TAWANDA STOOD IN THE MIDDLE of the scattered and confused remnants of what had once been an organized march. As the police presence increased, so did the anger and frustration of the marchers. Young men were still jumping on police cars, and Tawanda could hear them start to yell out names with every kick.
“This for my Uncle Black that got killed by you bastards.”
“This is for beating that man.”
“This is for when you jacked me up and called me a bitch in front of my girlfriend and you spit in my face.”
Tawanda listened as these boys, children as young as ten and no man older than twenty-five, told a story—the story of what had happened before Freddie, before Tyrone, before the marches. A US Department of Justice report would spell it all out in a couple of years—these were the kids whose mothers were molested by police officers, were called “bitches” and “tricks,” and were propositioned for sex. Whose fathers were humiliatingly stopped and frisked for no reason. These were the kids who were next in line to be debased and devalued, winding up behind bars or in the ground.
Tawanda felt like something powerful and suppressed was being unleashed. Today the kids were fighting back. And it frightened her.
The last time she’d been this scared was when she was twelve, when she and her friends were attacked by a group of skinheads while walking home from school. The men were all wearing T-shirts, and many were tattooed—one had a swastika inked on the side of his head, his loyalty branded on his skin. The men started screaming at her and her friends and then moved in closer and started kicking them. When Tawanda and her friends ran, the skinheads chased them down the street, waving baseball bats and calling them niggers. It was complete chaos, and Tawanda was petrified. She and her friends ran all the way back to the school, where they banged on the locked door, hoping to find some sanctuary from the attack. The school’s white principal would not let them in. The youngsters were screaming and crying, pleading to be let in. The principal saw the men with bats coming. Still he told them, “You can’t come in this door.”
Tawanda and her friends hid behind some bushes, and when they saw a chance, they ran out and sprinted up Falls Road. Eventually she and her friends took refuge in a laundromat. But the white woman who worked there wanted them out. When Tawanda and her friends locked themselves in and refused to leave, the woman threatened to call the police. Tawanda remembered an overwhelming sense of relief at the threat—a call to the police was just what they needed to save them. How things had changed.
Tawanda’s memories were interrupted by her phone buzzing. It was her fiancé, telling her that things were starting to get violent—it was no longer just a few windows getting smashed, and people were now starting to put their hands on each other—and he told her to get out of there. Tawanda realized that her car and her cousin’s car were still in West Baltimore, where things had seemed so promising just a few hours ago. She and Qiara began running away from the crowd and called a family member to pick them up. She and seven other people piled themselves into the small silver coupe, some sitting on the others’ laps, crowded and uncomfortable, but desperate to get out.
As they sped away down Light Street, away from the chaos, Tawanda saw that someone had thrown a trash can through the window of the Michael Kors store.