Graceland, at Last by Margaret Renkl

Author:Margaret Renkl [Renkl, Margaret]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Literary Collections, essays, nature, Travel, United States, South, East South Central (AL; KY; MS; TN)
ISBN: 9781571311849
Google: _i4KzgEACAAJ
Publisher: Milkweed Editions
Published: 2021-11-15T23:44:11.880916+00:00

THESE KIDS ARE DONE WAITING FOR CHANGE

In less than a week, six Nashville teenagers created a march that drew ten thousand peaceful protesters and gave hope to a whole city.

JUNE 15, 2020

In real life, Nya Collins, Jade Fuller, Kennedy Green, Emma Rose Smith, Mikayla Smith, and Zee Thomas had never met as a group when they came together on Twitter to organize a youth march against police violence. It was unseasonably hot, even for Middle Tennessee, with rain predicted. Earlier protests here had ended in violence, with the Metro Nashville Courthouse and City Hall in flames. Collectively, these are not the most promising conditions for gathering a big crowd, much less a calm one. But the teenagers were determined to press on, even if hardly anyone showed up.

On June 4, five days later, the founding members of Teens for Equality—as the young women, ages fourteen to sixteen, call their organization—were leading a march of protesters some ten thousand strong, according to police estimates. “I was astonished,” Kennedy Green, fourteen, told me in a phone interview last week. “I did not know there were that many people in Nashville who actually see a problem with the system. I was like, ‘Oh, my gosh, there are so many people here who actually care.’”

The protesters, most in their teens and twenties, chanted “Black lives matter” and “No justice, no peace” and “Not one more” as they marched for more than five hours. There was not one hint of disarray in their ranks, no angry confrontations with National Guardsmen or police officers clad in riot gear.

“As teens, we are desensitized to death because we see videos of Black people being killed in broad daylight circulating on social media platforms,” said Zee Thomas, fifteen, in a speech that opened the march. “As teens, we feel like we cannot make a difference in this world, but we must.”

They already have. The march they organized—with advice from the local chapter of Black Lives Matter—was one of the largest protests against white supremacy in Nashville history. Mayor John Cooper has responded to the protests by announcing that Nashville police officers will begin wearing body cameras next month. The cameras have been long planned and also long delayed, despite strong public support amid an increasingly frayed relationship between the police department and many of the communities they serve.

When these Teens for Equality look around them, what they see is the strength in their numbers and the power of their own voices. Those of us who are long past our own teen years have watched powerful social movements rise and fall. We have seen hard-earned social change walked back by new leaders. We might be forgiven our despair that anything in this magnificent, damaged country will ever change.

But the protests that have risen up in the wake of George Floyd’s killing show every sign of being different. Across the country they have continued unabated, bringing change astonishingly quickly. Readers in large numbers are moving to educate themselves about systemic racism—in just a few weeks, demand for books about the topic has surged.

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