The Black Lives Matter protests have become the story of the day. Hundreds of thousands of people in cities all over the world have been demonstrating for over a week. We joined the end of a march in Brixton first, hearing about it from a friend who saw it pass through Kennington and cycling out to join the fray. It was the first crowd I’d been in in months. It made the fact that people were shouting in one voice even more striking. A man stood over the crowd with a megaphone and thanked them for assembling, spoke about the need for justice for those killed by police in the UK, and asked us to go home peacefully. The core of the group marched up Brixton Road and demonstrated in Windrush Square. We went to another march this Sunday, beginning as a protest at the American Embassy in Vauxhall and eventually marching over Vauxhall Bridge and to Parliament Square. Unlikely figures hung out of the windows of expensive apartment buildings in Pimlico to show support for the passing demonstrators, banging pots and pans. Many more windows were notably absent of support, given then everybody is probably home. In Parliament Square, I looked at the protestors with a colossal statue of Winston Churchill rising above them and wondered how long its presence would be tolerated; later the news reported his plinth had been annotated to include his status as a murderer.
We’ve picked a new house. It’s going to be a house! It’ll have a garden and stairs and space for the cat, space for us to work and relax. We’re leaving in three weeks unless some recalcitrant property manager or landlord gets in the way.
Outside, COVID-19 measures had begun to relax and things had begun drifting slowly toward normal. Then a few days ago the US exploded with protests against police violence in response to the murder of a man named George Floyd by a policeman in Minnesota. All over the country the authorities have responded with a police riot. Peaceful protestors, the press, and bystanders are being brutalised and arrested all over the country. Black Lives Matter marches are starting up here too; my employer has notified us we don’t need to use up holiday allocation to march. I’ve made some donations to bail funds and encouraged others to do the same.
I’ve been struggling to keep track of links to the relief funds established for Black Lives Matter activists across the USA who’ve been arrested, injured, or killed by the police. I’m throwing them up here, with sources linked at the end, to keep track of them for myself and for others who are struggling to pull them out of Twitter. For now, I’ve donated to the Brooklyn Bail Fund.
There’s now an even easier way to donate to a wider range of organisations fighting for this cause. Just make one larger donation on this page and it will be split automatically. Click here.
I’m reading the epic biography of Robert Moses, The Power Broker, at the moment. At the moment it’s the 1920s and Moses is trying to wrestle swathes of land off the robber barons who’ve built their manor houses on Long Island, so that he can build extensive park systems and a parkway to connect them to the city.
It’s a mammoth book but I’m really enjoying it. The 1920s is an interesting era in American history not just because of my teenage obsession with The Great Gatsby and the associated milieu, but because it’s also a period when the Klan were incredibly active in white, Protestant communities all over the country, and because it’s when the robber barons of the Gilded Age were really trying to hand onto their wealth.