Racial justice
Black Lives Matter rallies in Garrettsville enter 13th week, drawing counterprotests
At least 70 people crowded downtown Garrettsville on Thursday, some demanding racial justice and many more who want them to stop
By Carter Eugene Adams, Michael Indriolo and Ben Wolford
A few days after police killed George Floyd in Minneapolis, the protests sweeping the nation reached Garrettsville, where a handful of local residents gathered on Main Street to hasten the end of structural racism.
By last Thursday, Aug. 13, that small group of Black Lives Matter supporters had swelled to about 20. And suddenly they had company: about 50 people chanting “all lives matter,” bearing Trump campaign signs and vowing to return each Thursday until the anti-racist demonstrators go home.
Yesterday afternoon, they kept their promise. Divided by Main Street, under the gaze of local police, the two camps took up their positions and began to yell. In interviews, the Black Lives Matter protesters described a lifetime of racism and microaggressions growing up in Garrettsville, while the counterprotesters, all of them white, denied there are many racists in the village.
When a Portager reporter related to one counterprotester that one of the Black Lives Matter protesters had been the target of racism throughout her life, he said, “That’s bullshit.”
As the afternoon turned to evening, the atmosphere intensified. People drove by shouting out their windows. A pickup truck revved its engine, ejecting a plume of thick exhaust. Police intervened about five times, pulling over drivers who directed obscene gestures at the Black Lives Matter crowd.
“This town is not racial,” said Ivan Krupansky, of Newton Falls, who graduated from James A. Garfield High School in 1983. He said he’s never seen “bodies being dragged down the road tied to the back of trucks” or the Klu Klux Klan in Garrettsville.
“There’s always going to be white people who don’t like Black people, just like there’s always going to be Black people who don’t like white people,” Krupansky said.
The counterprotesters say they began attending the weekly rallies because they do not like how disruptive the Black Lives Matter demonstrators are. Shelli Buchanan, who owns the nearby Garrett’s Mill and Brewing Company, says the protesters have been disruptive to her customers.
One man, a janitor at Hiram College, had been a stalwart attendee of the Black Lives Matter protests, sometimes standing on the sidewalk outside the Village Bookstore by himself with a sign.
“It’s intimidation all the time. And death threats,” he said. “It’s 1950 here, the mentality.”
One day, a Garrett’s Mill bartender asked him to be quiet, and a shouting match ensued.
“And then it snowballed from there into him boycotting us,” Buchanan said. “He started on Facebook. He called us racist. He called me a white-privileged woman, and that was his first words to me. So he’s a nasty man in our eyes, and he lies.”
If that was the genesis of the escalation, it has since taken a more serious turn. The man, who asked not to be identified because he has received death threats, said customers gather on the patio of the restaurant to harass the protesters. Several people said they have been spit at. A Black woman filed a report with the Garrettsville Police Department after a man confronted her at a gas station, shouting “white power.”
No one has been charged in relation to any of the protests.
“People have a right to protest peacefully here in the states,” said Garrettsville Police Chief Tim Christopher. “We wanted to make sure — because of the number of participants that were arriving and coming in, the numbers were continuing to grow — we wanted to make sure that it maintained a peaceful protest and it didn’t cross any lines that would turn criminal in nature.”
The Black Lives Matter protesters say they will continue to line the streets each Thursday afternoon until residents of Garrettsville no longer feel comfortable putting racist behavior on display.
Sasha Gough is a Garfield graduate in her early 20s. She has been one of the key organizers of the protests. “I had one person who was well-known throughout the school to be racist who said to me once, ‘You’re one of the good Blacks,’ or something to that effect,” she said.
“Something I’ve confronted a lot is people being like, ‘Why didn’t you say anything?’” she said. “Well, what was I supposed to say? Who’s going to listen to me?”
Around 8 p.m. last night, someone on the counterprotesters’ side of the street cried out something to suggest that the Black Lives Matter adherents were unpatriotic.
In reply, 20 Black Lives Matter protesters on a sidewalk in downtown Garrettsville, Ohio, sang “America the Beautiful.” Some across the street shook their heads.
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