Tired, Not Sleeping

Tavonna Lewis stood last Sunday at the edge of the plaza at the Grand Concourse and Fordham Road, where a protest march was about to start. It was her first ever demonstration. She said she was excited—and exhausted. The long lists of names on T-shirts and signs, some with writing so small they conveyed an impression of pain rather than a precise roster of those murdered, were stacks of weight that accumulated and slowly crushed. “Everyone is tired,” Lewis said. “It has to stop.”

All around there was evidence of exhaustion. One marcher's black t-shirt read “I'm tired of being tired.” A few blocks into the demonstration, a city bus pulled up and the driver held out an “I can't breathe” sign. A roar of approval came from the crowd for his act of defiance and solidarity. There was hope in the fact that he was tired enough to do something. So were they.

During times when I was not reporting, I've marched against a lot of things in my life—the 1994 Contract With America, Rudy Giuliani's budget cuts, the 1996 immigration law, the Iraq War—but there was always a sadness in those events. Maybe it was realizing that we wouldn't win, and were just going through the motions.

This stuff is different. At the rallies and marches I have covered in recent weeks, there is pain, fury and sorrow. But there is also a shocking, joyful presence of optimism. It seems to come from a sense that, this time, there is a chance—and that, after all this time, there's no choice.

“Do not go home satisfied. This doesn't end here,” a protest leader, Justin Pando, told the crowd at a Van Cortlandt Park sit-in on Saturday. “Now is the chance to stand on the right side of history, to take control of the system we built and the people we employ. Let us demand basic decency for Black people that has never existed in a country we built for free.”

When I was growing up, schools had only recently begun observing Black History Month in February. But my second-grade teacher, Ms. Olga Calendar (the only Black teacher I ever had) kept the Black history posters and Black heroes' portraits up all year. In retrospect, the message seems clear: This isn't part of the story. This is the story. She must have been tired, too.

Jarrett Murphy
executive editor

Policing & Protest

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