“I Will Say Your Name:” Washington Protests Continue
Less than 24 hours after the president ordered an assault on peaceful protesters outside the White House, the demonstrators returned to Lafayette Square.
This time, the police had pushed the barricades as far back as H Street, completely blocking off Lafayette Square. Protesters stood at the edge of fences and fanned out into side streets, together alternating in chants that have emerged in the wake of George Floyd’s death.
The night before, they gathered by the hundreds (at least) downtown to protest police brutality in the U.S. At 6:30 PM, thirty minutes before D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser’s curfew would set in, police broke the crowds, spraying tear gas and rubber bullets, causing mass panic.
The violence continued well into the night, where for the first time in this crisis the military deployed Black Hawks helicopters — normally used for military operations abroad — to disperse the crowds. From there, people fled on foot through the city.
Using their phones, protesters shared shocking videos online showing helicopters hovering dangerously low to the ground, causing debris to fly and threatening tree branches to snap over their heads. By 11:00 PM, the helicopters had trapped an estimated more than one hundred people at the intersection of 15th and Swann, far from the White House and into the residential DuPont neighborhood.
One Swann Street resident, Rahul Dubey, is being hailed as a local hero for opening the door to his townhouse and sheltering some of the protesters.
By Wednesday, the White House Twitter account’s posts made clear the reason for the sudden show of violence on June 1. President Trump, accompanied by an entourage, walked across the street to St. John’s Episcopal Church to pose for a photo holding a Bible, smiling.
The bizarre display was documented and produced in what appears to be an attempt by the White House to appeal to the president’s Christian base.
The White House account then later tweeted a statement President Trump, saying that the U.S. military “stands ready” to intervene the “criminals and mobs who have infiltrated peaceful protests with violence and anarchy.”
If there are any detractors in the Republican party, they are silent. Leading the charge to Trump’s defense was Senator Tom Cotton of Arkansas, who today published an op-ed with The New York Times defending the deployment of armed troops on American civilians on home soil. “The rioting has nothing to do with George Floyd,” the senator wrote.
Using language from the White House, Cotton called the protests “anarchy” fueled by looting.
The COVID-19 pandemic has already altered D.C.’s normally full streets and crowded metro stations. Even months before when the crisis began to really hit the U.S., there has been a noticeable increase in the number and frequency of helicopters across the city.
It wasn’t until June 1 that they were joined by Black Hawks and other military-grade vehicles for use against civilians. The sound of helicopters circling over the city could be heard well into the night — even at a distance from the district’s residential areas.
None of this stopped protesters from returning the next day, where as early as 2 PM (and possibly earlier), a small crowd had already gathered outside the White House.
It was hard not to stand there and think of how fragile the peace was, knowing that in a moment the gathering could descend to chaos at the firing of a rubber bullet or pepper spray.
“Hands Up! Don’t Shoot!” Protesters yelled, holding their hands in the air. This has become both a chant of rage and a message to the police and National Guard on the other side of the barricades.
“Who do you protect?” The crowd screamed.
Even so fresh off the violence of June 1, it was clear that some came as agitators. Early in the day, a small handful of young white protesters could be found at the front of the crowd, seeking out space in front of the police. There were moments where they would shake the fence and scream, putting others visibly on edge.
They are an example of the young white people who have never experienced racism or the violence that comes with it that are channeling their rage inappropriately by escalating the protests. They were in the minority on June 2, and easily dwarfed by the numbers, but they remain a dangerous element to these protests, providing a scapegoat for political leaders looking to denounce the movement.
As the numbers increased, protest leaders guided the group away from Lafayette Square and up to Logan Circle. The next hour or so saw the crowds swell, everyone following the lead of a group of young black men at the front.
In the three-mile loop from Lafayette Square, up 14th Street, and back down 16th, the men would occasionally halt the march and ask everyone to take a knee. Even when they could not be heard across the sea of heads that stretched down 14th Street, the streets grew quiet.
“We are everywhere,” one said into a loudspeaker from 14th street, where in front of him hundreds sat kneeling in the late afternoon heat.
“I will say your name,” one of the protest leaders boomed into the microphone. “I will not go quietly into the night.”
Whether they had intended to or found an opportunity to speak, the men who ended up leading the protest of June 2 knew that their audience included white people and other minorities, many of whom were joining the Black Lives Matter movement for the first time.
Gathered on the steps of the Freemason Network building on 16th street, the men again took the microphone: “We gotta stop looting. We gotta stop that,” they implored. “It starts with us.”
As the crowd observed their call for a thirty-second moment of silence, a surveillance helicopter whirred overhead.
By the time they had looped back to Logan Circle, the protest that had begun with a few hundred had swelled to at least a thousand.
Twenty-four hours after the police attacked peaceful protesters, they stood again, in larger numbers, before the barricades.
“No justice, no peace.”
