Mott Haven, The Bronx, and the Summer Protest I’ll Never Forget
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Since I began my graduate program, I’ve been to the Bronx three times. Before this past month, I had only been twice. Once to visit a friend, and another time to protest racial injustice during the summer of 2020. I’ve never written about that summer because it never felt right to do so.
It had taken my crew and I about an hour to get to Mott Haven that night from Brooklyn but we were determined. We knew the crowd in the Bronx would be smaller because it wasn’t Manhattan or Brooklyn. Mott Haven was a predominantly black and brown neighborhood only known in the mainstream media for violence, and we wanted to make sure we protested there, that we showed up in support of this community. We had no idea what would unfold.
We marched for maybe 45 minutes. The entire time I felt something in the air. There was a tension so palpable, I kept one hand on a friend, on my roommate, on Leo. My white friends went to the back — they didn’t want to take up space — but I was scared something was going to happen. The cops were too quiet and it felt like there were so many of them, in such weird places, like behind trees or in cars, not just at the usual corners of the streets. 10 minutes before curfew, as the crowd began to turn a corner, it happened. Suddenly, people were screaming and on top of each other. People were falling all around me, I began to reach and search for my people. I came with a group of 7–8 folks; some of color, two were parents. The way the cops kettled us, the small group of us that showed up that night compared to the 10,000 protesters that were present the weekend before in Manhattan, the beatings I witnessed take place from a foot away. My friend Mikey texted me that he was minutes away, keeping me calm as I trembled with fear. There was smoke, loud shots, and so many cops with so many bikes and they used them to pin us down. We were so outnumbered by the police, we didn’t even realize that to them this wasn’t a protest, it was a street fight and we were going to lose. It was the epitome of walking into the lion’s den. I tried to get as many of my people out as I could. Some of them, the whiter ones, stood unscathed.
Eventually my friend Mikey showed up and pulled me out. He said we had to go. It was still getting worse. So I grabbed the friends I had managed to pull out of the rubble and we ran. Mikey had a car, and he’d begun driving in my direction 30 minutes before when I told him something in the air felt off. A handful of cops looked away from us as we ran away from the kettling. They looked away from what their colleagues were doing to our friends. Another organizer had asked some tenants she’d worked with in the past if we could use their apartment as a safe house. I’m not even sure how she found out where we were, but pretty quickly my phone was littered with messages: “Are you okay? Aurora found a safe house. Go there.”
This is one of the many traits I love about organizers — they move quickly, they’re incredibly efficient. Within an hour, word had spread throughout the many organizing threads on Signal that cars were being trapped in Mott Haven. The people who had managed to get free from being kettled and attempted to run to safety in the homes of folks nearby had been arrested too. Police had broken into those homes and arrested the folks inside as well. Pictures, videos, people asking for the whereabouts of their friends led to a constant dinging. My phone was fighting for its life. The air was panic, panic was the air. Thankfully, Aurora had found a home a bit further away from the violence. We were safe, or at least safe enough to smoke a cigarette on the roof while I came up with a plan.
I ordered $100 worth of McDonalds and we sat around the home of a woman none of us knew, waiting. I waited to get some message on my encrypted messaging app about where jail support would be set up, where the National Lawyer Guild volunteers were, if any of them had been spared from the beatings. I was checking online too — Instagram, Twitter, anything that would tell me this atrocity, this direct abuse of human rights was being reported somewhere. I saw nothing. I wasn’t shocked, just fucking irritated. I needed to know how I could help, where I could find jail support. All I could think about was my friends and how I had been the one locked up the weekend before and they’d found me. Later on, the photo above would go viral. Blurred in the background is a white man with a backwards black cap on and a black mask. That is one of my closest friends, Leo. He was transferred to a precinct back in Brooklyn that night and held in a crowded cell during the height of COVID for close to 18 hours without food or water, like many others. The woman pictured above started the march with me. She didn’t end with me though. Although everybody knows NLG volunteers shouldn’t be arrested, the cops took every opportunity to abuse us that night and arrested those people anyways.
Eventually, I realized that folks had been taken to the 40th precinct and that there weren’t enough volunteers to run jail support there, so a couple of my friends and I set up shop while the other half joined folks organizing jail support at other precincts. The cops waited until we were soaking wet from rain and had spent 45 minutes setting up our support equipment before telling us that our efforts were in vain. Although they’d been watching us set up across from their precinct for well over 30 minutes, the cops waited until we were done and soaking wet to announce… “None of your little friends are here.” At this point it was almost 1am. We were exhausted but determined to find our friends.e packed up and headed towards the other precinct. When we arrived there, we were met with three very exhausted NLG volunteers. They begged us to take over.
“We need folks to do the remaining intakes for the night. We’ve been here for hours.” My three friends and I happily agreed. The volunteers explained that we’d need to take down the information of every person released from the precinct. If the person had any cuts, marks, or blood, we’d need to make a note of that too. We’d also need to take pictures and email them back to NLG. It was 5am before we finished. Between the four of us we processed somewhere between 150–200 people. So many people came out of that precinct caked in dried blood, soaking wet, and hungry.
My friend Leo, the one in the picture, still hadn’t been released. The others had been released at other precincts scattered all over the city. We heard that some people had even been taken to Rikers that night.
It wasn’t until the next day at 2pm that I got a call telling me Leo had been released. He was on his way home. Alone in my 7x9 foot room, I began to cry. I sobbed from exhaustion, from heat, from release. I knew we’d all be okay, relatively speaking. We all knew. This was one night for us, one horrible, brutal night, but we knew it was the reality other folks had lived and faced countless times for no other reason than they were black or brown or poor. I cried mainly because of that fact. While state violence is something I have known and feared my entire life, that summer was different, I was more afraid than I’d ever been.
I have put that night out of my head for so many reasons, or at least tried to. But when I got off the Mott Haven stop last week and popped up in front of the 40th precinct for the first time since that night, something cold and dark ran through me. I clutched my book bag tight, my jawline was hard. I was ready for fucking war again. This time, I’m using something different, something much more difficult to engage with, the written word. Here is my testimony, what I know to be true. Tell me, what is yours?
