On Memorial Day weekend, I am reminded that four years ago I was living in a hotel\shelter in Brooklyn.
It was a two-person room with it’s own bathroom. a luxury compared to the usual congregate housing with a dozen or more beds, sharing one bathroom. My roomie was a twenty-seven-year-old Hispanic man born and raised in Brooklyn.
He was released to the shelter from Rikers.
Gang assault.
“Did you?”
“Me and my friends was horsing around, not fighting. A detective told me they’d drop the charges if I dimed an older guy they wanted.”
He proudly (and wisely) chose not to snitch. But it cost him seven years, his entire twenties.
He wasn’t bitter. He told me about his experience in a matter-of-fact voice, like it was just a part of growing up in New York City.
He asked me if I’d heard about what happened to someone named George Floyd.
I shrugged my shoulders. At the time I was about as interested in what was going on in mainstream culture as it was interested in what was going on in my life.
He showed me a picture of an adult Black man with someone’s knee pressing against his neck.
“Fuck! Again?” Even without paying close attention, I knew that scenes like this were playing out regularly.
Later that day, the largest Black Lives Matter demonstration began forming right outside our window on Atlantic Avenue.
He cheered, clapped, and whistled like we were at a college football game. I looked down at the street below and was surprised and impressed by how many young Caucasians were marching along with the Black Lives Matter demonstrators.
There were so many people marching that it took close to an hour for all of them to pass.
Then we both went back to what we were doing. He didn’t go out to join the March because it could possibly be a parole violation and he had two years left on his full sentence.
About an hour or so later he started getting live Instagram feeds on his phone. Friends of his had joined the March and they were now approaching the Barclay Center with it’s high-end boutique clothing stores.
I could hear him telling his friends, “No, don’t hit that store it’s own by locals. But get me that, and that!”
Much later, I told the young man that I grew up at the time of the uprisings in Newark in the late 60’s. And that even though the so-called race rights were a reaction to the police shooting of a nineteen-year old Newark resident, in the aftermath of the uprisings all of the visual reports on TV and in the newspapers were of Black people vandalizing and looting.
I told him softly, “In order to make a movement work, it requires some discipline.”
I didn’t expect him to respond any more that I would have when I was his age.
Though a couple of weeks later I was rewarded for dropping some OG wisdom on him with a pair of official NBA basketball shorts.