Breonna Taylor's sister becomes symbol of pain, icon of hope
Nearly a year after Breonna Taylor's death, many people are remembering her as an iconic symbol of the Black Lives Matter movement: a young first-responder innocent of any crime who lost her life in a hail of police bullets in her own home. Photos and illustrations of her have been on magazine covers, spotlighting her as a victim of overzealous policing, with accompanying articles demanding justice and change.
But when Ju'Niyah Palmer thinks about Breonna Taylor, she calls her “sister.” She remembers her sister as a confidante and friend.
“She was lovely, she was caring,” said Palmer.
In a December interview with USA TODAY, Palmer, 21, recalled the summers she and Taylor spent with their grandmother in Grand Rapids, Michigan. One moment etched in her memory is the car ride back home to Kentucky one year. They'd usually taken the ride with their mother, Tamika Palmer, but this time they were driving the route by themselves.
It started to pour down rain. Taylor, who was driving, couldn't see. The car inched along in the middle of the highway. “It was just really funny, because she really stopped and started crying because she couldn't see, and called my mama,” Palmer said.
Their mother told them to pull over to the side of the highway and put the hazard lights on, but they didn't move. They stayed in the middle of the highway for about 20 minutes, until the rain passed and Taylor felt fine to drive again.
To Palmer, Taylor was playful, yet vulnerable — in other words very much like any other young Black woman.
As the anniversary of her death approaches, Palmer and social justice activists are working to keep her legacy alive by pushing for police reforms and public policies that would prevent more needless deaths like hers.
“Breonna's life mattered,” said Brittany Packnett Cunningham, founder of the social impact firm Love & Power Works and host of a Meteor/ Pineapple Street Studios podcast, “Undistracted.” “We have to wake up every day and ask ourselves what we owe her.”
Taylor, 26, was killed in her home at about 1 a.m. March 13, by Louisville Police who had a “no knock” search warrant for her apartment. Taylor and her boyfriend, Kenneth Walker III, were in the apartment that morning when they heard loud pounding at the door. According to Walker, the police did not announce themselves before breaking down the door. Fearing a home invasion, Walker fired one shot, hitting Sgt. Jonathan Mattingly in the leg.
Police responded by firing 32 shots. Taylor was hit multiple times and died on the floor of her hallway while Mattingly, who was wounded, was rushed to surgery.
In September, a grand jury charged Sgt. Brett Hankison with wanton endangerment because some of the 10 shots fired went into a neighboring apartment. But none of the three white officers involved were charged with Taylor's death.
“Breonna's Law,” legislation banning no-knock search warrants, was adopted in June by the city of Louisville. Similar noknock bans exist in Florida, Oregon and Virginia. But such laws haven't been universally adopted, not even in Kentucky. So activists worry this same scenario could play out elsewhere.
“You owe it to her to see Breonna in every Black woman you encounter at work, school or delivering your groceries, and treat her like her life is worth living before she dies,” Packnett Cunningham said.
Activists in Louisville and beyond are pushing for police reforms and accountability for police officers. They continue to demand charges against the officers involved in Taylor's death despite the refusal of the Kentucky Prosecutors Advisory Council last December to appoint someone to pursue the case.
Imani Smith, a native of Kentucky and sophomore at Centre College, said she owes her activism to Taylor. After learning about her, Smith formed her own organization called the Youth Resistance Collective.
She is also collaborating with organizations like Change Today, Change Tomorrow; Play Cousins Collective and The Louisville Urban League, and pushing forward in social justice work by bringing awareness to Taylor's story. The work involves changing policies, creating strategies that sustain the Black dollar and teaching Black history.
“Right now we are still in that process of still pushing, but also being conscious that we have to heal too because this was traumatic for a lot of us,” Smith said.
During last year's
BreonnaCon event in Louisville, convened to inspire activism in the wake of Taylor's death, young Black women like Jaida Hampton, 22, Youth & College President of the Kentucky NAACP State Conference, held voter education and registration sessions and legal roundtables.
“Being a Black woman myself, living in Kentucky alone, (I know) that could potentially happen to me, and I have older sisters as well that are the same age as Breonna Taylor,” Hampton said.
“Black women are not safe at all in this country (if) you can innocently be sleeping in your own home and all it takes is for someone to make a life decision for you. That is just scary,” Hampton said.
If Palmer could have told Taylor one thing on March 12 last year, she would have told her to go to their mom's house that night, or to work some overtime. “If this was a dream, I would literally tell her to go to pick up that shift at work that you planned on picking up, or go to mom's house, and go out like you planned,” Palmer said.
The days are longer than normal for Palmer, who shared the apartment with Taylor just as she had shared a room with her growing up. She was used to coming home and seeing Taylor getting ready to leave for work. Taylor worked evenings as an emergency room technician at the University of Louisville Health Jewish Hospital and Norton Hospital, and wanted to become a nurse.
Other times Palmer would come home and go into Taylor's room to playfully bother her sister as she watched TV. Little memories like this, or mundane tasks like cleaning her room or washing her car, make Palmer miss Taylor the most. “My outlook of the future has changed, any day could be really anybody's last day,” Palmer said.
When Palmer sees images of her sister painted on murals in bright hues or printed on the cover of magazines it makes her feel joyful.
“It makes me feel like people are still thinking about her, we're no longer lonely about the whole situation,” Palmer said.