Say Their Names

by Curtis Bunn

  “That’s the only thing I can assume…even though we do know that since then many people who have been affiliated with those groups [were] arrested.”

  The harsh reality is that there will be another Minneapolis—many of them, if history continues to repeat itself. In 1967, two years after the Watts riots, a Black cabdriver in Newark, New Jersey, was stopped for a minor traffic violation and beaten badly by two white police officers.

  The news of the Newark incident spread quickly, and a crowd formed at the police headquarters where the injured driver was held. Protesters, exhausted from police misconduct and more, expressed their discontent by hurling rocks at police station windows.

  The next two days were turbulent. New Jersey governor Richard Hughes called in the National Guard. The violence escalated, with twenty-six people dead and many Black people injured in the streets.

  Then, two weeks after the Newark unrest of 1967, police raided an after-hours club in Detroit, where a welcome-home party was being held for two Black Vietnam War veterans. Police busted up the celebration and arrested eighty-two African Americans who were in the club.

  The arrests lit the bomb within the Black community that had been waiting to go off. After five days of the disorder, thirty-three Black people were dead, 7,000 people were arrested, and more than 1,000 buildings were burned. This incident is considered to be one of the inspirations for the creation of the Black Panther movement.

  Police brutality was the spark in these moments, but the true causes were the boiling resentment behind racism in general and in particular unemployment, poverty, segregation, inferior education, and other systemic issues of oppression.

  Three months before the Detroit and Newark uprisings of 1967, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. foreshadowed what was to come in a speech he delivered at Stanford University called “The Other America.”

  In it, Dr. King said: “All of our cities are potentially powder kegs…But in the final analysis, a riot is the language of the unheard. And what is it that America has failed to hear? It has failed to hear that the plight of the Negro poor has worsened over the last few years. It has failed to hear that the promises of freedom and justice have not been met. And it has failed to hear that large segments of white society are more concerned about tranquility and the status quo than about justice, equality, and humanity…And as long as America postpones justice, we stand in the position of having these recurrences of violence and riots over and over again.”

  More than five decades later, Dr. King’s words continue to ring true in America.

  A week after the protests in Minneapolis began in 2020, Jenkins returned to her home in the neighborhood where she had lived since 1999, uncertain of what to expect after daily demonstrations mixed with nightly unrest that were pervasive in New York, Atlanta, Chicago, Los Angeles, Buffalo, and countless other cities across the country, as law enforcement maintained an aggressive posture against the protesters’ determination to be heard.

  “During the day it seemed like just regular old, beautiful, bucolic Minneapolis,” she said. “Summer was coming. The grass was turning green. People were walking their dogs. It’s your regular old neighborhood. But during those first few weeks, still people were on edge, and at night mostly people were on edge because there were these huge firecrackers. It kind of started slowing down after the Fourth of July. But for Juneteenth, the fireworks were mixed with gunshots.

  “It was unnerving. The fireworks were more rapid. They had a certain cadence. And then the gunshots were louder and had their own particular sort of rhythm.”

  In addition, the demonstrations occurred during the coronavirus pandemic, which sent the message that the cause was worth defying the stay-at-home orders that were in place.

  The perpetual concern during the marches centered on following—or not following—Centers for Disease Control guidelines on wearing masks and maintaining six feet of social distancing. Many demonstrators wore masks; some did not. Maintaining social distance was difficult as the gatherings grew in size. But it was the same for law enforcement, although it was not noted nearly as much. They lined up in riot gear, presenting a show of force—but masks were absent, and social distancing did not exist.

  Dr. Enid Neptune, a Black pulmonologist at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, said she watched the protests with equal parts pride and uneasiness. “As a physician I had a heightened degree of concern. The demonstrations were overly populated with African Americans. But that concern is balanced against the need to protest…The Black body is being devalued, so the protesters are protesting on merit, despite a pandemic.

  “This is about people having to make these decisions in this [racially divided] climate and what they hope to gain from the protests being more important than the need to employ every possible strategy to block the risk of COVID transmission. That’s a very personal choice [to march] and it’s not a choice that anyone can make for anyone else.”

  Dr. Pierre Vigilance, founder and principal at HealthUp Strategic Advisors and associate dean of public health practice at George Washington University, noted that the purpose of the movement was so powerful that any critique of following COVID-19 protocols rang hollow.

  “I often heard of these comparisons of the protests versus the mass [social] gatherings, how they are all the same,” Vigilance said. “Those are inappropriate. The point of the protests was to speak out on wrongdoings. That was valid. And many of the images showed people wearing masks.

  “The point of these other [social] gatherings, like in the Ozarks, was to socialize. So, if we’re going to talk about the protests and their impact on this pandemic, they also need to be talking about the mass gatherings of [white] people who are socializing not wearing masks or social distancing.”

  There was another, deeper reason, Neptune said, that Black people often did not wear masks as they demonstrated.

  “One aspect of police-involved events that target African American men is the subtext that these persons are not seen, not recognized as people of value,” she said. “The ability to show one’s face is a way of saying, ‘This is what I look like, and I matter.’ So, a mask can attenuate that assertion of individuality and importance and ‘This is who I am.’ That part of the protests has been underexamined.”

  Interestingly to Jenkins, as the summer moved on, she could look out of her window and see normalcy. “Fall came. The leaves were turning red,” she said. “I live right across the street from the park. Kids played soccer. They’ve got their dogs running loose, getting exercise. There was a church service. It was like the regular neighborhood.

  “That area became known as George Floyd Square. It’s barricaded off. But for all of the burning and looting and then fires and all of these things, the intersection at 38th and Chicago? No destruction.

  “You would have suspected that maybe Cup Foods may have been burned out. That’s what happened in many other cities, like Atlanta.” (The Wendy’s was set ablaze where unarmed Black man Rayshard Brooks was shot twice, once in the back and once in the buttocks, by an Atlanta police officer. He died in the hospital. A white woman was arrested for arson in that case.)

  “In Ferguson, when Michael Brown got killed, they burned down the [store] that he went to [where the worker had called the police]. But Cup Foods remained completely untouched by the destruction and the looting, which is very, very interesting because 38th and Chicago has historically been kind of gang territory. For decades, the Bloods.”

  Jenkins also found the racial makeup of the demonstrators interesting. Black people led the rallies. The communities participating were comprised of multiple ethnic groups, including Latino and Somalian. But “the protesters were overwhelmingly white,” Jenkins said. “Young white males were very visible early on. It was remarkable in the sense of people were talking about it—the news media and the elected officials.”

  The predominant number of white demonstrators in Minnesota was unique compared to most BLM protests around the country, es
pecially in the cities where a Black life was taken. But that show of support spoke to the horrific nature of Floyd’s death, and the outrage crossed racial differences. The civil disobedience in the 1960s had some participation from non-Blacks, but the demographic was predominately brothers and sisters exalting their pain and anguish on a social order that limited their growth. So they pushed back with little consideration for property—or consequences.

  In the case of Minneapolis, Jenkins said the site of the tragedy became a “sacred place” and a rally point.

  “George Floyd Square was like ground zero,” Jenkins said. “So, either people would start their march somewhere else and end up at 38th and Chicago. Or they would gather at 38th and Chicago and march to the capital or march to the precinct or march to City Hall.”

  There was not much discussion on television about the priority placed on the location where Floyd was killed.

  “There’s sort of an eight-block [area], for lack of a better term—protesters or advocates get mad when I use this language—an autonomous zone. The general public [was] monitored and controlled on who and when people can enter by these self-proclaimed George Floyd Square protector residents. They’re completely disassociated from any governmental or law enforcement agencies, and their distrust and their disgust to those very agencies [was strong]. People have come to ‘Hold down this space until they get justice.’”

  The barricade stopped the traffic flow on one of the state’s busiest thoroughfares, Route 5, which runs through six different communities: Bloomington, Richfield, Minneapolis, Golden Valley, and Brooklyn Center, and extends to the Mall of America and the nearby airport.

  Emergency vehicles could not get through George Floyd Square. And law enforcement exploited this as an opportunity to “take a break from enforcing the law, meaning citizens who needed protection often did not get any,” Jenkins said. She added that law enforcement’s lack of policing was in retaliation to the call to defund the police.

  “Right,” Agnew said. “The people paid to protect the citizens didn’t want to do their jobs because they were mad. That about sums it up. And it’s disgusting.”

  Indeed, the feel of law enforcement—in riot gear and with weapons drawn—treating protesters as terrorists reigned. The National Guard was called in, presenting another intimidating presence.

  “It wasn’t a comfortable feeling being there, exercising our right to protest and have the cops looking like they were ready to attack,” Samar Moseley said. “And because they’ve shot us before, I definitely had the feeling that it could happen again. Why did they have guns out? Why dressed like something’s about to go down? We came in peace. We got treated like the bad guys.”

  There was no official Black Lives Matter chapter in Minneapolis, which was the epicenter of the national unrest. There were BLM protesters there in its name and BLM representatives there, but the movements were not Black Lives Matter–organized.

  Rather, BLM spawned other organizations in Minnesota with similar ambitions that were key players in the 2020 demonstrations. There was Black Visions Collective, an organization that describes itself as “dedicated to Black liberation and to collective liberation, we need a radical and ongoing investment in our own healing. By claiming love for our own bodies, our own psyches, our own experiences, and by building the resources we need to integrate healing justice into all that we do, we are insisting on conditions that can carry us towards the next generation of work, and towards a deeper place of freedom for all of us.”

  Based in the Twin Cities, BVC says it “has been putting into practice the lessons learned from organizations before us in order to shape a political home for Black people across Minnesota.” BVC took the lead in most of the marches after Floyd’s death.

  There was also Reclaim the Block, a grassroots organization founded in 2018. It “organizes Minneapolis community and city council members to move money from the police department into other areas of the city’s budget that truly promote health and safety.”

  The Reverend Al Sharpton visited Minneapolis in the early days of the protests. His appeals to turn down the volume of the demonstrations were unwelcome. People needed to voice their anger and pain.

  “Ultimately, I think many people around the country who are ‘abolitionists’ and Black Lives Matter members…see it as the start of a process, not the end,” Jenkins said.

  In Watts, Detroit, and Newark, while they rebuilt, the remnants of the civil unrest persist in a number of ways: police violence against Black people continues there; quality jobs are not plentiful; food deserts exist; public education is subpar. And on and on.

  “What I would hope that we could trace back to these protests is that we have rebuilt our city on a foundation of sustainability and equal opportunities for everybody,” Jenkins said. “And I hope that for the entire country, I hope that through these protests we can see universal health care in our society, that we can see universal basic income in our society. We have a real huge problem of income inequality. And I believe that that is the main reason why you have millions of people in the street marching and protesting, George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Ahmaud Arbery are just the sparks that lit this flame.

  “But people are angry about the blatant runaway capitalism that has created a caste system in this country. People are tired of it. So, I hope we see a more equitable society in terms of income, in terms of access to home ownership, education, and to safe health care. And that is what I think these protests are getting at. And I hope that in the end, we will see those things as a response.”

  The Shift in Public Consciousness

  Long-distance freight driver Ed Hughes remembers—said he will not forget, in fact—the day a white woman approached him and his wife, Leigh, at a restaurant in northern Virginia. She served them dinner and had grown comfortable enough over their experience to share what Ed Hughes considered deep feelings of guilt.

  “She said, ‘I understand the battle and I just want to know what I can do differently and what I can say.’ I was touched by that,” Hughes said. “She could have kept that to herself. The fact that she didn’t made me believe she was sincere. She was in her twenties from Louisiana. That was an outstanding moment, considering the climate of the country.”

  Hughes answered her simply, “Treat everyone like you treated us.”

  He said: “That’s all that was needed to be said. She was wonderful to us, very nice and personable. My point was we need more of that.”

  The server’s comments to the Hugheses represented a shift in public consciousness that was palpable in 2020. The turmoil Black people lived with daily—and had been living with all along—came to the forefront in the aftermath of the callous nature of George Floyd’s killing in Minneapolis. Emotions of anyone with a tinge of empathy spilled over from seeing a man killed as he begged for his life.

  Ten days after Floyd’s murder, Marcy Sampson drove to Atlanta from Bessemer, Alabama, with two friends, a trio of young white women who said they felt compelled to be counted among those who agreed that the racial tide needed to be turned.

  “We all are people, all should be treated like humans,” Sampson said.

  She admitted that the devastating image of Floyd dying under a police officer’s knee was so heart-wrenching that she, for the first time in her life, gave serious consideration to the disparities she had heard African Americans share.

  “I don’t know. I mean, I thought I understood where Black Lives Matter was coming from. I thought I understood that there were biases in America,” she said. “But that…the way George Floyd died, as if his life didn’t matter…and worse, the officer seemed to know nothing would happen to him. It broke my heart.

  “And as a person living in the world, white, Black, or otherwise, we can’t just sit back; I couldn’t just sit back. When I saw that, I got it that something is really wrong. All this time, I…I guess I didn’t understand.”

  Sampson held a sign that read: “Black Lives Matter.” Her friend
s’ signs read: “No Justice, No Peace” and “Stop the Killing of Innocent PEOPLE.”

  They were a microcosm of the paradigm shift of public sentiment that emerged from Floyd’s death.

  “You can’t do that to people. Period,” J. Lee Young, a white man from Cummings, Georgia, north of Atlanta, said. Like Sampson, he said that before this year he did not believe racism was a prominent force in America.

  “I know there is racism in the world,” he said. “But that was what you call a watershed moment for me, seeing that man die like that for no reason. White people have to take a stand, too. I feel a sense of guilt for not understanding before now. If we don’t take a stand, we are wrong. And we shouldn’t be wrong on this issue.”

  The guilt manifested itself in other ways beyond protest participation. On social media, thousands of posts surfaced by non-Black people determined to share that they’d had a revelation about race in the United States. Books on anti-racism became bestsellers. “Black Lives Matter” signs appeared in front lawns of white homes and businesses.

  “And I had a white co-worker come to me and apologize,” Diana Wright, a pharmaceutical sales representative in suburban Chicago, said. “I said, ‘For what?’ She said, ‘For what’s happened to your people—the past and now. I’m ashamed.’ I was shocked. But when I told my friends about it, more than one of them said they had a similar situation happen to them.”

  Gentrifying the demonstrations ran its course, though, with some Black protesters, who believed many whites participated on the condition that they lead the marches. They respected and appreciated their support, but they insisted on leading.

  “It’s our turn to lead our own fight, to frame our own conversations,” Benjamin O’Keefe, a Black political organizer in Brooklyn, said. “We exist in a white supremacy culture in which even people who want to do good do not necessarily want to be led by a Black person.”

  Black leaders were more interested in how white Americans—inspired by brutality of white officers on Black people—would integrate anti-racism into their lifestyles, and not just when the country was mired in unrest.