My First Protest
I had no intention of joining the Delmar Loop protest on September 16. I didn’t even know there was a protest scheduled. But after seeing several police cars outside my window and hearing chanting outside, I ran downstairs with my roommate to see what the commotion was. Seeing a mass of people parading slowly down the street lined with police cars, we decided to approach the protest, armed with only our phones and our student IDs. I consider myself far more of a thinker than an activist, so heading downstairs and into a protest, regardless of the cause, was not something I had expected to take part in.
The protest had been scheduled in the wake of the verdict of Jason Stockley, a white St. Louis police officer, who had been acquitted of first-degree murder for the 2011 shooting death of a black man, Anthony Lamar Smith, in a high-speed chase. After Michael Brown, Eric Garner, Philando Castile, and countless others, to many St. Louisans, this verdict represented yet another brick in a wall that has grown far too large.
While I wholly support the notion of fighting against police brutality and improving the lives of Black Americans, I myself had been skeptical of Black Lives Matter protests. Almost every protest I heard about seemed to be followed by countless headlines mentioning that the protest turned violent, and even though there are so many incidents of white cops killing black men, it still doesn’t seem right to fight fire with fire. If we see so many headlines describing protests turning violent, how can the Movement for Black Lives be considered peaceful? How can these so-called “violent” protests be justified?
Back in St. Louis, the location of this Stockley protest was particularly significant. For those unfamiliar with the city, Delmar Boulevard, the thoroughfare on which the Loop sits, is a marker of racial and economic segregation. The Loop itself, a shopping and dining district spanning a few blocks, is typically buzzing and draws patrons from all backgrounds and walks of life from around the area. With the protest underway, however, the energy on the Loop was decidedly different from usual. Multiple university police officers stood in our lobby with riot gear at the ready, and outside the building, the street itself felt almost unfamiliar. Instead of seeing the usual crowd of small groups of people grabbing food and drink and nonstop traffic passing through the street, the only crowd on the street was the protest, and the only moving vehicles were the two police cars following closely behind.
When I left my building, I quelled my skepticism of the movement’s peacefulness and joined the mass of people gathering at the corner of Delmar and Skinker. There were hundreds of people marching through the streets, all from different racial, religious, and economic backgrounds. One had a drum, some had megaphones, and many held signs. There was yelling and chanting. There was a die-in. And there were moments of silence that were only interrupted by the chop of helicopter rotors circling overhead. The only thing missing from this protest, it seemed, was violence. Hundreds of people filled the streets, and traffic stood still as cars rushed to turn around and escape the blockage of the protest. But here I was, standing amidst a protest hundreds-strong, surrounded by police officers, helicopters, and reporters, with no indication of violence at all. The act of walking amidst a crowd yearning for change and channeling their anger and frustration nonviolently was incredibly powerful for me.
My roommate and I followed the protest until about 8:45 p.m., at which time we turned around to head home. The marching, drumming, and chanting continued amidst the sound of the helicopters. When we returned to Delmar, the traffic had resumed and small groups of people had returned to the restaurants and bars. Later on, the protest returned to the Loop once more and made another nonviolent sweep down the street.
It was 11:00 p.m. when I left my apartment to meet up with some friends, and as I walked down Delmar, all appeared to be back to normal. I noticed a small crowd of protesters gathered peacefully at an intersection before I turned a corner and left the Loop. Soon after, from my
understanding, the protest had ended, and the organizers of the protest told the participants to return home.
By the time I arrived at my destination, however, the Loop dynamic had changed again. I received an emergency alert on my phone that advised students against traveling to the Loop because of violence that had broken out. In my absence, windows were smashed, and riot police marched through the streets, arresting some and intimidating others. Although I was just a few blocks away, there was no suggestion that there was militaristic police parade going on back where I had been just before.
I returned to the Loop with some friends at around 2 a.m., and instead of finding the last few restaurants open late amidst a sea of darkened storefronts, I found an entire street of lit-up businesses amidst a sea of broken glass. Two hours after midnight, the Loop was as bright as day, as store owners, friends, and neighbors toiled to undo the damage. Nearly all businesses on the north side of the loop had their windows smashed, so instead of grabbing a bite, I grabbed a broom. As I swept up glass and looked up and down the street, it seemed impossible that a protest that had been such a strong force of positivity hours before could disintegrate into destruction. I went to bed shaken.
When I awoke the next morning, I decided to take a walk down Delmar, expecting to see an empty street of boarded-up businesses and a neighborhood on edge from the night before. I was in for a shock, however, when I exited my building onto a Loop that was as crowded as I had ever seen it. Every broken window that had been boarded up the night before was becoming a mural. At every storefront, artists from all around the community came to paint peace on the plywood. It became instantly clear that a series of destructive actions that had tried to tear the Loop community apart only reinforced the community’s bond and strengthened the calls for peace and unity.
As someone who is not particularly emotional, watching the community rebuild struck a chord with me. From the protesters marching peacefully through the streets, to the helicopters flying overhead, to the small crowd of vandals and the destruction on the loop, to the riot-prepped police officers marching and driving tanks through the streets, to the murals of healing and unity coloring Delmar the next day, the entire weekend felt surreal. While I’m not sure of any statistics, it seemed that many if not most of those individuals painting murals that day had been out peacefully protesting the night before. If the movement itself were truly violent, the protesters wouldn’t be up the next morning calling for peace and healing through art.
[pullquote]If the movement itself were truly violent, the protesters wouldn’t be up the next morning calling for peace and healing through art.[/pullquote]
I write this piece not to excuse the violence exhibited by some but to dispel the oversimplified notion that the Black Lives Matter movement is an inherently violent one. Thankfully, the violence was directed at windows instead of at people, but either way, I was horrified at the destruction that I returned to that night. But even so, the violence remained temporally separate from the protest and detracted from the goal of the peaceful protesters. As a former skeptic of the movement’s peacefulness, I was shocked by how stark the separation was between those peacefully protesting and those breaking windows. What was more remarkable than this separation, however, was the conflation of the two groups in the news. While both the marchers and vandals may have been protesting the same cause, they were, after all, two distinct groups of people, which the headlines seemed to ignore. With this protest, peaceful Black Lives Matter protesters were lumped together with the vandals, for as the headlines read the next day, “Protests on Delmar Loop Turn Violent.” The protest didn’t “turn violent”; a few angry people decided to corrupt the fight for peace, and the peaceful majority was vastly downplayed.
Of course, violent protests do exist. But unless a movement directly advocates for violence, we must separate the moderates from the radicals, and until I observed the effects of this Stockley verdict protest firsthand, I struggled to do so myself. I can now attest that it is impossible to truly understand the dynamics of a protest without physically being present. Even if the power of protest might be hard to fully grasp, if we are to preserve the first amendment right for people to demonstrate peacefully, we must not conflate those who exercise their constitutional freedoms with those who jeopardize them. Furthermore, we must also reckon with the fact that peaceful disruption is often necessary to achieve change. Behind every protest is a group of people yearning for change, and in a country whose social history is shaped by social disruption, we must forgo our biases and encourage Americans to peacefully disrupt. I hope that instead of making excuses about why the Movement for Black Lives is flawed, our country can unite itself to pursue justice in all forms. We can do better.
Ryan Mendelson ‘19 studies in the College of Arts & Sciences. He can be reached at ryanmendelson@wustl.edu.