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NY Times, June 17, 2020
How a March for Black Trans Lives Became a Huge Event
By Anushka Patil
West Dakota, a drag queen in Brooklyn, was checking in on a fellow drag
queen and mentor when they began discussing what they said was a painful
reality about the George Floyd protests: Black transgender people are
disproportionately the victims of police violence, but attending
demonstrations against police brutality can often put them in further
danger.
Her mentor, a drag queen named Merrie Cherry, who is black, said she had
seen silent marches in other states and would have felt safer attending
an event like that, West Dakota recalled.
And so she had an idea: a rally for black trans people that would evoke
one of the most notable protests in New York history, the Silent Parade,
when the N.A.A.C.P. assembled nearly 10,000 people in 1917, all wearing
white and silently marching down Fifth Avenue to demand an end to
violence against black people.
Two weeks later, West Dakota’s idea blossomed into one of the most
striking demonstrations that New York has seen since the killing of
Floyd, a gathering of thousands of people in a sea of white. Its size
and intensity stunned bystanders, participants and the organizers
themselves.
Though crowd turnouts for marches are often difficult to determine,
organizers said 15,000 people took part. The police have not released
their own estimate, but videos from the scene showed a sea of people
stretching several blocks from Grand Army Plaza, down Eastern Parkway,
with some eventually making their way to Fort Greene Park. [Here is
video of the event.]
The vast majority of the protesters wore masks, and safety teams
stationed along the route gave out hand sanitizer. But the crowd was so
large that six-feet social distancing was often not possible. Officials
have expressed concerns that the Floyd protests could lead to the spread
of the coronavirus, though there is no evidence of that so far in New York.
One speaker at the rally was Melania Brown, sister of Layleen Polanco, a
transgender woman who was found dead in 2019 in a cell at Rikers Island.
“Black trans lives matter! My sister’s life mattered!” Brown said in her
speech. “If one goes down, we all go down — and I’m not going nowhere.”
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