Whether in Midtown, Downtown or even suburban Collierville, protests continued across Shelby County over the weekend, calling for various law enforcement reforms and focusing attention on personal experiences with systemic racism.
“If I don’t stand up for this, I may be next,” says 30-year-old Derrico Golden, who joined hundreds of others Saturday night Downtown. He added that as a black man with tattoos, “I’ve been stereotyped a lot, a lot.”
Operating under a 10 p.m. curfew since Monday, protesters numbering in the hundreds have led marches into the night with spirited and emotional chants remembering victims of police brutality and demanding change. On Sunday, Mayor Jim Strickland pushed curfew back by one hour until 11:00 p.m.
After law enforcement used tear gas and force at times to disperse crowds last weekend, this week, the rallies have largely taken place without incident, with police blocking street traffic for demonstrators. One exception was Friday night, when drivers of two separate vehicles were accused of purposefully striking a Midtown march at different points in the evening. According to the Commercial Appeal, at least one protester was struck by one of the cars, who by Saturday afternoon had mostly recovered from minor injuries as a result of the crash.
The Memphis Police Department announced the driver of that car has been charged withreckless endangerment and reckless driving. The second driver received a citation for running a red light. MPD says the incident is still under investigation.
“How long do we have to say we're tired of this?” County Commissioner Tami Sawyer asked after the Friday night incident, questioning why the second driver was not arrested at the scene.
Momentum for the demonstrations does not appear to be waning, even after 11 consecutive nights of rallies.
About a dozen African American state and local lawmakers promised Saturday morning to enact policy changes such as re-examining funding for law enforcement.
Former University of Memphis basketball player Will Coleman attended his first march Saturday night, saying that black athletes are often only valued for their contributions on the court.
“Once people start to see us as people instead of athletes or instead of the revenue that we bring into a university or things of that matter, then I think that’s when we’ll start to see a little movement on the needle,” he says.
For Camile Melton-Brown, her husband Mike, two young children and one of her students, activism is a family affair.
They attended Saturday night’s Downtown march, which started and ended at the ‘I AM A MAN’ Plaza and drew upwards of 300 people.
Melton-Brown, the principal at Freedom Preparatory Academy, says honesty is the best policy to help her young people make sense of current events.
“We just tell them what’s going on, what happens,” she says. “As much as we love them, and we try to give them the best education [and] protect them, that unfortunately, not everyone sees them as equal so it’s important to be equipped with knowledge to know your rights but when things like this happen, [we] band together to fight injustice.”
Melton-Brown’s young daughter Leila Camile is currently reading about the civil rights movement of the ‘50s and ‘60s.
“Not only adults can be a part of movements, but children can speak up too,” she adds.
Mike Brown says the next generation will still be dismantling legacies of systematic racism.
“Honestly, no matter how hard black and brown people fight for this, it’s up to white people to do it. White people are going to have to change,” he says. “Sometimes you have to bring the problem to people’s doorstep for them to understand that it’s time to change. So right now we’re at America’s doorstep.”