Eventually, they knelt. Lexington protesters, police show what’s possible amid national chaos.
They knelt.
Protesters and police knelt together Sunday night at the biggest protest we’ve seen in Lexington. The protesters swallowed their rage and pain over Breonna Taylor and George Floyd. The police swallowed their pride, first one officer in riot gear who got on one knee in front of the police station, then a whole group. Together, they found a moment of, maybe not redemption, but one instance of peace as the country continues to explode around us.
My colleage, Morgan Eads, captured it all on Twitter, and her wording was perfect: “Protesters screamed ‘kneel with us’ to police repeatedly. And eventually they did.”
Eventually they did. Eventually, the Lexington police realized they could do better than their brethren in Louisville, Minneapolis and New York who attacked protesters and journalists. Detective Cody McMillen was one of them; he said that tension was high because police were worried about violence. He was standing in front of the police department and heard the protesters ask them to take a knee, and he heard Chief Lawrence Weathers say, if you want to take a knee, go ahead. So he did.
“I wanted them to know that I heard them,” McMillen said. “They want change and I hear that, I sympathize with them.”
The mood changed, he said. “The crowd went from angry and sad to a huge round of applause, happiness and joy.” A woman, Qina Morones, in front of him broke down crying, then asked to hug him. “At that point, it rang true to me, they’re not here to hurt us or destroy property, they have a message and they want to be heard.”
Tavia Chester, a black teacher and organizer with StreetGodZ, a public art group, was also there, and called the moment very moving.
“That made us feel they want us to be heard,” she said. “Our children should not be scared of the police.”
“Eventually” is slow and requires patience. In 1994, a young black man named Tony Sullivan was shot and killed in a Bluegrass-Aspendale apartment by a white police officer, who was never criminally charged. Eventually, in 2001, Lexington hired its first black police chief, Anthany Beatty, who had risen through the ranks. Eventually, then-Mayor Jim Gray hired another black chief, Weathers, who grew up in the same housing complex as Sullivan.
We thought the deaths of Michael Brown and Eric Garner in 2014 and 2015, and the national protests that followed, would eventually lead to changes in policing norms in black communities. Eventually didn’t quite happen.
Sarah Williams works with Cooperation Lexington, which organized the Friday and Sunday protests. Williams also worked in Ferguson five years ago. She was not that impressed with the Lexington police officers taking a knee, but had her own revelation when she and other black organizers were surrounded by hundreds of white allies, standing between them and the police.
“It was absolutely amazing, that speaks to the power of the moment that people who see us and love us,” she said. “That’s the key to the change we need. Not some violent tear-everything-down revolution, but an internal spiritual revolution. The revolution has to involve a shift in mindset that last night seemed so present and so possible.”
Now, Williams said, Cooperation Lexington will work on the more tangible: accountability for Donovan Stewart, the Lexington police chaplain accused of punching an autistic black teenager at Fayette Mall last year.
Protests can be peaceful and still show the need for desperate change in the way we police, the way we educate, the way we govern, the way we take care of people. We have to do a better job with this 400-year-old experiment known as America.
Let’s make it sooner than eventually.
This story was originally published June 1, 2020 at 2:03 PM.
