Dozens of people gathered that night to listen to the journalists, who were gathered on a panel that included civil rights lawyers, community organizers, and people who’d experienced altercations with the police themselves
Griffin Torrey- one of the authors’ two roommates- hanging around over the clear waters of Juniper Creek
Not even a hundred yards yet from the creeks place of origin- a rocky, moss-laden, subterranean spring of the same name- the water flowing through here, deep in the pine scrub of the Ocala national forest, is unusually, astonishingly clear: the type of water that gives the impression of being suspended weightlessly in the air. Paddling slowly, soft prisms of sunlight dancing in the leafy, turquoise shallows beneath, we make tentative headway down this glassy forest river, which cuts like a silent corridor through a wilderness of pine. Over many moments this morning, we hold our dripping paddles alongside the boats as the current swings us downstream, relishing in what can only be described as fleeting moments of release: all is peaceful in these watery scrublands. All is quiet save the hush of the wind.
Under a pale overcast sky, the sun lost in a diffuse of white, protesters gathered in the parks central pavilion a little past 2 pm.
Fearful of violence similar to that witnessed in Charlottesville last August, Jacksonville police virtually locked down the area surrounding the park in preparation for the event: they shut down all surrounding city blocks, cordoning off all incoming streets. They patrolled the area with dozens of officers. And they separated opposing camps between two rows of bright, neon orange barricades. As people began to coalesce in the plaza, the police droned out every few minutes through the booming echo of an unseen megaphone: “The police respect ALL points of view! Please do not instigate violence!”
By Jared Olson (Photos: Joseph McCann)
The protesters, led by black minister Rev. Ron Rawls, amassed along the Granada street sidewalk next to the Lightner Museum, where city officials inside discussed mounting pressures over recent months calling for a community-wide reconsideration of the monuments. Deploying the booming echo of their voices, the protesters had gathered outside the building to project their presence to the deliberating local politicians, who were hidden by tightly curtained windows within the museums forebidding stone walls. As the evening light failed and gave way to darkness, the anti-Confederate protesters swung into a chorus of chants deploring the monuments and the racism behind them, while on a corner down the street, the counterprotesters echoed back with periodic volleys of insults, their bright-red rebel flags luffing like soft sails in the breeze.
The wind came in waves: vast, pulsating, hurricane force gales, some upwards of a hundred miles per hour, crashing, heaving, and receding over our house like long curling swells over a rock in the ocean. It was a palpable wind, its sound so immense that you almost felt you could feel it from within the house. Outside, one heard the periodic, brittle crack of trees as they heeled over under the blasting force of the wind. And when one peeked outside- as I did several times, against my better judgment- one saw there in the maelstrom a broken but unending river of debris, swept up ineluctably by the unceasing waves of wind. For a moment, standing there on the back porch, I watched as the storm-stricken landscape was briefly illuminated, its contours revealed as a transformer burst in the distance.
I returned to the living room, which after several hours without power had become ungodly hot, and waited there anxiously, beads of sweat congealing over my forehead, listening silently to the sounds of the night.
None of this scene would’ve been particularly disturbing were it not for a peculiar fact: we were far inland, sixty miles from where the damage was supposed to be at its most severe, and yet we were still feeling the effects of a storm so massive that its total volume engulfed the entire state of Florida.
By Jared Olson (Photos: Katherine Lewin)
Two marchers carry the American flag towards downtown St. Augustine in a demonstration of remembrance to Dr. Martin Luther King: a man who is now revered in the same town where he was once brutally attacked and imprisoned
Congealing along the sidewalk into an amoeba of people whose numbers eventually crested at two hundred, the demonstrators – people black and white as well as young and old – stood shivering under an armada of American flags, held aloft loosely in the soft morning wind, as they waited for the yearly procession to get underway: a route that would take them from the steps of the storied black church, where Dr. King once thundered in indignation against racism, to the downtown market square, where black slaves were once auctioned off like cattle and goats.
Protesters reading from the manifesto of the striking prisoners inside, who are seeking to improving conditions and end what they perceive as quasi-“slave” labor
By Jared Olson (photos: Katherine Lewin)
The protesters – a group of former convicts, veterans, union activists and distraught mothers – coalesced into a noisy caravan as they left their cars along the roadside, and marched back and in front of the facility, where state laws permitted them the right to assemble. (Within prison property, protesting is proscribed as an illegal offense).
Beating makeshift drums, blowing into trumpets and carrying signs, the stream of protesters led a rising chorus of chants:
“Brick by brick! Wall by wall! This prison slave camp has to fall!’
“We, will end, the department of cor-RUP-tion!”
Promoting the Black Students Association, for which Hasani is VP, on campus
Hasani had spent the majority of her life in Atlanta, where growing up, she was enveloped in a largely African American community. Now, she was one of the few black students in the nearly uniformly white, liberal, upper-middle class mass of Flagler’s student body. And though many students treated her nicely, the feeling of cultural listlessness- that depressing sense, however diluted, of having been dropped in a foreign country without knowing the language- was nonetheless acute. Continue reading
Arundhati Roy’s Walking with the Comrades, a breathtaking journalistic journey into the world of India’s indigenous Naxalite guerrillas, does not open with a primer on Maoist ideology or the corruption of the Indian State. Veering clear of that kind of dry, inhuman introduction, the ever-effervescent Roy- a Booker Prize-winning novelist who has spoken about the inability of non-fiction to convey truth in the way fictive storytelling can- instead opens up her expose with a vignette. Whether it’s true, no one can say: though I would argue that in this case it actually doesn’t matter. In four pages of brisk, lucid prose, she relates to us a scene whose haunting imprint resonates like a persistent note throughout the entirety of the volume, and whose very essence contains the seed of all the injustice she attacks.
There are cacti and birds, lizards and snakes, smokecolored herds of pronghorns and mule deer. If you go far enough up into these high and forlorn hills, you can even find remnants of former human life.
