“Veteran organizers, like Nupol Kiazolu, the 19-year-old president of Black Lives Matter of Greater New York, are familiar with the ebbs and flows of a protest. She stood nose-to-nose with Nazis in Charlottesville. She’s fled law enforcement with rifle sights set on her chest. She knows it means risking her life, even before the COVID-19 pandemic ravaged the United States. But now she not only has to fear police and counterprotesters; the mere act of coming together to demonstrate poses just as much of a threat to protesters’ health and safety. And still, they gather.
‘At the end of the day, whether I sit at home or I’m on the front lines, I could be killed just for the color of my skin,’ Nupol says. ‘If anything were to happen to me, I would want it to be for a righteous cause.’
Nupol’s voice was still hoarse from tear gas. She spoke to Teen Vogue from Minneapolis, where she has worked as a frontline organizer with Minnesota’s Black Lives Matter to coordinate resistance efforts in the city where law enforcement officers were filmed kneeling on the neck of George Floyd, a 46-year-old Black man, for nearly nine minutes, killing him. The resulting protests have wrought even more viral instances of police violence against Black protesters, journalists, and even apparent bystanders.
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‘What folks in the streets right now, especially young people, need to hear right now is that you’re powerful,’ says Patrisse Cullors, cofounder of the global Black Lives National movement. ‘This moment of uprising is part of a long history of uprisings. We can only hold onto grief for so long until our grief turns into protest.’”
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