Voices of protest
One was moved to activism in 2006, when Louisiana prosecutors tried to make six black teenage boys face 100 years in prison for what amounted to a school fight. Another has been a fixture in Memphis' fight to remove Confederate monuments from its parks, while another is worried about the mental and emotional health of black people who continue to see police kill black people.
Those are the varied reasons behind
why these people decided to pool their outrage and worries into daily processions on Memphis’ streets.
Hence, a look at some of the activists who are ensuring that what happened to George Floyd, a black Minneapolis man who died on May 25 when Derek Chauvin, a white police officer, knelt on his neck for nearly 9 minutes, isn’t soon forgotten.
Theryn C. Bond
Bond, 34, who’s been bringing her bullhorn and her passion to Memphis’ protests over George Floyd’s slaying by a Minneapolis police officer, said her political activism began in 2006, when six black teenagers in Jena, Louisiana, were charged with attempted murder for beating up a white classmate.
That excessive charge, one in which the teenagers, who became known as the Jena 6, could have faced 100 years in prison, and one which came in the wake of racially-charged incidents at Jena High School, opened Bond’s eyes to inequalities in the criminal justice system.
“That’s the time it became very, very real to me,” said Bond, who took a bus to cover the Jena 6 protests as a student majoring in radio and television production at Tennessee State University.
“Going through school we read history books. We have Black History Month and it’s the shortest month in all the year. But that was the time that I, as a fresh adult, learned that there were big things wrong in America.
“People marched in the 1960s … the Jena 6 marches were my version of the lunch counter sit-ins and the marches during the 1960s,” she said.
Bond hasn’t stopped marching. She was arrested while protesting the shooting of Martavious Banks in 2018. She’s battled cancer and she unsuccessfully ran for a seat on the Memphis City Council.
And Floyd’s slaying brought her back out into the streets.
“I know the importance of protesting in the streets, and I also know the importance of engaging voters and getting them to go to the polls,” Bond said.
“From protest to the polls, we’ve got to make stuff happen.”
Amber Sherman
Sherman, who can be seen helping with the marshaling in Memphis’ protests over the slaying of George Floyd, also participated in the 2016 Black Lives Matter shutdown of the Hernando de Soto Bridge.
She’s also a political science graduate of the University of Tennessee who’s now working on a master’s degree in legal studies online from Hodges University.
That’s fitting since her activism and her desire for people to be treated fairly goes back to her college years.
“I was at the University of Tennessee at Martin, and we were having an issue with privatization,” said Sherman, who was working with a group to prevent the campus jobs from being privatized.
“It was a small campus, and if (the state) would have privatized those jobs, everyone would have lost their jobs.”
Now Sherman, 25, is marching for Floyd.
“I jumped into it because of the severity of it,” she said. “You had Ahmaud Arbery who was killed in February, you had Breonna Taylor who was killed in March, and now you have George Floyd,” she said. “And those are just the names of the people we know.
“Black people shouldn’t be put through that kind of trauma over and over again. Black people have already been put through the trauma of 400 years of slavery, of social and economic inequality, and not we have to watch them be killed on the Internet.”
Keedran Franklin
Franklin, 34, one of the main organizers with the Coalition of Concerned Citizens, has been a key organizer for many civil disobedience actions in Memphis.
He helped elevate public pressure as part of a yearlong civic-led campaign in 2017 that called for the removal of the equestrian statue of slave trader and Confederate general, Nathan Bedford Forrest.
But Franklin’s activism did not start with, nor end with the removal of the Forrest monument from Health Sciences Park.
Instead, Franklin, in his leadership role with the coalition, has orchestrated acts of protest that touch on issues that disproportionately impact black citizens in Memphis and beyond, with special emphasis on lowwage jobs that help bolster Memphis’ staggering poverty rate.
In 2016, police and city officials included Franklin on a list of 81 citizens that required police escort for entry into City Hall. The Memphis police said activists like Franklin were placed on the list in error.
The City Hall “blacklist” became central to an ongoing lawsuit filed by the ACLU against the City of Memphis. The lawsuit alleges officials have violated a consent decree that forbids police surveillance of private citizens for their political affiliations.
Al Lewis
Lewis is a second-generation activist from Memphis. His mother, Sara Lewis, was a long-standing board member of Memphis City Schools and an education equity advocate.
Lewis, 66, is a primary organizer with the Coalition of Concerned Citizens, bringing decades of activism experience to the coalition and working alongside the next generation of organizers in Memphis.
The first protest Lewis recalls participating occurred in the 1968 Sanitation Workers’ Strike, when Martin Luther King Jr. first visited the striking workers. Lewis was 14.
Since then, Lewis has participated in numerous actions of civil disobedience, with the aim of elevating collective consciousness in Memphis around issues that disproportionately impact black Memphians — low wages, health disparities, police brutality and transit access, to name a few.
Among the more immediate demands Lewis has for the City of Memphis and MPD are increased de-escalation training for law enforcement, and heightened