I found this one on that JusticeforGeorgeNYC IG account. After locking my bike in Marcus Garvey Park I walked up to 125th street. While I cautiously submerged myself in the crowd I overheard a Lieutenant say to a uniformed officer, “We are not kneeling today.” Sweating, tightly packed people faced inwardly around a megaphone projected young man, elevated above surrounding heads by an unseen support. The crowd steadily accumulated bodies and drew the faces of people stopping along the opposite sidewalk. With some nudging from people in neon vests only one lane of 5th avenue’s two barely allowed vehicles, a few city buses and sanitation trucks to squeeze southward. Two arms extended from and unseen body below the man speaking and supported him with two hands on his broad muscular back. The body of people jammed between them and the building appeared intent and restless. He spoke forcefully, oscillating his upper torso at the intent and restless faces encircling him, packed between him and the gothic facade of the National Black Theatre building. His speech culminated in a call and response. A skinnier man in a neon vest took his place and explained the marching route through the megaphone: east on 125th street, north on Lenox Avenue. Police escorted the march. I observed the people watching us as we passed what busy storefronts were open on 125th. Flower shops and small grocers hosted the somewhat stunned faces of people witnessing the protests which began over a week ago arriving on their street. Those cheering from balconies, passively held their phone cameras at imperfect angles. People on stoops and gathered around corner stores watched with fascination. Vehicle passengers traveling in opposite lanes of traffic, or halted at intersections by the protest itself eagerly participated in the chants. At the intersection of 135th and Malcom X the march condensed in front of the Schomburg Center for Research and Black Culture. Across Malcom X, northeast adjacent, John Rhoden’s commissioned bronze, United (family) stood above the heads and signs filling the street. People on balconies high up in the Clayton Apartments looked down at the crowd. A small drunk person with hardly any teeth stumbled through the crowd, slurring, extending a crumpled hand. The descendant of natives who built this country struggled to pronounce the name of a tribe and put forth a desperate unrelenting non-specific plea. Tears perpetually welled in their eyes, refusing to run down their cheeks. About ten yards away a person sermoned into the megaphone with a sharper, sober voice alternately muting and echoing the begging protest of the weary soul. The voice going into the megaphone came from a young man with a sweaty, shaven head and bushy beard. To the crowd, spanning the entire intersection he asked, “Who here believes that there is power in the name of Jesus?” They responded with unanimous applause. Next a young woman in an athletic outfit beautifully sang a single repeated chorus which contained the word hallelujah. I thought the march might be over, but it continued east on 135th and then north on Adam Clayton Blvd. Approaching 143rd Street the march of people slowed and turned east quickly condensing around a core group with the megaphone again in the middle. The tree shade between the Drew Hamilton Community center and P.S. 194’s paved playground area calmed the overheated bodies. Some not close enough to hear the megaphone listened to a voice on their cell phones, an IG live broadcast delayed by five seconds, an up close account of the current speaker. As I slowly moved closer I could see with my own eyes the woman who people were watching on their phone screens. A verbal argument over personal space caused the speaker to pause. Other voices began to urge a woman to be peaceful and deescalate. She was referred to as sister. As the woman with the megaphone started speaking again, listing names of black people unjustly killed by police, I heard some chatter on a police radio asking, “who is that woman, who is she?” The voice had a pretend casualness and seemed over-interested in the person referred to as “sister.” The woman‘s voice in the megaphone, as she prompted the crowd into saying Breonna Taylor’s name, followed with, “who would have celebrated her 27th birthday yesterday.“ She emotionally described the no-knock entry which lead to Breonna’s death and finished with, “And this is just the short list,” in a cracking, exhausted rasp that trailed off abruptly. Woos and applause came from the crowd. A young white man took the megaphone next and began speaking passionately. I stood on the base of a lamppost and framed in my phone screen the depth of the crowd stretching east down 143rd until it merged into the overhanging greenness of ginkgo and London planetree leaves. On the west end of the block, in front of the Engine 69 station house, the sidewalk and street was empty, a disorienting amount of unoccupied space. I walked west, leaving the protest behind and then south on Frederick Douglas Blvd, until a torrential rain fell from the sky. I stopped and bought a margarita and a bag of chips. By the time I reached 125th Street the sun was shining again. No relief followed the downpour. A lot of people crowded the sidewalkS around subway entrances on 125th, spilling across the intersections in the way of usual urban foot traffic. Tables were out with things for sale. A destitute person laid with their back barely pressed against the side of a bank. Their jeans and bursting ruined basketball sneakers observed the full power of the earth’s sun. People participated in the pre-summer day by carrying water guns, wearing swim trunks and indulging in frozen treats, with only an urban park and a closed public pool available to them. One man begged for change. I thought about offering my chips to someone. The idea of burdening someone with extremely oily and salty chips in that atmosphere seemed cruel. I had Black Lives Matter written in sharpie on the front and back of my loose fitting t-shirt.
Marble Hill Houses, Bronx New York, June 2nd, 2020
I found this one on twitter, just by searching the word Inwood, my local neighborhood. At approximately 1pm, I walked onto the lawn of the Marble Hill Houses where protest organizers, identify by green clothe tied around their arms, stood in a circle reviewing their safety strategy. This protest was being organized by State Assembly Person Robert Jackson, with a specific purpose to call for the repeal of 50-a. Mr Jackson wore a bright orange high tech looking athletic t-shirt. The planned walk was 5 miles long. He stood on a green painted park bench under the shadow of palmate leafed locust trees and spoke at first without a megaphone. With his blue medical mask pulled from his face, one loop still around one ear, in a loud and clear voice he said, “First we want everyone to be safe,” and then, “most importantly, we want to be able to express ourselves about repealing 50-a. Does everyone one know what 50-a is?” “Yes,” someone in the slowly growing crowd of approximately 100 people responded. “I make no assumptions,” he said and proceeded to explain 50-a in his own, plain way. A person of authority for the Marble Hill houses was the thanked. Other people were thanked. Mr Jackson identified some of his staff. He now had the megaphone which was working. Drums and signs were offered to people, as were packs of food, water bottles and other essential supplies. Bathroom locations along the route were identified and also a time table was laid out. They planned to arrive at Riverbank State Park, rendezvous with another state politician and rally for an hour. Senator Jackson picked up a drum and cautiously, playfully, to a few awkward laughs attempted a marching beat. Police escorted the march as it left the housing complex and stuck to the sidewalk south on the east side of Broadway. When we reached 10th avenue both lanes of were filled by the foot traffic of chanting protestors, marching under the elevated 1 train tracks. In the beginning there were a few lulls between chants. One person’s sign said “No other profession had a song written about them called Fuck the Police,” or something like that. Vehicle traffic passenger and drivers, including city bus drivers, honked and had phone cameras pointed at the march, with raised arms, echoing chants. “Say his name.” “George Floyd!“ “Say her name.” “Breonna Taylor.” Also there was a “How do you spell racist? N-Y-P-D,” chant. The march paused at Dyckman briefly before turning east, taking up one lane of traffic. It paused again at the Broadway, Dyckman, Riverside Drive intersection, holding up traffic, before turning south, taking away the north and south bound lanes of Dyckman from vehicle traffic. I left the march at a Nagle Avenue, 195th street equivalent. A few clusters of what looked like grapes were hanging from a plant over a stonewall in Fort Tryon Park. A group of young people’s attention drifted away from the march and they inspected the grapes.
Prayerful March, Bronx, NY, June 10th 2020
I learned about this one from a link Willis shared on Twitter. Around 5:45pm, I biked east down 207th Street and crossed the Harlem River on the University Heights Bridge pedaling on the sidewalk. It’s a hot humid evening. Pumping up W Fordham Road, a young man without a shirt came bobbing down the road in the opposite direction on one rear tile, while the front fork of his frame stuck out in front of him, wheelless. A half block later, a white convertible Bentley with read leather interior pulled up next to me. The young man driving had two French braids on each side of his head and a large stock of money in hand. He was dancing and singing for a DSLR camera held on a gimbal in the passenger seat. Two men were in the back seats, one had his phone out, recording video of the man in the driver seat. The driver seat person was not wearing a seatbelt and stood up in the car before the light changed. He quickly sat down and accelerated through the intersection. I turned onto a paved section of the Croton aqueduct trail and pedaled north on a pedestrian path cutting between adjacent rear building lots. The trail only lasted one block and I biked north for three more blocks on a narrow street until I reached Kingsbridge Avenue. The protest as assembling below the two towering turrets of the giant red brick armory building, which is visible from the Bronx Lookout in Inwood Hill Park. Police officers, Lieutenants and patrol cars and a van or two held a soft perimeter on the protest, a few hundred in number. The man talking through the megaphone was talking about not resisting arrest, the right to disagree with someone’s sign and ask them to remove their sign and that there were only three chants and they each involved prayer. People were passing around snacks in the crowd. A woman in a pin-striped apron, dirty from kitchen work, reluctantly investigated the crowd. When riding by on a lime green painted moped, she felt compelled to stop and leave the vehicle temporarily unattended behind where I stood. The paint was wearing away on the dented and scraped body of the vehicle that gave it the intentionally worn look of a movie set prop. Her arms revealed by the rolled up sleeves of her white shirt, looked swollen and tanned with kitchen dirt. Her face was wrinkled in a pleasant way and her confused expression seemed suspiciously innocent. She clumsily worked her way between young people in matching black shirts holding their arms and signs up in prayer. I worried she might bump someone. Her mind appeared concerned with something more serious than a racial protest. As she turned back her bewildered and lost look had not been satisfied by her inspection. She stood face to face with a young man holding a large sign. Neither of them budged for a few seconds. When she made it back to her moped a digital alarm spilled out of the vehicle. In a seeming response, the crowds voice rose with an amen. A white woman in front of me had a two or three year old child strapped to her back. The child’s blue eyes were pleasantly engaged in the sky, building edges and unfamiliar faces beside his mother’s exposed shoulders. One man arrived with a rainbow flag tied into one of his neatly hanging dreadlocks. He was the only other person I saw with a bike at their side beside me. A woman wearing a sleeveless black shirt with a priest collar approached him as if they had been searching for each other. Continuously while I observed these crowd members a woman preached a passionate, musical sermon. All in the crowd raised up both hands, in prayer. Then I noticed a woman with her hair in a pepper gray ponytail and reflective aviator sunglasses hurriedly cross Reservoir Avenue and reveal her folded laminated sign over her head. It said “Black Trans Lives Matter” on one side and in multi-colored font on the other side, “Silence = Violence.“ An officer standing close to me took a phone call from a friend or family member. They talked causally about immediate plans for dinner or socializing. Then they said, “Alright this protest is about to start marching, I have to go.” Protest organizers in with megaphones tried to explain for everyone to line up behind a banner. There was no banner in my sight. Eventually the march swept into the east bound lanes of Kingsbridge Avenue. A woman in front of me thanked a female officer who was standing in the intersection. A chant involving the word prayer emanated rather weakly from somewhere in the front of the march. As I carefully rolled my bike along with the crowd I notice a beautiful red-tailed hawk joined a flock of pigeons which had been circling in the sky. Among the urban birds two red brick towers with conical roofs rose above the long edifice of the armory. The structure built in the 1910s to house the New York National Guard burned in the light of the low and unobstructed sun of the western sky.