As I watched the protests, something inside me clicked this time. I knew I had to go. It wasn’t just that Diallo looked like me. But seeing his merciless killing, after all the other incidents, underscored the vulnerability of navigating the world in Black skin. He could have been me; I could have been him. He was just a hardworking young Black man, saving up money to go to college. I hurt for his heartbroken mother, who had watched her son travel to America with such hope. I hurt for his interrupted dreams and for my people whose skin alone made us such targets of hatred and violence.
Some of my seminary classmates were feeling the same. At least one of them, the Reverend Anthony Lee, now a Maryland-based pastor, was snatched and thrown against a gate by four plain clothes police officers who bolted from a rickety looking car and ran toward him one cold winter night as he was walking back to the seminary. Not knowing whether the men were officers or muggers, he decided that it was best not to run.
In a very tense moment, as they were frisking him, one officer yelled “gun” although he was unarmed. Seeing his life flash before him, he said, “I am a student at Union Theological Seminary. My ID is in my right front pocket.” After everything checked out, one officer advised, “Don’t act so nervous the next time.”
Given what was happening around us and sometimes to us, it didn’t make much sense for us to be talking about justice in the classroom and singing about it in church if we weren’t willing to get in the struggle in the streets.
So I gathered up a small group, and we took the subway as close as we could and walked the rest of the way to the precinct. Throngs of others were already there, some with signs, calling for justice. As one group of protesters crossed the line of demarcation, were handcuffed, and were put in the back of a police van, the next group stepped up.
My group just flowed with the crowd, moving closer to the line and our eventual arrest. I’d never been arrested before, but I knew without a doubt that I was doing the right thing, that this was my time to get in the fight, to put my body in the game, to participate in the civil disobedience that I had heretofore just read about or witnessed from afar.