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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. 35

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 36

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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.

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