In Breonna Taylor’s name: Devastation, search for hope
LOUISVILLE, KY. >> C hea Woolfolk searched the crowd until she found the face of the woman she’d come to regard as a second mother. And then she watched the tears roll down Rose Henderson’s cheeks.
L ook ing into Mama Rose’s eyes, Woolfolk could see that her heart was breaking.
This formidable woman looked off balance, like she might topple. Mama Rose has been the matriarch of “Injustice Square,” a block downtown that protesters, many of them Black women, have occupied for 120 days.
They have been tear gassed by police together, arrested, threatened online, shot with pepper bullets. They lost jobs and friends and homes to show up every day because they had hope: that there would be justice for Breonna Taylor, the 26-year- old emergency medical technician shot and killed by police when they burst into her house in the middle of the night in a botched raid. And that in pursuing justice for Taylor, America would signal that their lives and the lives of other Black women have value.
Now they were standing in the square, listening together as the Commonwealth of Kentucky announced no charges would be filed against officers for Taylor’s death.
“That broke me,” Mama Rose cried, and that agony rippled across the country, as protesters took to the streets for days to say Taylor’s name, and to display rage, despair, powerlessness, exhaustion.
“It was like sitting at a funeral, it was a collective feeling like someone died,
and everyone was grieving,” said Woolfolk, a 45-year-old radio personality who documented the movement from its early days.
She didn’t expect then that she would be back every day for four months, and that she would come to refer to the protesters as “us.” That she’d be enveloped in what would become a family.
“It was probably one of the heaviest moments I’ve ever felt in my life,” Woolfolk said.
Beyond Louisville, the de c i sion r e verb er at e d widely across Black America. For months, Taylor’s name has been a rallying cry for activists who hoped Black women and their deaths at the hands of police would finally receive the same attention given to cases concerning the extrajudicial killing of Black men.
And to some degree, that has happened. Famed musicians, actors, athletes and politicians said her name and called for the arrests of the officers involved in the raid that killed Taylor.
Then, on Wednesday, the grand jury decision came down to charge one officer with three counts of wanton endangerment for fir
ing wildly into the apartment building. But the charges were for endangering Taylor’s neighbors. No one was charged in connection with Taylor’s death.
There followed the kind of coast-to- coast protests not seen since the start of summer, along with a rising sense of doom and despair.
On social media, some noted that the decision came 65 years to the day after an all-white jury acquitted white men of murdering Emmett Till, a Black teen from Chicago who was lynched in Mississippi in 1955 after he was said to have whistled at a white woman.
“I am completely mortified that our criminal justice system has failed Breonna Taylor, her family and friends, and frankly, it has failed our country,” said Patrisse Cullors, co- creator of Black Lives Matter and executive director of its network of BLM chapters.
The grand jury’s decision was “just another reminder of how the system doesn’t value Black life,” said Zellie Thomas, a BLM organizer in Paterson, New Jersey, who led a vigil Thursday night, in the aftermath of the announcement.