Will the Floyd protests lead to change? Old activists hope so.
Calvin Taylor, a former member of Memphis' grassroots black activist group The Invaders, said the video of George Floyd dying beneath the knee of a Minneapolis police officer didn't surprise him.
Neither did it surprise David Acey, a former member of the Orange Mound Mobilizers, a group which, in the 1960s, put itself between civil rights protesters and the racists bent on brutalizing them.
Racists who, many times, didn't wear hoods.
They wore badges.
“Most African American people are not surprised,” said Taylor. “We've always had police killings ... we continue to have them.
“I'm surprised at how many have to take place for people to realize that something is fundamentally wrong in our government system for this to continue.”
“This is nothing new,” said Acey. “When I saw that, with the officer's foot on his neck, and the other officers standing there looking, I said this is a modern-day lynching in broad daylight, with the Klan standing around like they used to do …”
The fact that people like Taylor and Acey aren't surprised at Floyd's killing is a tragedy.
That's because they, as well as Coby Smith, a founding member of The Invaders, are now in their 70s. They spent most of their teenage and young adult years protesting segregation, racism and cruelties that many police officers either participated in or abetted.
Their efforts, as well as those of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and the activists who made ending police brutality a key part of civil rights reform, should have, by now, reduced that problem to a footnote in American history.
Instead, it's become another whole chapter.
That's largely because the time when black-and-white footage of African Americans being beaten by police forces run by segregationists spurred Americans, black and white alike, to push for civil rights reform faded.
The conditions that fed the callousness of Derek Chauvin, who apparently thought he could kill Floyd with impunity, returned — if they ever left at all.
Still, Smith and Acey believe that the intensity of the protests, as well as the diversity of the protesters, opens a greater opportunity for a do-over.
“The world is watching, and we never knew that we could get white people to come out like they are coming out now,” Smith said. “These youngsters believe in what they're doing, and they want to see more changes.
“Now, I know a lot of people are pessimistic and they say, ‘Well, you didn't get what you wanted.' Well, no we didn't. But it (change) doesn't happen overnight. And some of the things that I wanted to happen then are happening now.”
Said Acey: “We had whites to march with us in the 1960s, but not like this. There's a diverse community of African Americans, whites, Latinos and everyone who are involved here.”
Yet to see the changes in police reform through, the protests have to translate goals into policy, he said.
“The young crowd now, somebody in those crowds need to emerge from it and have an agenda,” Acey said. “They need to listen to old people like us, because we've been there.”
Like Acey and Smith, I believe that the protests will lead to changes. But it will take constant pressure to make lasting, systemic changes to force police departments to change policies to prioritize black lives over asserting control.
But the tragedy for American Americans is that, once again, one of us had to die in front of an audience to make the world see our pain and act on it.
Yet this time, Smith said, that pain is being shouldered by more people.
“We're being driven crazy by this, but a lot of white people can't live with the fact that what they saw on television (Floyd's slaying) actually happened in real life,” he said.
Perhaps Smith's view is reflected in the slogan, “If you can't breathe, I can't breathe,” that many of the protesters were chanting in Memphis this week.
And maybe it will all help to energize a new movement. One that will stop police brutality and systemic racism from suffocating us all.
You can reach Tonyaa Weathersbee at 901-568-3281 or tonyaa.weathersbee@commercialappeal.com.