The next day, in Harlem, the clouds were marshmallow white and the sun shone over the plaza in front of the Adam Clayton Powell, Jr., state office building at 125th Street, where, at one in the afternoon, hundreds of demonstrators streamed in to gather around the statue of Powell, the state’s first black member of the House of Representatives. The day before, Derek Chauvin, the officer who killed George Floyd in Minneapolis, had been charged with third-degree murder. The protesters were not satisfied. “First degree, not third degree!” they shouted. As before, the crowd was multiracial and young, although there were a few more people over forty, and even a few small children. Two people in light blue medical scrubs held a sign that read “Healthcare Workers Against Police Brutality.”
The night before, Mayor Bill de Blasio had said, “We don’t ever want to see another night like this.” That day, perhaps because of his message, or because of the political power of Harlem, the visible police presence was smaller. A dozen or so officers, spaced apart, stood at the entrance of the office building. The demonstrators policed themselves, more or less, waving people off the street to maintain the flow of traffic. The memory of the night before dissipated, and a sense of exhilaration at the gathering of hundreds of people on a beautiful spring Saturday after how many days of social distancing—seventy? eighty?—was undeniable, the anger and risk notwithstanding.
The protest was barely thirty minutes old when a majority contingent began marching south down Adam Clayton Powell Boulevard, walking at a New Yorker’s clip along multiple city blocks. A driver of a Farmland Fresh dairy truck on the northbound side honked to applause; fists were raised through sunroofs; a UPS deliveryman in his brown uniform recorded video on the sidewalk, smiling under his sun visor; a family banged on pots and pans from an upstairs window. “These people, they’ve had enough,” I heard a bystander say, as she recorded the march on her phone.
The march passed the shuttered stores of Harlem—flower shops, laundromats, Ateliers DuBois antiques—the demonstrators happily chanting, “N.Y.P.D., suck my dick.” Any members of the police on hand to hear this kept themselves scarce. At 116th Street, the protesters paused for a moment and knelt, fists raised. A helicopter hovered overhead, but, as the marchers reached F.D.R. Drive, the sun glittering off the East River, they broke into a run of jubilation.
The police closed in at the Ninety-sixth Street exit, a line of bicycles blocking the way on the southbound side. The protesters at the front clashed with them in a flurry of pepper-spraying, shoving, punching, screaming, and zip-tying, arrested protesters shouting out their mothers’ phone numbers as they were dragged into vans, while others scattered at a run. The march fell apart, despite shouted pleas to stay together. A small remainder of a hundred or so people retreated from the highway and gathered under some scaffolding next to a gas station. A young man climbed the scaffold to give a speech. He was black, small, and slight, and wore his hair tied up in a poofy ponytail. He had round gold-framed glasses, pants emblazoned with the NASA logo, and a T-shirt with the words “Speak Out or Shut Up.” The group now had a de-facto leader, and he happened to have a sense of style. He said we could call him Tito. Now Tito reminded everyone of the importance of not scattering at the first sign of police. “Make a friend,” he said, hanging off the scaffolding. “They’re your new brother and sister, new uncle and aunt. Grab their information.” The group, which had seemed on the verge of dissipating, found a renewed sense of purpose. “Remember to be like water, be like water, and follow what they do in Hong Kong and all the other countries. Organize,” he continued. “When they try to block us, we turn the corner.”
“Where we going?” someone asked.
“I don’t know. We gotta figure that out.”
And so the march continued into the heart of the leafy, shuttered, and depopulated Upper East Side, where the drivers who were made to halt looked on with the stone-faced not-seeing that New Yorkers reserve for displays of evangelism on the subway. The marchers passed a person walking a poodle, and a young woman whose velvety Scottish Fold cat glared from her purse. Solitary elders, trapped in their apartments by the coronavirus, gazed down from terraces in bemusement or longing. A hush hung over the leafy side streets, a few masked doormen waving in support from behind glass entryways.
