Northwest Arkansas Democrat-Gazette
‘BLACK POWER … EXISTS EVERYWHERE’
Nedu Anigbogu’s parents wanted more for their children, and so they immigrated from Nigeria in the 1990s. They raised Nedu and his two older brothers in the San Francisco suburb of El Cerrito.
Today his father is a lawyer and his mother is preparing to take the bar exam. Nedu, now 20, is majoring in cognitive science and plans to work in artificial intelligence.
He recalls his mother taking him and his brothers aside after Trayvon Martin, an African American teen, was fatally shot by a neighborhood watch volunteer in 2012. She warned them people will treat them differently, because of their race.
“At first I felt confusion,” he said. “Then there was sad acceptance.”
Anigbogu wants convictions for the police who killed Floyd, as well as Breonna Taylor, an African American emergency medical technician who was fatally shot by Louisville Metro Police while asleep in her own home.
He wants better police training. He wants to end the legal doctrine of qualified immunity shielding police officers from lawsuits.
The incoming senior at the University of California, Berkeley had signed petitions and donated money to the family of George Floyd, but he felt a duty to protest in person. So on June 3, he joined what would become a 10,000-person march through San Francisco’s Mission District.
Someone gave him a horse to ride, so he did.
“To see a black queen on a horse, a black king on a horse, that you’re showing you are rising above it all and that black power exists, and it exists everywhere,” Anigbogu said.