By Kevin Coughlin
Chanting “Hands Up, Don’t Shoot!” and “No Justice, No Peace!,” black, white and Latino demonstrators marched through Morristown on Saturday to protest a tumultuous week that saw black men shot by police in Louisiana and Minnesota, and five police officers gunned down at a protest in Dallas.
“We want justice. This past week has been a rough week,” said Morristown resident T’Anna Kimbrough, co-organizer of the Black Lives Matter event that brought together a crowd, which police estimated at 75- to 100 people, on less than 24 hours notice.
Mayor Tim Dougherty and members of the town council joined the peaceful procession, a round trip from town hall to the Morris County Courthouse.
Police Chief Pete Demnitz escorted the contingent down South Street as officers stopped traffic. SUVs from the Morris County Sheriff’s Department also were stationed along the route.
Marchers carried signs demanding “Justice for Alton” and “Justice for Philando,” references to Alton Sterling and Philando Castile, African Americans whose shootings by police this week were captured in graphic videos viewed by millions on the internet.
Red carnations were distributed. “We Shall Overcome” was sung. Prayers were offered by the Rev. David Smazik of the Presbyterian Church in Morristown, the Rev. Jerry Carter of Calvary Baptist Church, and the Rev. Alison Miller of the Morristown Unitarian Fellowship.
A few shopkeepers waved or flashed thumbs-up greetings; one or two pedestrians along the route stepped into the street to embrace friends in the march.
The only opposition came from a honking motorist hemmed in by the line, and from a local couple, shouting “All Lives Matter!” from the sidewalk in response to chants of “Black Lives Matter.”
“I think this is very divisive, to say only black lives matter,” said Helen Lindner.
“There’s real issues,” said her husband, Rich Lindner. “But it’s like every time there’s a shooting and we really don’t know what happened, people jump to conclusions. It’s better just to see what happens. And if someone’s guilty, then obviously, it’s a big problem that needs to be contended with.”
Nationwide protests erupted after the 2014 police shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, MO, amidst reports that the unarmed black teenager was shot with his hands up. But a Justice Department probe later concluded that Officer Darren Wilson, who is white, acted in self-defense when Brown tried to grab his gun.
No officers have been convicted in any of the highly publicized police shootings of blacks across the country over the last two years, said Kimbrough and others in Saturday’s march.
“Black Lives Matter does not condone or support violence toward police,” Kimbrough said, expressing sorrow for the slain officers in Dallas. “We just want equality for everyone…we just want our voices heard.”
“When we’re saying Black Lives Matter, we’re not saying other people’s lives don’t matter. All we’re saying is we want our lives to matter as much as anybody else’s,” said march co-organizer Jerry Carter III of Morristown.
Eric Valosin, an artist from Montville, is white. He marched, he said, because “I’m just tired of my black friends not feeling safe around police that I feel safe around.”
‘IT BEGINS WITH POLICE POLICING THEMSELVES’
Participants generally gave good marks to the Morristown police.
“For the most part, the cops that I know, the cops that I’ve encountered, are good guys,” said Councilwoman Hiliari Davis, who is African American.
“They know the people in the community… the guys that have been here for awhile know what they’re doing. They know who knows what, and who does what. Honestly, I have to say we don’t have serious police issues.”
Communication is essential, said Demnitz, the police chief. “There needs to be better understanding all around,” he said.
“United we stand, divided we fall,” Mayor Dougherty told the crowd.
Yet elsewhere, “too many lives are being taken for petty things” that should be resolved with a simple summons, said Michael Briggs, a graduate of Morristown High School who is African American.
White Americans — and police– need to grasp what blacks have experienced in the United States, he said.
“A lot of people want to say, ‘Listen to the police, do what they say.’ Stop. Hold on a minute. If you’re not from the black community and don’t understand black history, you’re not going to understand why some people feel the way they do about the police.
“You go back into the ’60s, when you had Martin Luther King marching, peaceful protests, and you had police putting dogs on people, hitting black men over the head with a billy club. For what? Because they wanted Civil Rights? They wanted to be treated equally, like another man.”
Decades later, Briggs said, many police departments remain too tolerant of bad cops.
“That’s where it begins,” he said. “It begins with the police policing themselves.”
Slideshow photos by Kevin Coughlin
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Well said!! We need to make changes and evolve, but in general we are kept safe every day by the bravest members of our communities, the police.
The one thing that I cherish most about Morristown, NJ is our diversity. To see peaceful protestors represented by EVERY race bringing awareness of the rising incidents of excessive force resulting in death by these rogue officers means that change IS POSSIBLE. To say that “every police officer is bad” is just plain ignorant, and in fact there are more good ones than bad ones. The bad ones are like airplane crashes — they don’t happen that often in comparison to the millions of daily safe passages, but when just 1 crashes, the impact is felt everywhere.