By Gemeem Davis, Calabria Gale Heilmann
It’s hard to believe that we are here. Again. But as they say, those who refuse to learn from history are doomed to repeat it.
On May 25, 2020, Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin knelt on George Floyd’s neck for more than nine minutes, while Mr. Floyd was handcuffed, lying face down in the street, shouting “I can’t breathe!” Captured on video, Mr. Floyd’s public murder rocked our nation to its core and birthed a summer of uprisings and protests.
Rallying around the cry that “Black Lives Matter,” protesters, activists, and everyday Americans were determined to show that Mr. Floyd’s death was not in vain. After decades of horrific police killings of Black men, Dylan Roof’s terrifying 2015 massacre of Black worshipers at a church in Charleston, S.C., the 2017 deadly Charlottesville “Unite the Right” rally, and the 2022 mass shooting of Black people in a supermarket in Buffalo, N.Y., the United States was overdue for a “come to Jesus” moment with our nation’s racial violence and the underlying ideologies of white supremacy that justify it.
No city was immune to this reckoning. Not even our city. That summer, four Black high school students from Central High School organized a march to the Columbus statue in Seaside Park to call for its immediate removal. These young women did not ask anyone’s permission. They did what they saw was just, moral and necessary. The Golden Hill Paugusset tribe and the NAACP joined in. We did too, alongside Bridgeport Strong, the Interdenominational Ministerial Alliance, and many more. Councilman Jorge Cruz and state Rep. Antonio Felipe, both of whom represent the South End, joined protests to end racial violence along with Councilman Ernie Newton and state Rep. Chris Rosario.
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