'We're going to get there together. It's a slow journey. It's a marathon, but we're going to get to the other side of justice together,' said Jeanelle Austin, the executive director of the George Floyd Global Memorial.
Austin, known as "Lee Caretaker of the Memorial" first began tending to the square in 2020 as her form of protest. As the memorial grew, so did her role and responsibility.
I went to bed after midnight and I was very aware that we had come to the anniversary of May 25. It is a trauma anniversary. And so there is grief. And I'm always very aware of the ways in which grief comes out sideways. So I started to reflect on the ways in which my grief may have been coming out sideways. Because it's heavy. A man was lynched in my neighborhood just three short blocks away from my family home.
If you try to look back on what's changed and what hasn't, it can be a really muddled picture. I’m wondering how you view that, in terms of the changes that have been made and changes that some people are still pushing for. How do you think things stand on, you know, three years later? I know this because as we've been planning Rise and Remember, we have businesses, we have churches, we have individual people and benefactors. We have schools, we have children. We have our neighborhood coming together to say we are not done fighting because we do not yet live on the other side of justice.
So they don't necessarily have to bring equity and justice for the work that the people are doing there. I believe that what does work is when we move our neighbors to set the imagination of the way in which we want to live life and then expect our policymakers to catch up with us. And not only that, but they also want to contribute to it. People are continuing to leave memorial offerings as their form of protest to contribute. That matters, that says that we locally have done something right. And I know that it's a challenge and I know that it's difficult, and I know that not everybody agrees. And I've sat down, and I've listened to neighbors, and we are continuing to do the work of listening to our neighbors to figure out how we do this remembrance.
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