We want the whole system to be torn down and built anew.
My main motivator is like...
pure anger, pure anger.
2020 has seen Black and Brown people disproportionately die from COVID-19,
more likely to lose their jobs,
and at the center of conversations about systemic racism and police violence.
- Black lives matter! - Black lives matter!
Twenty-three-year-old Kerrigan Williams has been protesting since George Floyd’s death
and is one of thousands marching on Washington.
Folks do not have jobs. Our felons cannot get jobs.
Our citizens cannot get jobs.
Our DC residents cannot get jobs.
Still fighting for those same liberties and protections that we were supposed to have
57 years ago after that speech.
Martin Luther King Jr. delivered his “I Have a Dream Speech” in DC 57 years ago.
But the event wasn’t just a call for racial harmony.
I think it’s important that people remember that the original March on Washington in 1963
was actually titled the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom.
So how have Kerrigan and others been organizing for change in 2020,
in the middle of an economic, health and social crisis?
Freedom Fighters DC is a group of like-minded individuals that are constantly fighting for
the abolition of prison systems and police
and also continuing the fight for Black liberation.
Kerrigan and six others founded Freedom Fighters DC and have mobilized thousands into action,
including this sit-in at the U.S. Capitol days after Floyd’s death.
In a country hit by unexpected crisis, the group doesn’t want to see a return to the old normal.
The system isn’t meant to protect us, so organizing is started from the ground up.
So I think that that’s different from the political power that we know today.
It starts with moments like these, to talk to people, “What does our future look like?”
Having a robust conversation about imagining new systems, a new world.
We don’t know what a society is without prisons,
without crimes and cops and that fear indoctrinated into us.
So these types of conversations allow you to reflect on yourself and spread it into the community.
The FFDC has a clear plan of action.
It includes
mutual aid drives to help those who’ve lost their jobs in the pandemic,
teach-ins and workshops,
and even group therapy for organizers.
Power in this moment, in this racial climate, looks like FFDC.
It looks like folks, you know, regular people, like, “You know what, I want to do something in my community,
I’mma do it.”
And if the community like, “OK I see you,” I’m going to pour into that.
- George Floyd!
For Kerrigan, the death of George Floyd sparked memories that were close to home.
I grew up in a neighborhood named Greenspoint in Houston, Texas.
I also was raised a little bit in Third Ward.
That is where George Floyd was from.
She says, she saw firsthand the systemic racial injustice that so many are protesting in the U.S.
[I] went to Sam Houston University in Huntsville, Texas.
This is the campus right here and this is death row.
You could see the white smoke in the air,
right from campus from when somebody dies on death row.
You see a whole bunch of people out there picketing and protesting different executions.
Kerrigan moved to Washington, DC for grad school and like many others started organizing this year’s protests.
Between late May and the end of June, there have been at least 5,000 anti-racism demonstrations in the U.S.
Over half of those polled in another study were under 30.
And Kerrigan’s approach?
Imagine that there’s a fly in your ear, a mosquito, just buzzing, buzzing, buzzing.
The annoyance of being out in the streets,
the annoyance of people always having to set up barricades just because these folks are yelling in your face again.
Like, you know, “Hey this is happening, hey this is what we want. Did I tell you that this is what we want?
Oh again, here again, this is what I want. I’m out here again.”
So I think, just keep applying that pressure, keep saying, “I’m not leaving until this is remedied, and I’m for real.”
That’s when change starts to come.
- George Floyd!
The protests have come in the midst of a pandemic
where Black and Latino U.S. residents are 3 times more likely to contract COVID-19 than white people.
All different things that you see that communities of color have to face on top of going through a pandemic,
on top of job insecurity as well.
It’s highlighted the economic fault lines across the United States.
For some activists, the movement is also about helping the community at a local level.
And this includes mutual aid:
a shared effort where people exchange resources and services with their neighbors.
Mutual aid is the community helping the community.
It’s all about us keeping us safe and cared for.
So if you need any different items like household items, toiletries, feminine items,
mutual aid will be us giving that back to the community that doesn’t have access to that.
Kerrigan says she is influenced by the Black liberation movement that came before -
- No more brothers in jail.
which campaigned for economic and social justice.
But the survivor programs are tools and institutions by which we unify our people around.
The Black Panthers really inspired most of our core thinking.
We want to have a free breakfast program just like them.
They definitely inspired us to look out for the community while fighting for the nation.
Thousands have been gearing up to protest in the capital
on the 57th anniversary of the March on Washington.
Some 250,000 people gathered in front of the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, DC to hear Martin Luther King Jr.
The whole idea of civil rights and social justice, as King pointed out, really doesn’t meant a whole lot.
You know, if you have the right to vote but you don’t have access to the American dream
and all of the social mobility that goes along with that.
The idea that all American citizens should have equal rights and access to the same protections
was really central to the March on Washington even then as we talk about those same issues today.
And the activists of today are wise to the parallels with this moment in history.
Growing up, in textbooks, I saw the dogs and the fire hydrants and the water hoses just being blasted by people
in black-and-white.
Now I think that the Black Lives Matter movement would look like tear gas, clouds of smoke,
with street medics trying to administer aid,
people being carried out because they were beaten so brutally.
August 28, 2020, billed as the biggest march of the year,
but how do protesters think marching can drive change?
Hopefully it’s bringing awareness
to, not just the United States, but to the world
to show that this has to stop.
We’re here to have our body as a presence
to know that we care and we demand change.
We’ve been here going through the same thing for a long time.
We have to make a difference for the kids.
We get a group of people like this together,
it’s the beginning of change.
And we need a reminder of that.
Decades on from MLK’s March on Washington, people are still protesting for an end to systemic racism.
We are going to be the generation that dismantles systemic racism
once and for all, now and forever!
And activists still hope the moment we’re witnessing in the U.S. will bring about change for the next generation.
For people like me it looks like, we just still have to be in the streets.
We still have to be like, OK, this is what we want
and we want it now.
The America that I want looks like
Black and Brown liberation.
It looks like all folks won’t be scared of the folks that are supposed to serve and protect us.
I’m not sure how to unlearn certain things about, “being Black means this,
being Black means you have to be sad all the time,
being Black means that you have to see your brothers and sisters killed all the time.”
So, I’m not sure how that unlearning happens in my new America?
But I want it to happen and I don’t want folks to feel like they are worthless
in the new America that I would like to see.