BY ZACH WILLIAMS | Events a thousand miles away drove hundreds of #BlackLivesMatter activists from Washington Square Park to Macy’s Herald Square to Times Square, on the night before Thanksgiving.
People of color had once again been on the receiving end of a nationally prominent shooting. This time, a group of white men in Minneapolis, Minn. allegedly shot five people who were part of ongoing protests sparked by the fatal Nov. 15 shooting there of 24-year-old Jamar Clark by police. Supporters quickly took the attack as an attempt to stifle the year-old movement against police brutality and institutionalized racism.
They responded in New York City by highlighting their grievances in the most public way possible — by rallying, marching and chanting through the streets of Manhattan.
A feeling of uncertainty overshadowed the nighttime rally at Washington Square Park on Wed., Nov. 25. While reports of threats against the activists could not be confirmed, organizers acknowledged that new adversaries had emerged against their high-profile public actions.
“We refuse to be intimidated. If they think these attacks will scare us away, let me just say they massively underestimate the power of the people,” Vienna Rye, a Millions March NYC activist, said to the crowd.
The opposition includes a segment of American society represented by West Side resident Donald Trump’s presidential campaign. Attendees at an Alabama rally supporting him attacked an activist who chanted “Black Lives Matter” on Nov. 21.
Protests in New York City have been peaceful besides sporadic scuffles with law enforcement at demonstrations. But that could change, said Josmar Trujillo of the Coalition to End Broken Windows.
“We are in a state of war. Self-defense is the minimum that we should be doing,” he told the crowd. “We need our communities, because these motherf—-rs are going to shoot at us…it’s gotta be an escalation because this sh-t is escalating all around us.”
The success of the several hundred activists present that night depended on their ability to evade the dozens of police officers who followed them, aided by a helicopter and a cavalry of motorized scooters.
In the West Village, they briefly blocked streets until the police caught up. They repeated such efforts by making abrupt turns left or right when police moved forward during the march, all the while deploying a harsher rhetoric than seen in protests months ago.
The faces of people of color killed by police stared from photographs printed above words like “justice” and the eponymous slogan of the #BlackLivesMatter movement.
With chants that infused profanity into the message, some carried signs stating that police work hand-in-hand with the Ku Klux Klan, while another sign linked acts of terrorism with opportunistic anti-immigrant sentiment and militarism (“Don’t use Paris as an excuse for racism and war”).
A route along the East Side to Union Square arose from spontaneous decisions made at the front of the crowd. Wherever the cops weren’t, they went. There was little time for thinking when clashes would break out between the police and activists. Sometimes the marchers invited arrest, such as when an activist with the Chelsea-based Peoples Power Assemblies obstructed a policeman riding a scooter on St. Marks Place. The crowd rushed forward and police shoved them back.
Other times, police ventured into the crowd to track down an activist who they intended to arrest. Such confrontations transformed the combined energy of the crowd into a frenzy of camera flashes, flailing limbs and an uncertainty of what exactly was happening. The ability to remain standing depended on deft footwork and levelheaded thinking.
Pedestrians were not out in large numbers on the cold autumn night, but a few raised their fists in solidarity, while most simply viewed the spectacle with a certain dismissiveness. Marchers banged on the windows of restaurants and urged patrons to join them. A young black man claimed victory when he convinced a young woman to utter “Black Lives Matter” as he passed by.
That was what they said when the protesters entered the Macy’s flagship store at Herald Square. There was nothing to stop them as they marched down the shopping aisles, although shoppers paid them little attention. The police accompaniment did not follow them into the store, but was waiting when the protesters emerged.
At that point, the crowd of a few hundred had dwindled by at least a third.
The remaining group continued onwards with the cat-and-mouse game until arriving at Times Square — about four hours after the march began in view of the Washington Square Arch. It was there, at the very beginning of the evening’s demonstration, that Harlem Church of Christ’s Richard Price spoke to the crowd. He noted that many among them had participated in local actions on numerous occasions in the past year, but progress continued to be slow.
In that time, a national debate on police and criminal justice reform began. But the events of last month show that the overall goals of #BlackLivesMatter remain unfulfilled, Price said, adding that a disturbing phenomenon persists.
“For those who come here tonight saying that we’re just here because we want to hear ourselves: you have not been here when we marched all year long,” he said at the rally. “We’re worried about what’s going on. We’re worried that black lives still don’t matter, and so what I want to say is that this is a systemic thread woven through the fabric of our United States.”
