The Tribune

By EARYEL BOWLEG

ebowleg@tribunemedia.net

A trip to church on Sunday turned into a scary ordeal for Margaret Davies, a 49-year-old Bahamian living in the US, who got stuck in the midst of a heated protest in Tampa.

Americans in the country’s major cities have started major uprisings after the death of George Floyd, a black man who died after being detained by police in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Footage of the arrest showed a white police officer’s knee on Mr Floyd’s neck for nearly nine minutes while he was already handcuffed and facedown on the ground. Some of his last words were “I can’t breathe”.

When heading out on Sunday, Mrs Davis noticed a lot of patrol cars and the road was blocked off. This led the mother to detour into a side street and caused her to be in the path of the protesters.

“When I detoured, where the two cars blocked off they could not move. So then I turned back around and then I went back on the main Martin Luther King (street) and as I was going further down then that’s when the commotion was. When I reached further down that’s when I saw a lot of people on the road,” she recalled.

“The police were disturbing them...Normally when they protest in the day the police don’t bother them. . .they get violent through the night. So the police cars were lined up all through the road on the left side and I was on the right and the protesters were all in the road because the cars in the front of me couldn’t move, because they were in the front of them.”

As protesters tried to proceed into the street, Mrs Davies tried her best to move around. Her 11-year-old daughter who was in the car with her was afraid and started shaking due to the incident, she said.

While some protests have become violent, with looting and rioting, Mrs Davis said those who stayed away from the fray were generally safe.

She said: “If you stay out of harm’s way, they’re not coming looking for you...but if you go there being a spectator or a part of it, yes anything can happen - I’m not going to lie to you. But they’re not deliberately going to hurt you. But because of the violence and rage and them throwing things, yes you could get hurt in the process by them.”

While Mrs Davis is trying to get away from the protests, 28-year-old Rashad Curry spent the weekend in Minneapolis. He had been planning this trip for a few weeks to the city from New York City where he currently lives.

With everything that took just a couple days before his departure, Mr Curry wondered whether he should cancel his trip due to the protest in the mid-western city - eventually, he decided to go in the end.

“I got there Friday night... the first night of the curfew - an 8pm curfew was implemented. So, I got there right before that and the route we took to get home I didn’t see anything,” he said to The Tribune.

“The second day, which would’ve been Saturday when we were driving from one part Minneapolis to another we saw just in the distance like you could see smoke coming from some of the buildings and then we saw like a pocket of people with like signs but it was more of a peaceful protest. It wasn’t like the violent ones that they’ve been showing on TV.

“..On the news, it’s saying it’s so horrible but then when you actually take the time to walk around it wasn’t probably what you would’ve expected based on watching the news because we were fairly close at that point to where the action was and was a typical day.”

Walking around, he saw a lot of stores were boarded up. Stores that had already been vandalised and others that were taking precautionary methods.

There were times he said he was left uneasy. His friends wanted to help with cleanup efforts; Mr Curry did not feel “100 percent confident doing that” as he was not familiar with the area. “The other time I felt fear was when we were walking around in the Minneapolis neighborhood. Even though there was no presence of a riot or violence..I didn’t know if people would just be angry in those areas and would take action against seeing a black person.”