A former financial adviser. A makeup artist. A college student who, until the pandemic, worked at a movie theater.
Over the past two weeks, a mix of newly minted activists and more seasoned hands led protests across New York City, directing thousands of marchers across bridges and blocking highways to denounce the death of George Floyd at the hands of the police — and to condemn racism in America.
Their faces are on television. Their images swarm social media. Chivona Newsome, the former financial adviser and a founder of the New York chapter of Black Lives Matter, spoke to hundreds of people at a Times Square rally last week. Tanelle Veira, the makeup artist, led a crowd that walked for several miles through Brooklyn.
For five days straight, Djibril Diakite, a Brooklyn College student who until recently worked at a Nitehawk Cinema in Brooklyn, spoke disarmingly on behalf of protesters to police officers, some of whom were clutching batons.
They all identify as part of the Black Lives Matter movement. But even as the protests wrapped up their second week, no one person, or organization, had emerged as the clear leader in New York.
The decentralized nature of the protests, with different figures popping up to lead crowds day after day around the city, has given the uprising unusual stamina. At the same time, however, it has posed a challenge for elected officials who are aiming to end the demonstrations as the city struggles to reopen after the coronavirus pandemic.
The organization Black Lives Matter has been at the front of some of the marches, along with people who have been affiliated with the National Action Network, the veteran civil rights group founded by the Rev. Al Sharpton.
But others have also jumped up to lead, including some who said they were driven by their own experiences with the police, like Jamel Mims, 34, an activist with Refuse Fascism, an organization in New York. With a bullhorn in hand, he led a group of protesters as part of a huge demonstration in Lower Manhattan last week.
Mr. Mims, who had marched against the city’s stop-and-frisk practices, recounted decades of harassment — and worse — at the hands of police, in Washington, D.C., New York and Boston, where he said a friend was pepper-sprayed and he was dragged from a party. He said the incident jeopardized a Fulbright award he had to fight to save.
“I had to sit down in front of a panel and explain the pervasive culture of police brutality and how it was something I’ve always had to negotiate with,” said Mr. Mims, a rapper who is fluent in Mandarin. “What kind of society is that?”
Many protest organizers are not affiliated with any group. Ms. Veira, the makeup artist, planned and led the demonstration for Breonna Taylor, an emergency medical technician shot by police in her Kentucky home in March, that snaked through Brooklyn. Ms. Veira, 29, said she hoped to draw attention to the female victims of police brutality.
At the same time, new groups have formed to give direction to throngs of protesters in their teens and 20s.
Timothy Hunter, 21, who grew up in Brownsville, Brooklyn, and several other student government leaders from New York public colleges created a group called Strategy for Black Lives that locked arms as it led a protest across the Brooklyn Bridge last week.
Like many of his peers, Mr. Hunter said that having grown up in the shadow of the cases of Trayvon Martin and Eric Garner, he could not sit by when Mr. Floyd died.
The younger generation is the first in decades to grow up witnessing both police killings and the rise of a national protest movement in response to them, said Matthew F. Delmont, a professor at Dartmouth College who focuses on African-American history. “There’s a sense that this is going to be a turning point,” he said. “They can’t let the intensity go.”
That fervency has proved to be an obstacle for officials trying to restore a greater sense of calm to New York, the nation’s epicenter of the coronavirus outbreak.
“If you were to ask anyone who is leading these marches, I’d be surprised if anyone could tell you,” said Eric Adams, the Brooklyn borough president and a former police captain who has been working behind the scenes to get protest leaders to the negotiation table. “It heads to the point of, ‘Where do we go from here?’ We can’t march for the rest of our lives.”
Over the past weekend, while dozens of protests were held across the city, Mayor Bill de Blasio sought to reach an agreement with demonstrators. He turned to a few familiar faces to discuss ideas for police reform, including Gwen Carr, the mother of Mr. Garner, and established community and religious leaders.
By Sunday, Mr. de Blasio pledged to cut the city’s police budget and spend more on social services, a nationwide demand made by protesters, and he lifted the city’s curfew a day early, citing the peaceful character of the protests. A spokeswoman for Mr. de Blasio said he made the changes because “he believed it was the right thing to do.”
Ms. Newsome, 35, who founded the New York chapter of Black Lives Matter with her brother, Hawk, said Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo called a member of her group to negotiate before later announcing he would support the repeal of a law that keeps police disciplinary records secret. The governor’s office did not respond to requests for comment.
These announcements, however, have not yet stopped the protests.
“Keep fighting,” Ms. Newsome, now a congressional candidate in the Bronx, urged a roaring crowd in Times Square. “Because that’s how things came about in this country.”
In the course of protests, some young demonstrators have defined themselves as leaders by drawing a clear line between protesters and looters. Mr. Diakite, 20, the Brooklyn College student and former movie theater worker, directly approached groups of officers. “You need to know that us here,” he told one group in Union Square, “We are not the same as the ones burning your cars. We are not the ones breaking down windows and burning buildings. They’re infesting our protests.”
Members of Warriors in the Garden, a group created by local 20-somethings who met while protesting, have reminded marchers that it is vital to stay peaceful to preserve the image of the movement.
The protests have had an air of youthful improvisation. Notices go out just hours before the events, posted on dozens of websites and on Instagram accounts. On the ground, protesters carry police scanners and check an app called Telegram for up-to-the-minute information on police activity.
But in fact, many say, while the demonstrations that swept the city and the country appear spontaneous, they are the product of years of grass-roots organizing. “It is and it isn’t overnight,” said Soraya Palmer, an organizer at Equality for Flatbush, a group in Brooklyn. Ms. Palmer, a 35-year-old writer who grew up in Flatbush, described the unglamorous work that is underpinning the protests, from creating fliers to coordinating with other groups.
While protests at the Barclays Center or outside Gracie Mansion, the mayor’s residence, might get more news coverage, she added, marches held in neighborhoods like Flatbush are also drawing thousands.
Chris Banks, another community organizer, helped stage a huge memorial for Mr. Floyd in Downtown Brooklyn last week, supplying bullhorns and borrowing some chairs from a day care center in East New York, his Brooklyn neighborhood. The movement, Mr. Banks, 36, said, was rooted in the distress of communities like his.
“It’s beyond frustration now,” he said, describing a pattern in which police officers — even when charged with a crime in connection with a killing — received only light sentences. Protests will stop only when people see major policy reforms or new leaders who will hold police more accountable, said Mr. Banks, who runs East New York United Concerned Citizens, a social service advocacy group. Leaders at demonstrations have started to raise those topics.
At the end of the second week of protests, the number of individual events seems to have scaled back, but some demonstrations are still drawing large crowds of people. While policy requests may differ slightly, many agree that they want a portion of the police department’s budget redirected toward social programming to support communities, and changes to laws that protect police misconduct.
The policy demands that are now being voiced have not materialized overnight.
After the death of Mr. Floyd, Ms. Newsome traveled with nine members of her Black Lives Matter group to Minneapolis. She had received a call from the chapter president there asking for support at their demonstrations.
In the hours leading up to their flight, the group drafted a legislative proposal that included a number of goals long sought by activists, including repealing 50-a, the New York law that shields police records from public view; defunding the New York Police Department; disbanding police unions; and banning donations from police unions and individual officers to elected officials.
Less than two weeks later, in a swift turn, lawmakers in New York are already acting on some of those measures. “I feel as though we are on the verge of a revolution,” Ms. Newsome said.
Anne Barnard, Jo Corona, Derek Norman and Alex Traub contributed reporting.
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