“When George Floyd was killed publicly, the people who might have been going about their everyday work normally, were isolated and were really able to tune into what they were seeing., that there was a collective grief, because there was a collective understanding…. When George Floyd was killed there was this connection… It was a collective understanding, not ‘this this could be me, but this is me.’”
Blackmon participated in a good number of the protests and at one particular march in St Louis, a city where there were 169 black men killed that year, she said about her march with the mothers, “What I learned in that moment is that you must receive grief, you must let it wash over you and through you, let it manifest itself whether that’s in tears, in wailing. You must receive it. It (grief) is an often rude and obnoxious guest but you have no choice but to receive it and let it flow through you.”
How might the griefs of the last year, in all of its many forms, be harnessed for positive change?