“Minneapolis Is Everywhere,” read the sign of one young protester in Brooklyn on Saturday night, during the third day of protests in New York City over the police killing of George Floyd, in Minneapolis, on May 25th. In New York, as in cities across the country, the weekend was marked by a mass uprising and aggressive police action.
A rally on Saturday began on 125th Street in Harlem and headed downtown, at one point blocking the F.D.R. Drive. Groups split up and eventually convened at Washington Square Park before making their way farther downtown. In the evening, protesters clashed with police in the Brooklyn neighborhood of Flatbush, which has lost residents such as Kimani Gray, a sixteen-year-old, to police killings in the past. Some protesters burned police cars and erected barricades using trash. Some threw bricks and bottles at police. There, and throughout the city, police responded with force, using batons and pepper spray and making hundreds of arrests. In one widely circulated video, a police S.U.V. plowed directly into a crowd of protesters. There were also scenes of solidarity. Bus drivers and other motorists honked their horns to the beat of protest chants, and rolled down their windows to cheer with demonstrators. Volunteers wove through the crowds, distributing food, bottled water, and hand sanitizer. The masks that most protesters wore to reduce the spread of the coronavirus turned into wearable protest signs, scrawled with phrases like “Black Lives Matter” and “I Can’t Breathe.” Protesters sang the lyrics of Pop Smoke, a young Brooklyn rapper who was killed, in February, during a home invasion in Los Angeles, and shouted chants: “No justice, no peace”; “I believe we will win.”
