Three nights in Raleigh: protests, mayhem and peace — and a movement for change
The first morning after parts of downtown Raleigh burned, leaving behind charred sidewalks and blocks of broken glass, hundreds of locals arrived to help clean up. Others came just to see what there was to see, driven by anger, fear or curiosity. Perhaps some arrived seeking understanding.
That first night had taken a turn toward chaos. For hours, people gathered peacefully to stand against inequality and police brutality after the death of George Floyd, who died in Minneapolis after a police officer dug his knee into Floyd’s neck, pinning him to the ground. The officer has been charged with murder. Floyd’s death, after so many others like it, has sparked days of unrest nationally and in North Carolina.
In Raleigh, police first deployed tear gas against protesters around 7 p.m. last Saturday, May 30. Even before, officers had come dressed in riot gear. By dark, downtown had turned into something like a battleground, armored trucks rolling slowly around city blocks intermittently engulfed in the fog of tear gas.
What began as protests had devolved into something else.
The next day, Sunday, May 31, Rika Brooks wanted to see the aftermath. She walked down Fayetteville Street wearing a dazed expression and stopped in front of Kimbrell’s, the old department store. The glass had been broken. Inside, there were empty spaces where merchandise used to be. In the storefront display, the window gone, a single loveseat sat alone.
Up and down both sides of what equates to Raleigh’s main street, workers and volunteers sawed wood and nailed boards to places that’d been vandalized, set afire or looted. People scrubbed profanity, written in spray paint only hours earlier, off the sides of walls. Brooks, a black woman who has lived in Wake County since 2008, needed to see it all herself.
She’d come to check on some of the people she knew, and their businesses. Her dad is a truck driver for CVS, and he’d made deliveries to the CVS just down the street, on the corner of Fayetteville and Hargett. Now, that CVS had been ransacked, the aisles turned over and items thrown askew, some of them still littering the sidewalk.
A couple of blocks over, the people who run Blalock’s, a black-owned barbershop that has been in business for 50 years, were putting boards on their shattered windows, too. Brooks, who is 44, used to babysit one of the barber’s kids, years ago, so the place carried special meaning for her. And just up the street from there, she knew the owners of the black-owned tattoo parlor. One of the artists there had helped her daughter design shirts for a talent competition.
To Brooks, the actual sight of it all did not bring understanding. Only more confusion.
“I don’t even know what to say,” she said, before using words like “appalled” and “uncalled for.”
When she looked around the streets of downtown, she didn’t see anything that, to her, symbolized a stand against injustice. She saw people she knew cleaning up a mess they didn’t make. Still, the wounds of a damaged city could be covered up. The windows could be boarded, the glass swept away, the paint washed off.
And yet after the first night of protests in downtown Raleigh, the damage had become the story. The protesting, itself, had become conflated with everything that came after the moment the city lost control. The graffiti on walls spread their own messages, often with profanity, and Brooks feared all the vandalism spoke more loudly than the message the protesters were trying to send.
“The protest is a great thing,” she said. “But it’s the way that you handle it.”
The clean-up had just begun, and some things were a lot easier to fix than others.
A BLACK BARBERSHOP ASSESSES DAMAGE
One block east, Trina Blalock had come to survey the damage at the barbershop that’s been in her family for decades. It has been right there, off Wilmington Street between Hargett and Martin, since 1970. Her father worked there and used to own it, and now that he’s older, Trina Blalock had become something like its caretaker.
For a while on that first night of unrest, the block where Blalock’s sits had been the epicenter of turmoil. The tear gas and patrols of cops dressed for battle had corralled a mob into this block, and the peaceful part of the night was over. People who might’ve been protesting earlier left. Others arrived. Their intent became clear.
Not far away at Taz’s convenience store, one of the owners stood guard outside, pacing back and forth. As Saturday night neared Sunday morning, he considered the question of why people hadn’t started smashing his windows or looting the inside, as they’d done just about all around him. The man, who didn’t want to give his name, came to a simple conclusion.
“They know I’m strapped,” he said.
That became the central difference between places that suffered damage and those that didn’t. The ones that didn’t usually had someone standing guard outside, often with a weapon. That’s how it was at Cooper’s BBQ, where a man sat on a chair and pulled up his shirt to reveal the handgun resting on his waist. The places that were targeted had no such protection.
A group of black men guarded Blalock’s for a while that night. They told the crowd who’d come to do damage that it was a black-owned business, and for a while that staved off people who’d come to damage it. Around 2 a.m., the men who’d stood guard cleared out. The night had finally become quieter, at least for a moment. At home, Trina Blalock was still monitoring her security camera when, 15 minutes later, the shop’s front window was smashed.
“It’s our home,” she said the next day, standing outside of the barbershop. “Also, I understand what’s going on. I also experience racism all the time. So I feel like I got it double. I experience it every day and I get it again” with the vandalism.
“But I’m OK. I’m safe. We’re OK. And we’re just going to keep moving.”
When Blalock’s opened in 1970, Raleigh was a different city. It was the city where Jesse Helms rose to prominence behind his racist rhetoric, and a city without the progressive kind of spirit of, say, Greensboro, where the lunch counter sit-ins of 1960 played a pivotal role in the start of the Civil Rights movement. Raleigh was more Old South then, in the early 70s.
A black-owned barbershop became more than a place to get a haircut. It provided refuge.
On Sunday morning, Blalock said, people walked past and cried when they saw the damage. “Grandfathers, fathers, their children,” she said.
Nearby a couple of workers were measuring the wood and preparing to board up the front.
Blalock could tell stories about sleeping in the back of the shop when she was a young girl, while her father cut hair. When she said it was like a home, she meant it in a literal way.
Life had come full circle, and now her dad was living with her. He stopped cutting hair about five years ago, but still carried his barber’s license. He’d been unable to come down to the shop and see the damage for himself. Fifty years ago, when he opened the shop, the Civil Rights Act had been passed only six years earlier.
Now there was a new movement afoot. Yet it was hard to make sense of a black-owned business sustaining damage on a night that began with a peaceful call to end police brutality against black people.
Trina Blalock was able to separate those two ideas. The protests were one thing, with the noble objective of creating a better society. The looting and vandalism were an unfortunate side effect of the manifestation of anger and rage during a night gone awry.
To Blalock, the barbershop hadn’t been targeted. It had just been there.
“After a while, it was anybody,” she said.
A LOCALLY OWNED STORE IS LOOTED
Two blocks west, on the corner of Hargett and Salisbury, Kyle Denis walked out of his store and stood among the people who’d come to provide help, or maybe comfort. Denis, 36, and his wife met when they were students at N.C. State. They’d started a business together, an outdoor goods store called Apex Outfitters.
The one in Apex had been so successful that they opened another in downtown Raleigh just a year and a half ago. And now, on Sunday morning, May 31, everything inside of it was gone. The hats. The shoes. The shirts. The backpacks. The equipment. Gone. Everything, gone.
Denis, who is white, had come back to the store at 9 the previous night, after receiving word that someone had broken his windows. For a while, with the help of a larger group, he was able to keep looters from entering. But only for a while. It was all difficult to process, Denis said.
For one thing, he wondered where the police had been. Officers had been roaming downtown in body armor, standing shoulder to shoulder at intersections with their batons, weapons and tear gas canisters. For long stretches, those officers simply stood at those intersections. There was no police presence, Denis said, when the crowd threatened his store.
For another thing, the meaning of it all didn’t make sense to him, either. He said he and his wife tried to be good citizens. They tried to donate to progressive causes, the kind that would help minorities. He said they donated to Neighbor To Neighbor, the charity based just a few blocks away off Blount Street.
“I tried to tell a lot of the people last night trying to get in that I don’t understand their pain, but that I am with them,” Denis said. “And their response to me was, ‘Why are you trying to protect your business? Why do you care about this — you should be protecting us.’ And my response was like, ‘Well, I’m protecting my family. This is what puts food on my table.’
“And (I) tried to hit personal notes with them and it just didn’t ...”
His voice trailed off. It’d been a long night. After arriving downtown the night before, he’d done what he could before the crowd became overwhelming and more hostile. Denis barricaded the place as best he could, and told anyone attempting to guard it to leave. He went home, he said, and “spent the rest of the night watching my Nest cams, just kids coming in and stealing everything. I mean, they took everything.
“I mean, freely. The entire night. When I say I watched it the entire night, I mean, like, the entire night.”
A PLACE FOR OVERCOMING CRISIS, IN CRISIS
Two blocks southwest, Carroll’s Kitchen had not been spared, either. At Carroll’s, “women overcoming crisis,” as its mission statement reads, receive employment opportunities. They’re women who’ve been incarcerated or addicted, or both. Women escaping domestic violence. Women who need hope and a new beginning.
Since September 2016, dozens of women in need have found those things at Carroll’s. Anyone walking by last Sunday morning, however, would have found smashed windows and a busted storage cooler. They would have found volunteers, like Joseph Baldree, cleaning up and assessing damage and trying to remain hopeful that Carroll’s would persevere.
“It’s really sad to see something like this, because our women are dependent on our business being open,” he said. “... It’s just kind of a mind-boggling thing to think that we are serving the minority group here at Carroll’s Kitchen, and this rally, this protest, was for the minority, and I get that — I completely support them in that. But it’s just ...”
He feared that what happened, the destruction, “might be forcing these women out of a job,” especially after the shutdown amid the pandemic.
(It was only a few days, on Wednesday, before the owners of Carroll’s posted an image on social media, along with a statement. The picture showed boards covering the restaurant. The statement read:
(“Our windows may be boarded, but WE ARE OPEN! Our mission to help women overcoming crisis will continue on,” and then came an invitation to stop in for a meal between 9 and 2:30.)
AN ARTIST CALLS FOR COMPASSION
Back on Fayetteville Street a little after noon, Quana Gill colored in a heart on the sidewalk with pink chalk. She’d come to help clean up, but saw there were more than enough volunteers who’d arrived with the same thought. Then she saw the chalk, and “me being an artist,” she said, “I’d rather do this.”
She knelt on the sidewalk near the same place where Rika Brooks had stood earlier, surveying the city’s damage. Now Gill was on her hands and knees. She’d written a message, the words in different colors and large capital letters: HAVE COMPASSION. People walked past and thanked her, or gave her a light pat on the back while she kept her head down, focused.
“I decided to write words of affirmation,” said Gill, who is black. “Because we all need positivity. And we all need God right now. And everybody’s lost. And if we just have a little bit of compassion, we wouldn’t be in this situation.
“If people just cared a little bit more about somebody else.”
Gill is 31, and she lives in Raleigh. The sight of Fayetteville Street like this, with more places damaged than not, with people trying to separate the damage and distance it from the intentions of people who’d arrived the night before calling for change — everything about it bothered Gill.
“What’s going on is messed up,” she said. “The city is messed up. Everything is jacked up right now.”
She’d been out of work since mid-March, she said, amid the pandemic. In the meantime, creating art had helped calm her anxiety. And so that’s what she did on Fayetteville Street, where just hours before there’d been so much ugliness. She tried to write over it with a message of hope.
“It’s sad, everything that’s going on in the world,” she said. “The pandemic. A man getting killed. And then this? This wasn’t Raleigh yesterday. This ain’t it, right here. I don’t understand it. Ain’t nothing wrong with protesting.
“But to mess up our community like this is jacked up,” she said, and she continued to fill in that heart.
A PEACEFUL PROTEST MARCH IN RALEIGH
Monday afternoon, after another night that began with peaceful protests ended with something much different and more hostile, a group gathered again on Fayetteville Street down on the end closest to Memorial Auditorium. It was around 5 p.m., three hours before the first curfew the city had set after two nights of chaos.
Speakers took turns with the megaphone, passing it to anyone who had something to say. The messages were similar. At one point, the crowd knelt in silence in memory of George Floyd and other black people who’d died at the hands of police. Soon they began marching, and they carried signs and chanted while they walked toward the Capitol.
While they walked they called out two of the people who’d led them to gather in the streets.
“Say his name!” the chant began.
“George Floyd!” they answered.
“Say her name!” the chant continued.
“Breonna Taylor!” they answered.
Taylor died in mid-March, after Louisville police officers raided her home and initiated an exchange of gunfire with Taylor’s boyfriend. Neither Taylor nor her boyfriend had been accused of wrongdoing. Taylor was shot eight times. Less than two months later, the video of Floyd, pinned to the ground for nearly nine minutes under the knee of a stone-faced officer, went viral.
Now on Monday afternoon the crowd on Fayetteville Street, comprising several hundred protesters, slowly made its way to the state Capitol. It crossed Morgan Street and filled in the sidewalk and the steps leading to the grounds. Members of the National Guard stood atop the Capitol building and across the street, wearing fatigues and carrying automatic weapons.
National Guardsmen and police officers created a perimeter surrounding the Capitol. The protesters, meanwhile, continued their chants and yelled in unison while drivers who passed by honked in solidarity. Many of those drivers extended their fists out of their windows and held them high. Speakers took more turns with the megaphone.
One of them, a black man who appeared to be in his mid-20s, who didn’t want to be named, led the crowd in a chant of “black lives matter.” He also included the phrase “all lives matter,” which, when coming from a white person, is seen as a denial of the movement. Coming from him, it felt unifying — perhaps a gesture to nearby police officers that ultimately this was about humanity. The crowd embraced the chant, and repeated it back to him.
The man who led that chant said he didn’t like what happened the two previous nights. He called it “sad and unfortunate, that things are happening ... broken glass and everybody’s looting and all that.”
“However, it’s very understandable on my end,” he said, “because I am a black male and I have been caught up in situations, or even looked at in a certain way as if I did something wrong when all I did was just walk down the street or walk by. And after a while, it’s called micro-aggression, and after a while it kind of builds up, and people just, you know, get angry.”
And yet the scene on Monday wasn’t one of anger so much as it was resolve.
“I just want to be free,” said the man who’d led one of the chants. “And I just want to walk down the street without having the cops have to look at me as if I did something. I don’t want to have to keep my head on a swivel, as if, Who’s this guy behind me? Who’s that over there? ...
“Freedom is what we want.”
In the minutes before the start of the 8 p.m. curfew, the crowd chanted “no justice, no peace” and “hands up, don’t shoot!” The clock struck 8, and the crowd remained. The police didn’t begin trying to enforce the curfew for another 20 minutes, when a patrol vehicle slowly circled the block, playing a message on repeat telling people to go home.
Another protester, who also didn’t want to be named, held a megaphone and talked to the officers who now were riding up and down Fayetteville Street on what looked like a souped-up golf cart. The man, whose dreadlocks flowed past his shoulders from underneath a dark hat, appeared to be in his mid-30s. He told the police not to be “cowboys.”
“I think it’s beautiful, seeing people band together,” he said. “I think it’s sad seeing us destroying our city. You know? I don’t condone any problematic things, man. I want everybody to be happy, man. They’ve got to understand why these people mad. And they seem like they don’t care, you know? And that’s the exact problem, man.”
It was past 8:30, and the crowd of protesters had become thinner. Someone had brought speakers to play music, and an acoustic version of Johnny Cash’s cover of “I Won’t Back Down” played softly as the sky grew darker. On this night, though, darkness did not bring mayhem. There was no tear gas, and no breaking glass.
The streets of downtown remained empty, an eerie silence providing a backdrop to a scene that already appeared ominous and foreboding, what with all the boards on the windows everywhere. After two nights that had to be among the most dramatic in its history, Raleigh looked like a ghost town, and it was in the dark quiet of a wounded city that the message behind these gatherings somehow came through at its loudest and most powerful.
This story was originally published June 6, 2020 at 6:00 AM.
