Why I Protest: Isaiah Williams On What Led Him Downtown Saturday
Williams felt called to action to protest the loss of life here and around the world.
Inside of me I feel scared. I can be pulled over and questioned and asked who I am and where I'm going. If I move too quick, or if they don't know who I am, and they just look at me because I’m a black man with dreads, they might look at me as a threat or they might pull out a weapon.
I felt called to action to go out and protest for the loss of a life of a great man in the community and other people who lost their lives around the world. I called my buddy Kyle, he's a local videographer. We got together to record and take some footage. We got down there a little bit after 2 p.m. when it started. You could already feel the energy and it felt amazing because you could see how many people showed up.
Everyone was wearing face masks because obviously we're still going through a pandemic. It goes to show how deep the love is for one another when you can stand up for something that you really believe in and you think is right even during a pandemic.
Eventually the crowd keeps moving and we get to the Justice Center. Some of the crowd go up to the steps and stand there with their signs and talk to the police and voice their frustrations. Then another part of the crowd kind of split off and went down around the corner. For the most part, people were there in peace and protest. The cops started to create a line in front of these people because they were throwing water bottles at the Justice Center, and then they came out and they started macing people.
The Black Lives Matter group were there in peace and there was another group wearing like Antifa-type gear and they had first aid and they knew how to put out the tear gas grenades. It kind of kept the protest going and kept it alive by having this group there. But the police officers started to get more and more frustrated that they couldn't disrupt this protest, and they started to throw flash-bangs to disperse the crowd.
You could tell there was a lot of frustration and pain because there were a lot of people who wanted to be heard and then the violence kind of escalated where they were breaking things around the officers, and the officers are throwing tear gas and shooting rubber bullets. And then, out of nowhere, probably about two hours into it, there were two police cars on fire.
After I went to the peaceful protest, I kind of wanted to just take some time to think about everything and stay home and stay away from the chaos.
I feel like people are starting to see the world for what it is, and the pain and suffering that we all experience separately but together. There’s kind of like an awakening of consciousness where it's painful and uncomfortable to have to see what's going on and put yourself in someone else's shoes. But this awakening is part of the healing of our nation. We have to really look within ourselves and try and find a way where we can all evolve because we're really holding each other back.
