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.

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

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