VOICES OF PROTEST

Crying for change, people speak out across U.S., beyond

They are nurses and doctors, artists, students, construction workers, government employees; black, brown and white; young and old.

Hundreds of thousands of demonstrators have taken to the streets in big cities and tiny towns in every U.S. state — and even around the world — to protest the killing of George Floyd, who died after a police officer pressed his knee into his neck as he pleaded for air.

They say they are protesting police brutality, but also the systematic racism nonwhite Americans have experienced since the country’s birth. Many say they marched so that one day, when their children asked what they did at this historic moment, they will be able to say they stood up for justice despite all risks.

Most say they don’t support the violence, fires and burglaries that consumed some of the demonstrations, but some understand it: these are desperate acts by desperate people who have been screaming for change for generations into a world unwilling to hear them.

Yet suddenly, for a moment at least, everyone seems to be paying attention.

About half of American adults now say police violence against the public is a “very” or “extremely” serious problem, up from about a third as recently as September last year, according to a new poll from The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research. Only about 3 in 10 said the same in July 2015, just a few months after Freddie Gray, a black man, died in police custody in Baltimore.

Some demonstrators describe losing friends and family to police bullets, and what it feels like to fear the very people sworn to protect you. Their white counterparts say they could no longer let their black neighbors carry this burden alone.

Some describe institutional racism as a pandemic as cruel and deadly as the coronavirus. One white nurse from Oregon who traveled to New York City to work in a covid unit saw up close how minorities are dying disproportionately from the disease because of underlying health conditions wrought by generational poverty and lack of health care. So after four days working in the ICU, she spent her day off with protesters in the streets of Brooklyn.

The stories of these protesters, several of them told here, are thundering across the country, forcing a reckoning with racism.

(Courtesy Photo/Colin Boyle) Jahmal Cole, founder of My Block, My Hood, My City, speaks June during a peace march and food giveaway organized by his nonprofit group in Chicago. “I want to make sure we’re protesting by calling our local officials. I want to make sure we’re protesting by going to the school board. There’s other ways to protest,” he told the crowd.