Nearly two weeks after the Death of George Floyd, a small-town protest in Ashtabula 65 miles east of Cleveland caught the attention of Kate Dedinsky and Adam Grindler.
“You wouldn’t really expect a protest in Ashtabula,” says Grindler, one-half of the indie-pop duo, the Baker’s Basement. “It made us curious to see where else this was happening.”
Their curiosity inspired Mapping a Moment, a multimedia project that measures the scope of early June’s civil rights movement. The online database captures more than 1,600 public demonstrations in more than 1,300 American cities, of which the vast majority were peaceful.
“If you were to just look at headlines, it would seem like violence is sweeping the nation,” says Grindler. “This research made us see that there’s more information here.”
In an accompanying song and music video, lyrics such as “kids drawing posters in Yazoo County, Mississippi, 200 miles away from the nearest big city” document events in a number of surprising places, which also includes the town of Kotzebue, Alaska, 26 miles above the Arctic Circle.
“This small community of people was moved by this horrible thing that has happened, and they feel like they have to go out there even though they’re so far removed from mainland America,” says Grindler. “It’s pretty amazing."
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