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Portland Awakens
This City Will Not Sleep
This article first appeared in It’s Going Down
In the beginning, we were many. We were thousands. Exploding into the street after watching a video of horror both strange and all-too-familiar: a video of a nine-minute murder, of a killer indifferent to the pleas of the bound man he choked and crushed to death. Broad daylight, on film, unprosecuted. Another police murder. Another black person dead.
As the video circulated, things began to shatter. Hearts. Trust. Restraint. Patience.
Glass.
We marched through these streets — our streets — to the sound of shattered windows. We screamed the names of the dead to the heavens as though they might be able to hear, as though we might rouse them and reverse the brutality that ended their lives. From above: silence. Some crimes are unforgivable, irreversible. But the future is not yet written: we could stop this from happening again, we must stop it by any means necessary. Voices united in a pledge, a pact: “No Justice, No Peace.”
There was no justice, and so there was no peace. The police quickly set aside their PR platitudes and came for us…
