from so many different walks of life, all mobilizing for this cause, it’s really brought it all home for me. I understand anger, I understand rioting, I understand the reasons for looting because I was in an altercation with the police and felt unsafe, and heard of my mother being assaulted by a police officer. I’ll never forget that moment of seeing her and just seeing the total fear on her face. It was horrifying. The experience protesting, the experience of being involved, it broadened my—it gave me experience to back up sort of what I already believed, if that makes sense.

Nekima Levy Armstrong, 44
Minneapolis

The way that I look at this is: How do the frontline activists who have consistently been in this movement, who have consistently been out on the front lines, view this issue? And all of us are pushing for systemic change and reforms. One of the groups that we organize with is Communities United Against Police Brutality. They developed a list of 44 reforms in Minneapolis and across the state that would help to shift the culture of policing and the dynamics—we signed on to that through the Racial Justice Network, along with several of the other organizations that we organized with, including BLM Minnesota and BLM Twin Cities. So we’re all in agreement about those 44 reforms that we want to see happen.

So there’s that activist community. There’s also some organizers who have been working with city council, who are not necessarily a part of these groups that I mentioned, and that’s who the city council has aligned themselves with.

And then there is the traditional Black community, who are not typically activists out on the front lines, who may join a protest every now and then, but who are focused on: How do we keep our community safe? Because they understand the realities of police violence, as well as community violence. And just to give an example, in the weeks following the city council statement in Powderhorn Park [where, on June 7th, nine members of the Minneapolis City Council took a pledge to abolish the police], we’ve seen a significant surge in shootings in the community—at least a hundred shootings since then—that has far outpaced the level of crime that happened this time last year. And I believe that some of this is related to city council making these irresponsible public statements without considering the intended and unintended consequences, without exercising due diligence and without asking the Black community what we actually want to see.

So we can’t take a pie-in-the-sky approach and go from zero to one hundred, and not think about the implications to the community. People want to feel safe. They don’t want violent police officers showing up at their door. They also don’t want bullets whizzing by, you know, from people having a feud and then feeling like nobody is going to come and do anything about it. So I tend to side with the traditional Black community, even though I’m an activist, because I live in the heart of the Black community and I see the issues that are going on. And I also live in the real world, in terms of knowing that you have to find ways to strike a balance so that people feel protected.

[Weeks after the event in Powderhorn Park, the Minneapolis City Council passed a provision that would ask voters to remove the police department from the city’s charter. In September, in the face of considerable public resistance, the Minneapolis Charter Commission chose not to pass the councilors’ amendment, calling instead for further study.]

I tend to side with the traditional Black community, even though I’m an activist, because I live in the heart of the Black community and I see the issues that are going on.

Justin Williams, 37
Baltimore

Something the younger activists of all races are missing is that the people who were in the city through the Seventies and Eighties and Nineties saw the worst of crime. And they are scared about going back to that. In my zoning and land-use work, I go to a lot of community meetings in areas that, to be fair, I wouldn’t otherwise go to if I didn’t have clients needing to share their plans for development projects. Almost always, the community associations in places like West Baltimore skew elderly and are run by little old churchgoing African American ladies who care deeply about their community. Most meetings start off with a prayer and then a report from a police representative. And if they had their druthers, the community members would have police on every corner, surveilling everything. Because they don’t like the crime and they don’t want “those people” out there.

The city council took up the annual police budget right as protesters nationally, and in Baltimore, were calling for less funding for police. Something like nine of the fifteen members of the city council are Black, but it was a white council member who proposed an amendment during the budget hearing to completely defund BPD’s Drug Enforcement Section. His amendment failed six-to-nine, ironically with the council member representing the city’s whitest district by population voting for it, and the council member representing the city’s Blackest district joining the majority to vote the amendment down. My sense is that it got voted down because the people in the community who vote early—the little old ladies—you know, they want police to take action.

Maya Pendleton, 27
Washington, D.C.

I see this division within my own family. It’s complicated. On one end of it, a big, big part of it is that Black people see significant amounts of violence in their lives, whether that is state violence, whether that is the violence of poverty and all that comes with that. A Black community might say, “Our communities are hurting, we need help.” But the only demand that has really been listened to was like, “Okay, more police,” right? But there were all these other social factors that people were like, “No, we need this… we need jobs, you know, we need working wages, we need substance-use help,” we need all of these things.

So I think that we’ve really been told—and when I say we, I’m saying people who live in this country generally—that the police are here to protect us. And Black people aren’t immune to that. And so, I think that sometimes people are asking for protection, but we have been sold the idea that protection is synonymous with the police.

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POLICY AND POLITICS

Nekima Levy Armstrong, 44
Minneapolis

Both the mayor and the city council have done a poor job of managing the crisis that currently exists and the crisis in policing that existed before George Floyd was killed. They have all had ample opportunity to use their political power to help change the structural racism happening within the Minneapolis police department, to have a more rigorous system of discipline, and of accountability and transparency, and they haven’t done it. And so from my perspective, the city council was looking to take the heat off of itself by showing up in Powderhorn Park one day in June, and declaring that they were going to abolish the police, dismantle the police, but they hadn’t done any due diligence, any community engagement, they hadn’t even come to the Black community, which is at higher risk for negative encounters with police as well as community violence. They didn’t do any of that. So it was just very poor governance and poor timing—in the sense of trying to capture headlines to look like you’re going to abolish the police when you don’t even have the political authority to take that kind of action. And those of us who have been out here fighting, we knew then that Minneapolis City Council had not taken any steps to reform the police department. So we didn’t take what they were doing seriously as a solution, because they had missed so many intermediate steps, and so many intermediate decision points, and to try to just engage the public to see what do we want the future of public safety to look like? Not a single city council member has a background in policing or reform or any of that. And when we saw the city council president, Lisa Bender, go on CNN and try to defend her position, it was clear she was not well versed on any of these issues, and couldn’t answer basic questions from Chris Cuomo. And it was embarrassing, quite frankly, to witness that because none of it had to happen.

And then when you look at the description of what they are proposing, a couple things strike me: one, the fact that that new office will be headed by a non-law-enforcement head. That to me is a clear directive to get rid of the first Black chief in the history of the city of Minneapolis, the one who actually had the courage to fire the four officers who killed George Floyd. So they did that on purpose. And I’m thinking, “How would law enforcement be answering to a non-law-enforcement person who’s not trained in any of that?” That would create some very weird dynamics. And then their proposal also calls for some police to still be here. So it’s not abolition of the police. Beyond that, they are also just disseminating power from having the mayor oversee the police department to having city council members and the mayor. So that’s power divided by fourteen people. And this is a group that we’re expecting to get along with each other, to be in agreement about what’s in the best interest of the city, when most of them do not have a strong relationship with the Black community to know what we need, to know what we want. We don’t expect them to make decisions that are in our best interest. If that was going to be the case, they would have done it by now.

Barb Campbell, 56
Bend, Oregon

There’s a group in town that is a newly formed forum around the George Floyd protests, and I saw that on their page, they had a live video going of the ICE action. Some people were standing in front of a couple of ICE buses, trying to keep two buses from leaving the parking lot of a hotel here in Bend. As I was leaving the house, I got a phone call from a local activist saying, “Barb, you know what’s going on? Can you come down here?” I told her I had already heard about it and that I was on my way.

Throughout that day, I was texting our mayor, trying to get her to come down to the protest. [The mayor of Bend, Sally Russell, works on the city council with Barb Campbell.] Telling her that the crowd wants to hear from you, that you’re the mayor that they want you to talk to them, and right now that crowd is relatively friendly, and won’t you come down? She would not. And so, as the afternoon progressed, when there was chanting, it was directed at the mayor and at our new chief of police. There were, I think, maybe chants to get rid of him. But most of the chanting, I remember, was directed at the mayor—chanting, “We want Sally.” Or then, when she refused to come down… a less friendly message to her, shall we say?

The cry to her that I took note of was “Sally, I voted for you! Won’t you come and talk to me?”—which was really the case. Sally really did run for mayor as a progressive, and won with the support of many of the people who were in that crowd. So that sentiment of “We voted for you, we supported you, won’t you at least talk to us?” was a sentiment that I felt myself and I think a lot of people that day also felt.

I believe that it is incumbent upon elected officials to be available to speak to unfriendly crowds. I think we should be brave enough to get up in front of a crowd that might blow up. And I will tell you that I got plenty of heckling myself that day. I had made a couple of comments about my support for our local police force, and our new chief, which the crowd did not want to hear. But I still said it. And let them boo me and after they booed me, I continued on to make my point. I’m afraid that we politicians, you know, get used to friendly crowds. I just think it’s a question of courage. To me, it is a real sign of trouble when elected officials are afraid of citizens. Even if they’re not happy with you, I just really feel like speaking to people is what they deserve. At the very least, we have an obligation to let them know what we’re doing and why we’re doing it, or why we’re not.

Glen Ray, Sr., 68
Anniston, Alabama

Right now I’m fighting to get us a Black mayor. And like I tell the people, you know, as long as Anniston been Anniston, white people have been driving the vehicle. And at our council meetings, even though we have a percentage, we have three whites and two Blacks and we still don’t have a voice. You got all those Black folks but the white man still gotta be in charge. Every now and then I like to be a driver instead of sitting in the backseat. I tell the people it’s time for us to get out and let’s get us a Black mayor in this city. And that’s what we’re gonna try to do. We are moving forward slowly. We’re getting people in place and getting people in position. If you recall, Anniston is in the middle of Atlanta and Birmingham, we sit in the middle of ’em. Atlanta and Birmingham got some Black mayors and they’ve got Blacks in position—we stand here in the middle, and we’re not doing anything. We are still living in the Forties and Fifties and the Sixties.

How can you change when the people that pat you on the back and smile in your face are not changing? Change comes through a generation. You got to allow your kids to get involved and understand each other. This is how we’re going to have to make it. We’re going to have to make it through generation change. But there is a hard pill to swallow here in Anniston, I’m telling you, they don’t want to change.

I believe that it is incumbent upon elected officials to be available to speak to unfriendly crowds… We should be brave enough to get up in front of a crowd that might blow up.

Djuan Wash, 36
Waukegan, Illinois

We’ve been a part of a number of community events in Kenosha over the last month, including working with other groups, and with the Blake family—not only to provide access to food, but also voter registration. In the last election, turnout was very low for the Black community. And so our focus is moving towards making sure that more folks are registered to vote. But not only that, making sure that they’re actually getting involved in the process. Early voting begins October 20th. So we’re working on an event with a certain celebrity to be able to encourage people to get out and vote—really strong GOTV effort, in the days leading up to the election. We’re trying to pull out all the stops to make sure that people understand this is a way, or one of the ways, that you go about getting your voice heard—is getting involved in this process.

Justin Williams, 37
Baltimore

I’m happy, locally, that there’s been some movement with activists and leaders who actually have started articulating specific goals and have had meetings and discussions about policies that can be changed to reform police and then think about other ways of promoting social justice. It does seem like some of the folks who were out there in 2015 protesting Freddie Gray who were just—and rightfully so—expressing anger, without caring or thinking about the next step, now they’ve been thinking through what the next steps are. And so when there’s a beautiful moment coming together, unfortunately, from tragedy, it appears that there is now a critical mass of people who are interested in strategically leveraging the attention into concrete victories.

The big reform effort that’s been discussed locally is the repeal of the Law Enforcement Officers’ Bill of Rights, which is a set of laws that codified workplace protections for police officers. Critics have pointed to it being a big hindrance to investigations of law enforcement and obstructing police accountability by, for example, shielding records of misconduct from public scrutiny, and letting officers wait five days after an incident before being interrogated. One of the state senators leading the push first introduced legislation to reform the law in 2015—prior to Freddie Gray’s death—but it has gained little traction. It’s exciting to see the potential for its passage. Maryland was the first state in the nation to adopt it in the Seventies, which I didn’t realize till reading a recent article about its history. It has since been adopted by fifteen other states.

Maya Pendleton, 27
Washington, D.C.

I know politics. I know policy. I know that defunding is not going to be popular poll-wise—I’m not in some type of fantasy land. But I do think that it could be talked about in a way that is at least not dismissive of this huge contingent of people who are saying that the police are harming us, the police are hurting us. People have been starting to say, “Wait a minute, what causes harm? What are people asking for? What supports are needed in communities?” Also, what is working well in communities that are not able to get funding because it’s not evidence-based or all of the stipulations that come with getting federal funding? People are starting to have those conversations around, how do we trust communities to collect services that they want, but also participate in them without surveillance of programs and police and child welfare and all these other things? So, you know, policy work is slow work [laughs]. So I wouldn’t say I have seen that happen. I would say that I have seen those conversations opened.

Tristan Taylor, 37
Detroit

The eleven demands that we gave to the city are to defund, demilitarize the police, end Project Greenlight and facial recognition. Project Greenlight is a project of a series of cameras located throughout the city that live-feed images to the Detroit Police Department. The third demand was to drop charges and citations received by protesters. The fourth demand was for the Detroit Police Department not to carry out eviction orders. We wanted the city to drop the citations received by Detroiters during the stay-at-home order. The sixth demand was to end “consensual” sex between police officers and those under custody, because that’s actually not against the law. Seven was we want to prosecute and fire any police officer involved in police brutality. The eighth demand was to stop criminalizing homeless people. Number nine was make Detroit a sanctuary city. Number ten was to create an independent office for disabled citizens. And number eleven was to restore and maintain running water for all Detroiters.

We met with the mayor. Basically, it was a meeting to size up where each other was at, let’s just be honest. It was controversial, actually, meeting with the mayor because all of these Detroit voices were like, “Oh, we’re not included.” You know, “How does this group that just formed get to meet with the mayor, and we’re not at the table?” And so the mayor said that to us. They were like, “It seems like you guys are displacing long-term organizations in the city of Detroit.” Which was particularly ridiculous for me, because I have spent the last three years being a vocal critic of displacement in the city of Detroit, going toe-to-toe against the Duggan administration. He clearly knew who I was from those actions. But one of the things I said to him was—I was like, “This is your office, you could have invited whoever you wanted to. But that’s also why we wanted to have a meeting out in the public with the movement.” And he’s like, “Oh, well, I like to let leaders have discussions with their people and work out what issues they want to bring up so that way, we meet, you know, it’s a much easier process.” And I was like, “Well, sometimes democracy is a little messy, Mayor Duggan, and you get paid enough. So I mean, sure, what else are you doing?” So that was, in a nutshell, our exchange. They were like, “Oh, I agree with a lot of these demands. So I’m sure we can drop these charges. But what about some of the outside agitators…”—because that was the theme, of course, across the country.

There was someone from the Department of Neighborhoods who was like, “Yeah, someone was trying to hand me like rocks and stuff to throw at people.” And my response is, “What does that have to do with brutalizing a whole fucking march?” Like, whatever you said some individual did, that has nothing to do with what the police did to the whole fucking march. You have a problem with individuals shooting, you apprehend those individuals, but that doesn’t justify anything. And they were like, “Oh, well, let’s continue this conversation, let’s get into committees.” And long story short, the meeting just showed how determined the administration was to not engage and instead get us to commit to these endless committee meetings. We made clear we weren’t interested in any of that. And [since that meeting,] they’ve been pushing against every single demand.

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HOPE AND PESSIMISM

Glen Ray, Sr., 68
Anniston, Alabama

I was telling people, this year is the year of change. I didn’t know this was gonna happen, but I know that there was some things gonna happen this year because it had been written. But there has to be a sacrifice before a resurrection. Somebody’s got to sacrifice and this is what’s going on right now. That there have been so many Black people getting killed for no just cause, and we all got our children. Just like if the Lord sends Moses down to tell Pharaoh to let my people go, you’re not gonna keep on misusing God’s people. Somebody’s gonna come and tell you to let my people go. It’s time for a change! And I believe in that. I don’t look at Black and white. I’m looking at wrong and right. And I tell people that everybody that marched with Dr. King, you understand, patting him on the back, were talking about him on the corner. You know, he used to come to the city of Anniston when we had a mass meeting. I was very young, and we was going to a mass meeting and, I’m telling you right now, that old church wasn’t full when he came. He didn’t have the name then, they were just strategizing and getting protests together. I used to go down in Montgomery and sleep on the fairgrounds in little carts and stuff, looking up at the stars, to get up and march the next day. But I tell people, I understand that—hey, I’m gonna fight for my people. And I’m damn sure gonna fight for my family. That’s the way I am. And so if you want me to sit down and shut up, do what’s right.

Justin Williams, 37
Baltimore

It has clicked in a way that it hasn’t in the past, where, like, during the Colin Kaepernick protests—I guess that was 2016—the Ravens were talking about getting him and they were sort of talking about it, and they were like, “Oh, I wouldn’t want Colin Kaepernick!” And I explained to people, “Well, he’s protesting police brutality, but like, Orioles fans yell ‘O!’ when they do the national anthem—that, to my mind is more disrespectful of the flag and the national anthem than a silent protest, where he’s kneeling while they’re doing it.” And when my friend was talking about it with me in June, she was like, “I kinda get it now.” She couldn’t conceive that Kaepernick cared and was willing to protest for the people—she thought he was an attention hog. And so I mean, it’s unfortunate she didn’t get it then. But I’m happy she got it now. And so that’s something we can build upon. And I hope we do. And I’m just nervous, even still with the ongoing protests elsewhere across the country, like in Portland, where it seems like it’s just ongoing demonstrations without the message or pedagogy of what the next step is. You have the attention, the media is there, but are you taking advantage of the attention and the provocation and the spectacle by advocating for something and saying what you want?

I’ll put a finer point on it. It seems like some activists don’t care, and even locally, people don’t think about U.S. elections. In 2016, friends of mine who were super far left were like, “Oh, it doesn’t matter if Hillary doesn’t win… and the Supreme Court, the judiciary don’t matter.” I think people aren’t recognizing all the ways that government regulation and policy intertwine. And so I would hope that that’d be the next step for the movement. And maybe even people like myself, who might be more “centrist,” can help do the pedagogy that way too. And say, like, “Well, here’s the impact of what’s going on with the judiciary and the random regulations you don’t think about, because you don’t see it every day.” But there’s a reason there’s more—I saw last week—for example that of the $1 billion in Department of Transportation BUILD grant funding of 50 percent going to rural areas, despite the fact that more than 80 percent of the U.S. population lives in cities, so very little funding is going to mass transit. Which means it’ll be harder for folks in marginalized communities without cars to get to job centers or community colleges. And that’s just one small agency-level policy thing that no one really talks about during campaigns, but multiply that by a million different regulations and agencies, and you see how it really matters who’s in the White House.

Maya Pendleton, 27
Washington, D.C.

When Obama was reelected in 2012—it’s a Georgetown tradition to run to the White House when your candidate gets elected, and so obviously I ran to the White House and we were really excited. And there had been big block parties, very excited, lots of energy. So among friends, among organizers, I actually think that the Obama presidency was a point of political awakening, radicalization. You have to remember that when Obama was in office, it was also when we were out protesting Mike Brown. Right? And so when Baltimore happened, I remember being in D.C. and talking to my roommate and being like, “We should go to Baltimore.” For me, the big shift has been that at first, where I was politically, I was so excited for hope and progress with Obama. And then I saw what the limitations of that were and how deep-rooted this type of state violence is. And just how broad this is, and how it falls outside of the Democrat and Republican parties, I almost feel like it’s a shift that points to a unique sense of radicalization. And being in the city during this time and thinking about what the presidency really means and what it is capable of and what it can deliver. There was also this profound disappointment and point of feeling like this—having a Black president—is not enough for the true safety and liberation of Black people in this country. And Georgetown being super isolated and up on a hill and like, actually getting out in the city, and doing the policy and direct service work that I do in D.C. neighborhoods—and yeah, it’s weird because it is almost like a reality check, to be honest with you. That’s sort of what it felt like. It wasn’t heightened by Trump in the way that people think that it is.

I was telling people, this year is the year of change. I didn’t know this was gonna happen but I know that there was some things gonna happen this year because it had been written.

Louis Moench, 19
Santa Monica, California

When we marched, I personally felt more, what—like, empowered. I felt like, okay, maybe this isn’t really doing anything, but it’s kind of fun. And it’s liberating to just, you know, obtain a street. And I think a lot of other people felt that way. But I do also think that most of them are more idealistic than myself and probably believed in the power of some political moment that happened right then. I’ve never seen people like, with that much energy and commitment to something. So that was a new experience.

Greg Edwards, 31
Bangor, Maine

So, it’s slowing down now; it’s not on everyone’s feeds anymore but, you know, there was a good month or two when just every day there was a new and enraging, enthralling post, or multiple posts, on all these various topics that I maybe didn’t feel that strongly about—or had an ingrained, like, opinion on that wasn’t really based on anything except for something subtle that somebody might have said. Reparations would be one. I don’t know, it just seemed like an unrealistic, expensive thing that would never happen—for no good reason. I don’t know why I ever thought that, but I think the idea of reparations for slavery just didn’t seem like a possible thing. And then I learned more about it and learned that there have been reparations in U.S. history’s past with Japanese Americans, and learning the extent of how bad slavery was for how long. I would be 100 percent in support of reparations now, and that would be an issue that I would bring up with a politician now, whereas before that would not have crossed my mind, ever.

Emily Wolfenbarger, 38
Knoxville, Tennessee

I do think that the protests will at least be a symbolic stance—that’s the very minimum—of an era. I feel like we are making history and we are a part of history, and please God, let this be a pivot point towards the right direction. I think the lasting impact will be how it changes people, who will be in that environment and to put their own eyes on it, to walk those steps with people, to watch the dynamics within that community. The big impact on those protests will be the personal change that will bring transformation.

Josie Stanfield, 28
Prineville, Oregon

I knew that Prineville was like this. That’s why I did it, because it needed it. So I’m really not shocked at how many people came out to counter-protests. I think just I’m shocked that—I thought that once the community saw how many racist and dangerous people lived here that they would push back. But that hasn’t been the result. If anything, they’ve stayed more silent than they were before about it. And so I don’t want to say I’ve lost a little bit of hope for my community. But I think it’s gonna take a lot of meetings with people that are bigger than just the police chief here in town, you know, to get some real systemic change here. There’s a lot of work to be done.

Nekima Levy Armstrong, 44
Minneapolis

There are so many of us who are committed to this fight for the long haul. Whether the world is paying attention or not, we’ll still be out there fighting and still be out there demanding change. So I feel hopeful about that, knowing that we have comrades who are serious about the struggle, knowing that there are folks who are new to the work of this movement who are saying that they want to be involved for the long haul. So we’ll see what their commitment is. Regardless of their commitment, we’re still gonna be out here pushing for change. We’re encouraging people to run for office who care about racial justice, and who have been in this movement. So that might be new, when the elections happen in 2021, to see a surge of folks stepping up to the plate and willing to take on incumbents who have not lived up to their responsibilities on behalf of the city.

I mean, it is promising that the legislature held two special sessions dealing with policing, they did pass a police-reform bill—the first time in history that they have actually taken this issue up in a serious way. Although the bills are watered down and it’s not nearly enough. That is some action that hadn’t happened before. Not to mention the fact that local governments around the country have since taken on police reform and have banned chokeholds and done other things that will hopefully help save people’s lives. So this is a new moment, to some degree, because more people are waking up to the seriousness of this issue. But it shouldn’t have taken this. You know, we saw the uprisings in Ferguson. We’ve seen many people killed since then. Why did it take this, which is reminiscent of a lynching in terms of how George Floyd was treated, for people to actually begin to care or at least to say that they care? That’s very troubling to me. So, I mean, I’m hopeful in the sense that, again, I’m going to keep fighting. There are tons of people who are going to keep fighting until we see change actually take place.

Alsa Bruno, 30
San Francisco

Well, Black Lives Matter was something that was coined in about—what?—2014? And we’re bringing it back now. And now it’s in the news again. What happened in 2018? Why was it not in the news then? I’m sorry for yelling at you. But why was that not the focus? Two years later? So in 2022 will George Floyd Plaza be a cool place to take a selfie? Or will it be a place that is the linchpin, the catalyst, that spot where we find our soul? We see that this window to hell was by our own construction. We need to close it.

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WITH GRATITUDE TO OUR SURVEY PARTICIPANTS

• Ézé Amos is a photojournalist, originally from Nigeria. Since 2008 he has lived and worked in Charlottesville, Virginia. He is an affiliate photographer for the New York Times and Getty Images, who focuses on documenting resistance efforts on the ground.
• Anonymous is an activist and reader who lives in Seattle. He was involved in the protest and mutual-aid work in the Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone.
• Kerstin Arias is an artist, mother and one of the lead organizers of the Central Oregon Diversity Project. She lives in Bend, Oregon.
• Nekima Levy Armstrong is a civil rights attorney and activist. From 2015-16 she served as president of the Minneapolis chapter of the NAACP.
• Lydia Bodine lives in Knoxville, Tennessee. She is currently a student at Berea College.
• Alsa Bruno is an activist and comedian.
• Barb Campbell lives in Bend, Oregon and is a member of the Bend City Council.
• Scott Daniel is a musician who lives in Chicago.
• Greg Edwards is an accountant from Bangor, Maine. He is involved in a number of local social and environmental causes.
• Timothy Findley is the pastor of Kingdom Fellowship Christian Life Center in Louisville, Kentucky, and a founder of the Justice and Freedom Coalition, an organization that works with communities of color and economically disadvantaged communities to defend and advance their social and economic rights.
• James Gabriel is a literary agent based in New York.
• Jerrell Griffin lives in Kenosha, Wisconsin and is one of the founding members of Black Lives Activists of Kenosha (BLAK), a social-justice organization that formed after the shooting of Jacob Blake.
• Barbie Jones runs Youth Matter Chicago, a dance group and community center for kids on the South Side of Chicago.
• Brandon Kilbourne is an evolutionary biologist. He is currently a fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study in Berlin.
• Jason Lopez is a graphic designer and photographer who lives in Kenosha, Wisconsin. He is one of the founding members of BLAK.
• Louis Moench was born and raised in Santa Monica, California. He is a student at Whitman College in Walla Walla, Washington.
• Maya Pendleton is a policy analyst in Washington, D.C. focusing on social policy at the intersection of race and gender.
• Glen Ray, Sr. is the president of the Calhoun County NAACP chapter in Anniston, Alabama.
• Niles Schwartz is a film critic based in Minneapolis, Minnesota. He also works for the Minneapolis Department of Public Health.
• Josie Stanfield is one of the lead organizers of the Central Oregon Diversity Project. She lives in Prineville, Oregon.
• Tristan Taylor is an organizer with Detroit Renter City and one of the founders of Detroit Will Breathe.
• Sylvie Thode grew up in New York City and graduated from Princeton University this spring. She will start grad school next fall.
• Christopher “Mad Dog” Thomas is a dancer, activist and youth mentor based in Chicago.
• Djuan Wash is a national community organizer and civil rights activist currently based in Waukegan, Illinois. He is a founding member of BLAK.
• Koerri Washington is a content producer who lives in Kenosha, Wisconsin. He has been documenting the protests and unrest from the early days of the summer.
• Justin Williams is a land-use attorney who lives in Baltimore, Maryland.
• Emily Wolfenbarger works in systems management, diversity and education training, financial services and marketing. She lives in Knoxville, Tennessee.

INTERVIEWERS

Rachel Wiseman
Jon Baskin
Julia Aizuss
John Palattella
Maddy Crowell

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