Protests have again erupted across the United States following the Staten Island grand jury’s decision not to indict Daniel Pantaleo for the choking and killing of Eric Garner. Building off the online mobilizing network established in response to Ferguson, the most recent wave of community actions have gathered support via social media. After events are posted on Facebook or Tumblr, or simply spread through word of mouth, Twitter hashtags provide real-time updates that direct potential supporters to the location of a march.
In Washington, D.C., protests began outside the Department of Justice at 4:00 p.m. and continued throughout the city late into the night — through the National Mall, near the White House, the D.C. police department, and city hall. Comprising many races and many ages, crowds chanted phrases like, “Black lives matter” and “This is what democracy looks like.” One black mother, Shantelle, who was pushing her toddler in a stroller, explained why she was out marching today:
“We’re proud to be American. We’re military. We love our country. But we keep getting it, my son is gonna’ keep getting it. We’re not valued and we’re not looked at. I want him to grow up in a place where he doesn’t have to worry he wore the wrong hoodie, or he was playing with a toy gun, or he gets a chokehold, and dies.”
Another, older woman simply said, “I’m old. I hate that I have to be out here. I’m sick of doin’ the same old stuff.”
Cancelling Christmas?
During the Christmas season, such marches, which are often laced with lament and anger, painfully clash with ongoing sentimental cheer. As protesters staged a die-in on the national mall, silently lying down in the streets for four-and-a-half minutes to remember the four-and-a-half hours Michael Brown laid dead in the streets, Michael Bublé-esque Christmas ballads eerily echoed in the distance as the Obamas lit the White House Christmas tree.
As the front line of a crowd marched down Pennsylvania Avenue, a few began chants aimed at the holiday season, shouting, “Cancel Christmas! Cancel Christmas!” Veronica Jones, a protester who had participated in these chants, shared that her perspective actually emerged from her Christian faith:
“If Eric Garner, Michael Brown, and Tamir Rice can’t get a Christmas because someone unjustly took their life, how can we as Christians celebrate Christmas at this time? … Jesus told us to love thy brother. Jesus said that the two most important commandments that he gave us, that God gave us, was to first of all love God above everything else and secondly to love our brothers more than anything else. So how dare we as Christians celebrate the birth of our Christ, the birth of our leader, the birth of our savior, if we cannot help and stand together and save our fellow brother? If we cannot do what he told us to do, how dare we celebrate what he told us to do?”
Protesters Confront Officers
When organizers tried to take the march to the White House Tree Lighting Ceremony, police blocked the way, though they had accommodated the path of the crowd everywhere else. Protesters quickly came into close contact with officers, who remained stoic and disinterested in the crowd.
Some complained that the police should listen to them, since their tax dollars paid their wages. Others continued to chant, “No justice, no peace, no racist police!” One woman desperately tried to get an officer’s attention, begging him to let the protest through. Clearly startled by her persistence, the officer looked from side to side, trying to maintain composure. Eventually she turned to the crowd and shouted, “They can’t even look at us.” Turning back to him, she pleaded, “I’m a distressed woman and you can’t even look at me?”
‘This is not a protest – this is an uprising’
Later in the evening, another action, this time organized by a local media organization called We Act Radio, gathered in front of the Washington, D.C., police department. After marching to city hall, lead organizers took to bullhorns to communicate their demands.
“This is not a protest – this is an uprising,” one speaker declared. “We have to be prepared for the long haul. We want radical police reform.” He delineated their demands as follows:
“First, we want a legitimate citizen review board with the power to indict police officers.”
“Second, we want a significant percentage of police to actually look like the neighborhood they serve.”
“Third, any officer who has killed an unarmed person who is innocent should be automatically fired.”
These demands for justice were equaled by justice in the process of the protest, as the organizers publicly recognized the varying physical abilities of those marching. Bringing a “blind brother” to the front of the protest, the crowd remained unified philosophically and physically as they moved down the street at his pace.
Whites, Blacks Clash as Protesters Stop Traffic
Although the Washington, D.C., police often preemptively clear traffic to make way for unregistered marches, one crowd’s surprise turn brought some protesters into conflict with drivers.
After the crowd took over an intersection during rush hour, one white woman, with tears forming in her eyes, stepped out of her car and cried out, “I need to pick up my daughter. I need to pick up my kids! This is not the way to do it.”
Black protesters blocking her way responded simply, crying back, “Our babies are dying! Our boys are dying.” They continued to stand in the path of traffic.
Such tense interracial relations reveal the dramatic disparities in perceptions of racial injustice. For white people more removed from the death of black teenagers, it makes very little sense how blocking traffic can effect positive change. They think, how might delaying one mother from picking up her daughters, perhaps leaving them alone in the cold, make our justice system more just?
Yet, black people in the United States who see their sisters and brothers, sons and daughters, mothers and fathers, abused by police every day without recognition are desperate to make their voice heard. For them, the first step to making systems change is making people listen, which, unfortunately can only happen if they physically stop business as usual.
What Will Be Their Legacy?
As protesters marched through the National Mall, it wasn’t only the existing monuments that harkened back to the March on Washington. Even unfinished museums evoked a sense of history being born. Gazing up at the soon-to-be National Museum of African American History and Culture, one woman wondered aloud, “I wonder if this … is gonna’ be in the museum some day.”
Like Emmet Till, Michael Brown and Eric Garner will surely be mentioned in that museum some day. But unlike Emmet Till, whose murder galvanized a budding civil rights movement that made concrete changes to white supremacist political structures, it remains to be seen whether Michael Brown and Eric Garner will inspire similar structural change.
Ryan Stewart is Online Assistant for Sojourners.
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