Skip to main content
Read page text
page 30
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 29
page 31
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. 30

Page Text

View plaintext

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.

30

read next page

My Bookmarks

Buy this Book
Skip to main content