Breonna Taylor March Shuts Down Whalley

Two dozen young Black women jumped and danced and sang in the middle of the intersection of Whalley Avenue and Sherman Avenue as several hundred fellow protesters sat in the street and blocked traffic on all sides.

“Black women matter!” the group cheered, a portrait of Breonna Taylor held aloft nearby. ​“Black women matter!”

That spontaneous, cathartic 10-minute dance party came more than two hours into a Thursday evening rally organized by Black Lives Matter New Haven in honor of Taylor.

Taking place well after the sun had set, with cars honking — some in frustration, some in support — all around the island of protesters, the moment represented the emotional climax of a four-hour action filled with grief, outrage, joy, indignation, and an intensely political thirst for justice.

The catalyst for Thursday’s march was a Kentucky grand jury’s decision the day before to not charge the officers who shot and killed Taylor, a 26-year-old emergency medical technician, in her Louisville home in March during a botched drug raid. The only indictment the grand jury did hand down was a charge of wanton endangerment against a now-former detective who shot into Taylor’s neighboring apartments. The grand jury decision has sparked demonstrations throughout the country.

Thursday’s demonstration in New Haven brought together roughly 300 people to the Green — and then into the streets, for three-and-a-half hours of marching and mourning and chanting and blocking of traffic.

“No justice! No peace!” sang out the rally’s organizers, including Ala Ochumare, Sun Queen, Amelia Sherwood, and MiAsia Harris. ​“Say her name! Breonna Taylor!”

Unlike previous Black Lives Matter rallies that took place this summer in the wake of the police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis, Thursday’s march went not to city police headquarters at 1 Union Ave., but rather out into the neighborhoods. It wound through Dwight and Edgewood and Whalley before circling back downtown.

The protest was unaccompanied by any visible police escort, leaving the event’s organizers responsible for navigating hundreds of people for a miles-long journey by foot through the middle of relatively dark city streets and across intersections bustling with car traffic.

“We got time today,” Ochumare (pictured) said multiple times over the course of the night, including when the group blocked the intersection of Chapel Street and Park Street on their way out towards Edgewood.

“We’re not in a rush. We cannot continue to just keep moving like this is not happening. It is very inconvenient for Breonna’s family to be having to bury her. It’s very inconvenient for each and every one of us to be here because we’re risking our lives.” To the drivers honking their car horns behind the demonstration, she said, either turn around or stay parked or, better yet, get out and join the group.

“We’re gonna be here,” she said. ​“We’re taking up all these spaces. We got time today, y’all.”

“It’s About Change”

Young protesters — many walking over from Yale’s campus and wearing blue face masks stamped with the university’s white Y logo — started arriving at the Green at around 5 p.m.

Amistad High School students Tanayah Longs, Natenen Conde, and Julie Hajducky (pictured) said they turned out for Thursday’s action primarily to ​“honor Breonna Taylor’s legacy,” as Hajducky said.

“Her family has gone through so much,” she said.

She said that protests like New Haven’s, as well as those taking place all across the country this week, play a dual role of providing direct emotional support for Taylor’s grieving family as well as letting politicians and law enforcement know that many view the grand jury’s decision as the opposite of justice.

“As a young Black woman, it hurts,” Conde said about both Taylor’s death at the hands of police and at the zero indictments handed down to the officers who shot and killed her.

East Shore resident Marissa Harris, her 11-year-old daughter Isis Harris, and her mother Marcia Smith (pictured right to left) said that all three generations of their family had been closely following the months of protests that took place in Louisville after police killed Taylor. Smith and Harris said they even piled their family into a car and drove 15 hours to Kentucky earlier this month to participate first-hand in one of those protests.

“It just affected me,” Harris said about Taylor’s death. ​“She’s like family. I’m really saddened and disappointed in the justice system.”

Smith said she was particularly struck by how Louisville police were ​“up in arms” over the ongoing protests surrounding Taylor’s death. ​“We are citizens of the United States of America,” Smith said. ​“We have every right to protest and to exercise our First Amendment rights.”

“It’s not just about Breonna Taylor now,” she continued. ​“It’s about change. It took 400 years, and we’re still fighting.”

By the time the event’s organizers and featured speakers were ready to address the full crowd with megaphones, they too spoke of a deep-seated grief and anger and righteous indignation surrounding Taylor’s death and the grand jury’s decision.

“These last two days have been tumultuous,” said Sherwood. ​“We’ve been in pain. We continue to be in pain. Black women all over the world are enraged. We are hurt. We are tired.”

“The system just chews us up and throws us away,” Ochumare said. ​“I wish we didn’t have to do this work.” She said protests and mass uprisings ideally create positive, systemic change that betters the lives of Black and brown and queer people.

“Rage is a righteous and sacred emotion,” said Spring Glen Church Rev. Jack Davidson. ​“I am not here to ease your anger, but to encourage you to channel it towards justice. To let you use it for strength and courage. To remind you that Black Lives Matter. That Breonna Taylor’s life mattered. And that the bullets that went through her body deserved an indictment more than the bullets that went through the plaster in a wall.”

State Sen. Gary Winfield (pictured) agreed. ​“Her name is Breonna Taylor,” he said. ​“She is a beautiful, brilliant young woman who was taken from us not because of any particular issue that happened on that day, but because the soil that this country has grown up from has been poisoned from the beginning.” That history of anti-Black racism and chattel slavery, he said, still reverberates in this country’s disparate treatment of Black and brown people.

“Do not accept when people tell you what can’t be done,” he continued. Mass movements and political persistence can make a change.

100s Hit The Streets

With Black Lives Matter flags raised high and masks wrapped tightly around faces, hundreds of the action’s attendees then marched from the Green and into the middle of Chapel Street.

“Justice for … !” Ochumare shouted into her megaphone.

“Breonna Taylor!” the crowd replied.

“It is our duty to fight for our freedom,” Ochumare said in another call-and-response with the crowd. ​“It is our duty to win. We must love and respect one another. We have nothing to lose but our chains.”

Ochumare, Sun Queen, Sherwood, and Jeremy Cajigas took turns keeping the front line of marchers in an even row and walking at a slow enough clip to ensure that no one at the end of the group got left behind. Upon reaching an intersection one of the organizers would call on participants to rush up and block oncoming traffic to clear the way for the hundreds of people marching forward in the street.

They paused at Chapel and Park, and at Chapel and Orchard Street, before turning right on Sherman Avenue and making their way up to Whalley Avenue.

By then, the sun had fully set, leaving the crowd illuminated only by the stray streetlight and the lights spilling out from doorways and windows filled with onlookers, many of whom cheered the protesters on.

When the marchers got to Whalley and Sherman, Ochumare walked out into the Whalley Avenue intersection with a few others to raise their hands and stop cars on the six-lane road from moving forward. The roughly 200 people still with the march proceeded into the intersection, with many sitting in all four crosswalks, forming a boundary for a space in the center ultimately filled by the impromptu, joyful dance party.

Amistad High School music teacher John Galusha (pictured) served as a human beatbox for the night, providing the vocal equivalent of bass drum kicks and snare hits, all amplified through a speaker he carried in his backpack.

Many drivers stuck in traffic decided to turn around and pursue another route. An ice cream truck driver decided to stay put on the northern end of the intersection, and found a few happy customers looking for refreshment.

Robin Ellington (pictured) took the mic after the dance party and brought the group back to the particular life — and death — that spurred the night’s action. She referenced the $12 million settlement that the City of Louisville came to with Taylor’s family earlier this month.

“$12 million is not good enough when you take my family and put them down,” she said. ​“No, it’s not good enough. It should never be good enough. Prosecute her killers! Prosecute her killers!”

Cajigas (pictured), one of the lead organizers with Citywide Youth Coalition, led the crowd in chant after chant on their slow walk back down Whalley Avenue towards downtown.

“I ain’t get no sleep cause of y’all,” they shouted. ​“Y’all never gonna sleep cause of me!”

And, ​“Mama, mama can’t you see, what this system’s done to me. They lock us up and shoot us down. There’s no justice in this town.”

One of the last intersections that the marchers blocked Thursday night was at Elm Street and York Street. The protesters sat down once again, and this time Ochumare gave her most explicit call to political action of the night.

She said protests like Thursday’s are not just pressure valves to let off pent up anger and frustration and grief. They’re also opportunities to find and inspire a new generation of local political leaders.

“We definitely have to vote,” she said. ​“But it’s also time for us to identify other people in our city and our community, people have gained this knowledge through lived experience.” Those people need to be running for alder, she said. And for mayor and for state representative and for state senator.

“You younger people, y’all are the people we want to get into aldermanic seats,” she said. ​“It is so imperative for us to make a lasting change.”

The march ended just after 9:30 p.m., back at the flagpole on the Green, where an altar to Taylor set up the night before (pictured) remained. It included a picture of her, rose petals, and dozens of unlit candles. Ochumare and a few others took out lighters and lit up the candles, providing a wavering orange glow in the near-black darkness of the Green.

Click on the Facebook Live videos below to watch Thursday night’s protest.