Transcriber: Marco Cruz Reviewer: David DeRuwe
Hello.
I’m Kennedy, and I’m a good person.
At least I like to think of myself as a good person.
I know I should be spending more of my time in soup kitchens
and giving more of my money to various charities.
But overall, I like to think I’m a good person.
The very first protest I went to was in January of 2017,
and it was the Women’s March.
Not the one in Washington, D.C., I had cheer practice that day,
but the one in my local capital of Hartford, Connecticut.
I remember standing in that crowd and feeling so empowered
and invigorated to finally be a part of a community where people were fighting
for the same things I wanted to see.
But as I looked upon that stage,
I realized that I could be doing more and that I should be doing more.
Years later, I was finally given the opportunity.
May 2020, a month that became infamous with the brutal murder
of George Floyd at the hands of police, was a typical month for me.
I had just finished up my first year of college at Boston University,
and I had only been able to really stomach about a minute of the video.
But as I sat down at dinner that night with my family,
we briefly talked about it.
We discussed that it was terrible and tragic, but as a Black family
in America, we didn’t really think anything was going to change.
I mean, nothing changed for Trayvon Martin and nothing changed with Eric Garner,
so we continued on with our lives.
However, I kept a watchful eye on Twitter,
and I saw more and more momentum build,
and more and more people showing up and showing out,
and I decided that I could no longer be a bystander.
And it wasn’t until I received a DM from a girl
I had briefly sat next to in my junior year of high school
who was feeling the same sentiment I did.
The DM said: “I can’t watch the news anymore; let’s do something.”
So together, about six or seven of us, all decided we wanted to plan
a protest for that weekend.
Now we had no idea how to plan a protest, but I was in charge of logistics.
I basically mapped out the route,
made sure we had enough water, masks, hand sanitizer,
and it felt really good.
I felt like I was finally having some purpose and some motivation,
and I was no longer being a bystander.
That was until June 4th, which was a Thursday, a day I will always remember.
That was the day I received my very first death threat.
Now, for a bit of background, my hometown of Glastonbury, Connecticut
is over 80% white.
And to say that people were upset that we were planning
a Black Lives Matter protest is a bit of an understatement.
Somebody had posted about our protests in Facebook, and one of the comments said:
“I’m going to show up early to show these girls the barrel of my gun.”
Looking back, I really wish that I’d taken the threat more seriously.
When I think about it, I’m not even positive
I told my mom or my family that day that I had received a death threat.
What I did tell them about was the good news I got the next day,
that our U.S. Senator, Richard Blumenthal, wanted to come to our protest.
At the time, I was only really expecting 150 people based
on the different engagements we had on our post.
But this was the first sign that I was really doing something big.
The day of the actual protest, I remember so little from it, honestly.
I remember showing up early with my family and fellow activists
and their families, and then all of a sudden there was a huge crowd.
I remember giving my speech and walking down Main Street and feeling
like I was no longer being a bystander, that I was leading the movement now.
Police estimated the next day that we had over 3,000 people
attend our protest, one of the largest Black Lives Matter protests in our state,
and one of the largest protests my state had seen, ever.
And I felt really, really proud of the work that I was doing.
However, as days after the protest happened,
I started feeling more and more like I was becoming complicit,
and the other girls agreed, so we decided we wanted to do something.
Together, we created an activist coalition group
where we would take anonymous submissions from people
in our local public school system about different racially targeted events
that they experienced.
When you read these, I really want you to remember
that for everybody who experienced these events, they were under the age of 18.
They were minors, children.
We received hundreds of these submissions.
But after a while, we felt like we were only really doing work online,
and we wanted to go out and do more.
So we started doing voter registration events, created mutual aid,
and started speaking to our town council
about starting a civilian police review board.
We also decided that we wanted to do weekly protests in our town square.
Now the tactic we used was to hold our signs and walk around the crosswalk.
It is illegal to stand in the crosswalk, that disrupts traffic,
but walking in the crosswalk in a square - that doesn’t disrupt traffic,
but it slows the cars down long enough for people to read our signs.
And this worked.
We had a lot of people who would beep at us, wave at us,
and we’d tell them to come join, come stand with us.
But we had equally as many people
who were throwing water bottles at us and yelling racial slurs.
As I continued, the death threats got worse and worse.
And the weirdest, funniest thing about these,
as you look at these, half of these people I know.
One of these people is the husband of my cheer coach
that I’ve known him for ten years.
Other people are people I sat with at the lunch table in middle school.
So when I read the death threats, I thought I knew them.
They weren’t actually ever going to do anything.
Plus, there were a lot of great opportunities
I got from doing this protesting.
I got to speak with podcasts, go on local news and radio,
be featured in different newspapers and magazines,
and it felt like the work I was doing was really starting to make some change.
And like I said, at the time, the death threats were just threats.
That was until one of my fellow activists at one of my protests got hit with a car.
I remember very little from that as well, too.
I remember kind of seeing her body jolt.
I remember seeing people run to her with water
and other people run after the car, trying to get the license plate number.
And for the life of me, to this day, I still can’t remember what I did,
but all I hope is that I didn’t stand still.
However, Tori made it out fine with just a sprained ankle and a concussion,
and she wanted us to continue the weekly protest.
So that’s what we did. I kept protesting.
However, the toll started not only affecting me, but my family.
My two younger sisters at the time, who were 13,
they kept getting put into various group chats of random numbers
where people would send photos of monkeys and gorillas
and bombard them with the N-word.
And unfortunately, when school started back up,
it started happening in person as well, too.
It got so bad that one of my younger sisters ended up leaving
the public school system altogether and now goes to Catholic school.
My other younger sister was a little bit more like me
and felt empowered and invigorated.
She started coming to my protests, then she started speaking,
and then she started creating her own activist group
and leading her own proud protests.
And I felt so proud.
I felt I was showing my younger sister what it means to be a good person.
I saw us together, doing our activist work,
and it’s one of the highlights of my life.
However, my perspective changed the day she got hit with a car.
I do remember what I was doing that day.
I remember running up to her and holding her.
She was trying to get back up.
And I said “It’s OK. It’s OK.”
Like I’m calling our mom; I’m calling our dad. “Let’s go home.”
And I remember hearing her repeat my own words back to me:
that she needed to stay, she had to stay,
that she had to show that she was being a good person.
And hearing that back really did something to me, honestly.
I stopped showing up to protest.
I turned off all my notifications on my phone.
Literally never even looked at my phone.
And it wasn’t until I ran into the president of our local NAACP chapter
in a coffee shop, where she was talking about how proud of the work I was doing.
And I told her “Yeah, we’re having a couple people at our protests,
but do you see this other young Black girl?
She’s having 5000 people at her protest.
And this person has 2 million followers on Instagram.
Like, I need to get to that level.”
And basically, she said to me: “Kennedy, none of that matters
as long as you don’t sacrifice yourself and your education.”
And I realized for so long I was doing this life of professional activism,
it was never really my passion.
It was taking chunks out of me mentally and physically.
I had stopped going to school.
I had quit all of my extracurricular activities, sports teams.
I had stopped painting and writing poetry.
My entire life was just focused on planning the next protest,
planning the next post I was going to do.
So I decided to take a step back from activism
to really just focus on myself.
So I would like to leave you today with a quote:
“Be a good person, but don’t waste your time trying to prove it.”
For so long, I felt that I had to prove I was a good person.
I used to be the person running the protest.
I used to be the one doing the sit-ins.
And now sometimes I attend,
and sometimes it becomes too hard to even repost an infographic.
But I know I’m a good person
because I know I walk outside my door every day
knowing what issues I care about.
So I’m a good person, and you’re a good person too ...
as long as you care.
Thank you.
(Applause)