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Bryan Stevenson on The Frustration Behind The George Floyd Protests [newyorker.com]

 

By Isaac Chotiner, The New Yorker, June 1, 2020

The past weekend saw the start of an uprising in dozens of American cities, with tens of thousands of people taking to the streets for peaceful protests and violent encounters with the police. The proximate cause was the killing of George Floyd, an unarmed, handcuffed African-American man, by a Minneapolis police officer, Derek Chauvin. In Minneapolis and other cities, police in riot gear have responded aggressively to protests and looting, pushing and shoving protesters and using an arsenal of crowd-control weaponry. In Louisville, a black restaurant owner was shot dead, under circumstances that remain unclear; in Brooklyn, social media captured an incident in which police officers drove into a crowd of protesters.

On Sunday, I spoke by phone with Bryan Stevenson, a civil-rights lawyer and the founder of the Equal Justice Initiative, a human-rights organization that challenges convictions, advocates for criminal-justice reform and racial justice, and created the National Memorial for Peace and Justice, in Montgomery, Alabama, which honors the victims of lynching and other forms of racial terror during the Jim Crow era. Stevenson, who was the subject of a Profile, by Jeffrey Toobin, in 2016, is also the author of a memoir, “Just Mercy,” which was made into a feature film last year. During our conversation, which has been edited for length and clarity, Stevenson and I discussed the roots of police violence in both slavery and Jim Crow, how to change the culture of policing, and the frustration and despair behind this week’s protests.

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