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Police-brutality marchers demand a just society

“Pulp Fiction” director Quentin Tarantino, right, spoke at the “Stop Police Terror” march at its start in Washington Square Park on Saturday.  PHOTO BY ZACH WILLIAMS
“Pulp Fiction” director Quentin Tarantino, right, spoke at the “Stop Police Terror” march at its start in Washington Square Park on Saturday. PHOTO BY ZACH WILLIAMS

BY ZACH WILLIAMS  |  Chelsea resident Eileen Feldman was two blocks from home on Sat., Oct. 24 when hundreds of marching #BlackLivesMatter protesters blocked her path at the intersection of W. 23rd St. and Sixth Ave. The delay irritated her and she was not reluctant to say so out loud.

Activist Hannah Raytaylor heard Feldman and confronted her. Protesters were about halfway through the police-permitted march from Washington Square Park to W. 42nd St. as a small group of people stopped to watch Feldman and Raytaylor debate the merits of protesting police brutality on a sunny autumn afternoon.

The hottest point of contention between them was whether the deaths of Eric Garner, Michael Brown, Tamir Rice and other people of color represented the mistakes of just a few police officers or whether law enforcement as a whole protected a system of racial inequality.

Neither convinced the other, but their conversation succinctly covered the ground that defines the ongoing national debate on how to address ongoing discrimination against people of color.

“The country is more divided now than ever,” Feldman said about the #BlackLivesMatter movement in an interview. “Protesters are making it sound like cops are evil. … There is so much hate and moronic stuff coming out now. This county’s got to pull together. That’s why I was so pissed off.”

Raytaylor, in an interview, said disrupting daily life by marching provides a forum to push for progress on racial issues in a society resistant to change.

“I think that inequality is f—-d up and it should be slowing down and coming to a halt, but it doesn’t seem like that’s going to happen any time soon so this is very necessary, very necessary,” said Raytaylor, a senior at Bard College. “I told her that if she is annoyed it is a little more than annoying to have your families murdered constantly. People being murdered, that’s not annoying. It’s infuriating.”

A common sense of urgency prevailed among the activists throughout the event known by the hashtag #RiseUpOctober and organized by philosophy professor Cornel West and Carl Dix of the Revolutionary Communist Party, USA.

The event — billed as a “National March in NYC,” with the slogans “Stop Police Terror!” and “Which Side Are You On?” — drew hundreds of activists from around the country. More than a dozen family members of victims of police shootings attended. The organizers urged the crowd to press for police reform as the means to reach a more equitable society. The absence of criminal charges against police who have killed people of color factored heavily into their rhetoric.

“Police are killing us all over this country. Those of us who thought we lived in a region where we thought we were safe got a wakeup call,” said Reverend Jerome McCorry. “We will ask the question, ‘Have you ever seen a good policeman?’ and I will say ‘No’ because I don’t see them testifying against each other.”

No indictments were issued in the cases of Garner and Brown. In addition, a U.S. Department of Justice probe also cleared Darren Wilson, the officer who killed Brown, of any federal charges.

A sense of justice eludes Cephus Johnson, whose nephew Oscar Grant was shot in the back in Oakland, California, on New Year’s Day 2009. The police officer who shot Grant served a two-year prison sentence for involuntary manslaughter.

Johnson invoked a quote from Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. when he told the crowd why he had come to New York City in memory of his nephew.

“Cowards ask, is it safe? Expediency asks, is it political? Vanity asks, is it popular? But conscience asks, is it right?” he said. “There comes a time when neither safe, political or vanity is why you stand. You stand up because it is right. Rise up!”

West added that the rally and march were about “love.” But filmmaker Quentin Tarantino told the crowd that he had to call “murderers the murderers.” The crowd cheered.

The timing of the “Pulp Fiction” director’s comments sparked a furor since Police Officer Randolph Holder — a third-generation cop and immigrant from Guyana — had been fatally shot just days earlier while trying to arrest a career criminal in East Harlem. New York and Los Angeles police unions promptly called for a boycott of Tarantino’s movies.

There was room for further vitriol toward law enforcement as the march made its way north. A few people among the activists hurled aspersions toward the police, such as “pig,” or “The only good cop is a dead cop.” But the march as a whole peacefully made its way through the West Village and Chelsea.

“Shut it down!” the marchers chanted, as police contained the march to one lane of Sixth Ave. to keep traffic flowing.

The point of marching is to express frustration that, despite some progress, black and brown people still face entrenched racism in America, explained Rahim Mcillwain, a Harlem resident, who was marching with his daughter Ablessin, 10.

“I think that today should bring about an understanding and letting the people as a whole know what we’re going through,” he said. “There’s a lot on my mind. Words can’t really express how I really feel.”

After rallying again at the intersection of W. 42nd St. and Sixth Ave., a group of about one hundred activists moved on to Times Square. A woman scaled the statue of playwright George Cohan just before a ruckus erupted between police and the protesters. A black man with a child on his shoulders had been standing on a nearby bench and was suddenly thrown to the ground by police and swiftly taken away. The remaining crowd jeered at the stone-faced police, who arrested several other protesters that day.

White people among the marchers said that they couldn’t know on a personal level the sentiments of their black and brown counterparts who say they feel targeted by police on a daily basis. Twenty blocks to the south, Hannah Raytaylor made that case to Eileen Feldman, but the #RiseUpOctober march was as much about self-improvement as spreading the word, Raytaylor said.

“It’s not my experience,” Raytaylor said. “I am of privilege. I have never really had real struggle in my life and I’m aware of that and I want to be able to raise my awareness as much as possible, be as conscious of a human as I can.”