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NY Times, June 1, 2020
Inside a Huge Brooklyn Protest: ‘The World Is Watching’
By Michael Wilson
Rewind, before the trash fires and lootings and arrests, to the scene
outside Brooklyn’s Barclays Center on Sunday evening.
A gate agent at Kennedy Airport, Victoria Sloan, stood in the crowd with
the setting sun at her back, thinking about the time the police hassled
her little brother. Several feet away, Daniel English, a young media
consultant, handed out free pizza and water with friends at a table one
of them had brought along. Cory Thomas, a 40-year-old lead abatement
specialist, held his phone aloft, sharing the scene with an old friend —
the two were once beaten by the police, he said, when they were teenagers.
Soon, the group would march through the broad avenues and narrow side
streets of Prospect Heights, greeted at every turn with applause and
honking horns and raised-fist salutes. Bryce Stewart, 35, of Bushwick,
stopped his motorcycle and climbed atop it for a better look.
That mood, one of spirited, sometimes vulgar but essentially peaceful
indignation, lasted until dark. Then, as it had on each of the previous
nights of protest, the glass started to shatter. It began Sunday around
10 p.m. in SoHo, when a knot of young men on the periphery of a large
march from Brooklyn smashed a clothing store window and stole a jacket,
dragging the entire mannequin out onto the sidewalk.
Scenes of rampant looting and violence between the police and protesters
have dominated news coverage of New York City’s protests around the
world, and contributed to the announcement Monday by Gov. Andrew M.
Cuomo of an 11 p.m. curfew in the city. The crimes being committed have
frustrated the protest’s earliest arrivals, the ones who write slogans
on the lids of pizza boxes to hold overhead, only to see their efforts
hijacked by the shadowy newcomers with their metal bars and stolen clothing.
“There are people out there who are very negative,” said D.J. Elliott,
30, a gym manager in Harlem. “And this is their golden opportunity.”
Leroy O’Brien, who, at 63, was among the older of the protesters, was
less charitable about the motivations of looters and vandals.
“Knuckleheads,” he said.
A window smashed at the Lululemon shop on Broadway in SoHo. Peaceful
protesters are worried that late-night looting and violence has
overtaken their message.Credit...Benjamin Norman for The New York Times
Night after night, protesters have been arriving on a scale without
modern precedent, bringing with them a breadth of backgrounds as wide as
the city around them. Many of them have converged at the Barclays
Center, which rises up at the intersections of several neighborhoods,
old and new, white and black.
Many are young, whether black or white, Asian or Latino, from different
neighborhoods and boroughs. They are familiar in their young-New-Yorker
outrage — squint, and one sees the figurative offspring of the faces of
the Stonewall Riots, while far outnumbering them. Many bring personal
experience to the new wave of fury over the death of George Floyd in
Minneapolis.
At Barclays on Sunday, a crowd of hundreds, and growing, cheered for
angry speakers, for the supportive honks of passing cars, for one
another. At his pizza table, Mr. English, 27, who is white, said the
death of Mr. Floyd left him feeling helpless.
“Avoiding feeling helpless is really what brought me out three days in a
row,” he said. He and his friends set up a table with pizza, water and
masks to hand to protesters.
“People started donating money and going to the store for us, getting
cases of water,” Mr. English said. “A bag of granola bars. It was
unbelievable.” The protesters offered a whole pizza to the police. “They
said, ‘No, thank you,’” he said, but later, they asked for water.
Because of the late-night mayhem, Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo enacted an 11
p.m. curfew in the city and said he would double the number of officers
on the streets.Credit...Demetrius Freeman for The New York Times
Nearby, Ms. Sloan, 27, of Flatbush, stood and watched speakers railing
against police violence. “It could be my father, my brother, my uncle,
my cousin, my friend,” she said. “It makes me angry.”
She carried a core memory to the gathering: “When I was young, my
brother locked himself out of the house,” she said. As he paced in the
streets, “three cops pulled up on him,” she said. “I’m screaming, ‘He’s
my brother!’ Just because you see a black man running, doesn’t mean that
he’s a threat.”
She planned on leaving early, to return to her daughter, Lalin, 2, and
in case the night took a turn to trouble — “there are people out here
who are drinking,” she said.
The marches from Barclays through the neighborhood injected new energy
into the group, with neighbors hanging out windows of brownstones to
clap, a raucous echo of the nightly clapping for health care workers
that has taken place for three months.
Asked why he was marching, Mr. Stewart, who is white, standing atop his
motorcycle, said, “Why wouldn’t you?”
“I’m more scared of the people who don’t show up,” he said. “This is the
last opportunity white America has to listen to the problems of the
black community, because they’ve been living in hell and they’re ready
to show everyone else their trouble.”
His rhetorical question — “Why wouldn’t you?” — was echoed by a black
man hours later, crossing the Manhattan Bridge in lanes closed to
traffic. Mr. Elliott, the gym manager, was hoarse from leading
call-and-response shouts while climbing the bridge’s steep uphill grade.
“How can I stay home?” he asked. “Black people have been the backbone of
this country.”
Mr. Thomas, the lead abatement specialist, shared his march with a
friend on FaceTime. “I’m speaking for everybody, all my kinfolk, all my
brothers and sisters who’ve gotten beaten up by police,” he said.
“Everybody who’s been through this situation can relate.”
To him, that message should carry the day beyond the bad deeds of
looters. “I don’t condone the violence,” or the looting, he said, “but
at the end of the day, no 14-year-old should be beat up by police.”
Tiffiney Davis, 39, a managing director and a mother, said she had long
feared for her son’s safety around the police. She attended the Barclays
demonstrations for the first time on Sunday and was struck by the diversity.
“I’ve got my white friends out here with me,” said Ms. Davis, who is
black. “Now we feel like we’re getting a little power.”
Nearby, Gabe Jones, 18, of Sheepshead Bay, Brooklyn, was also attending
for the first time — it was his first protest anywhere, actually. Mr.
Jones, who is black, said that his own background with the police — an
officer once burst into his home, he said, and an uncle lost teeth in a
scuffle with others — informed his reaction to the death of a man 1,200
miles away.
“The world is watching,” he said.
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