Protest is telling the truth in public. Sometimes protest is telling the truth to a public that isn’t ready to hear it. Protest is meant to build a community, and to force a response. By DeRay Mckesson
I learned hope the hard way. It was a hot day in St Louis county near Ferguson, Missouri in September 2014, and I’d spent the majority of the afternoon at a sit-in on the floor of the St Louis metropolitan police department headquarters. At 9am, 20 of us had filed in and plopped down in four rows in the centre of the station. The police began to gather around us as hundreds of our fellow protesters turned the corner, and were now standing outside the building, demanding to get in. When it looked as if the officers might forcibly remove us, everyone began to link arms – everyone but me. It was my role to record and interpret as much as possible everywhere we protested so that we could consistently tell the truth to the outside world. So, I sat in the front of our stacked rows, unlinked.
I was trying to capture as much as I could on my phone and tweet about it in real time. I wanted to be able to tell the story of the only successful sit-in of a police department since these protests in response to the continued intransigence of the law enforcement community began. We were repeatedly told to move, and we refused. It wasn’t long before the officers’ growing impatience turned to action. I heard the screaming before I realised we had been completely surrounded. It all happened so fast. I looked over and saw a mother trying to stop an officer from driving his thumb into the pressure point behind her daughter’s ear. And when I looked up, there was an officer standing directly over me. She told us that we needed to leave immediately. Again, we refused to move. Then she rested her hand on her Taser. I’ll never forget how time seemed to slow down as I watched her move her hand from her waist to her Taser to her gun.
Continue reading...from The Guardian http://bit.ly/2Z6hZZy
