A Peaceful Protest, Cut Short by Police, in Houston with George Floyd’s Family

Protesters on horseback raise their fists.
At the march on Tuesday, organized by George Floyd’s nephew, it was easy to see why Houston is routinely referred to as the most diverse city in the country.Photograph by Sergio Flores / Getty

We hadn’t walked five minutes from the edge of Houston’s East End neighborhood, heading downtown toward the march with George Floyd’s family on Tuesday afternoon, when my boyfriend, L., and I saw the first set of cops, staggered beside trucks, adjusting their gear. Some clustered under the overpass by the convention center. Others began congregating at intersections leading out of the city, nearly a mile away from the Discovery Green park, where the march would officially begin, winding its way from there through the city until it reached City Hall. Despite the police presence, people continued filing their way downtown. Some walked in groups of twos and fours. A handful walked alone, carrying signs and adjusting face masks and hopscotching across the toasting pavement. Eventually, clusters of walkers began to merge—two became four, who became nine, who became fifteen, who became thirty. We passed one set of cops after another and then a set of city buses lounging under a bridge, with more police in riot gear bunched up beside them.

The afternoon’s march had been coördinated by Floyd’s nephew Brandon Williams, alongside the local rappers Bun B and Trae tha Truth. The city’s mayor, Sylvester Turner, was said to be making an appearance. Even if it wasn’t stated explicitly in the march’s notice, it was understood that local officials had a lot riding on the appearance of peaceful proceedings. Floyd grew up in this city. His grieving family members would be participating in the march. The event, however it went, would have international visibility. In the midst of mass unrest all over the States, Houston’s protests thus far had seemed considerably calmer: no curfew had been enforced; no mass destruction or disruption had taken place downtown; arrests had been made, three hundred and fifty in total, but they had looked nothing like the violent scenes of police playing out in other cities. As the march swelled far beyond the projected several thousand attendees—accumulating, as one friend put it to me in text, “A super big fucking amount of fucking people” (ultimately in the vicinity of sixty-thousand, according to the Houston Chronicle)—all eyes would be on the city of Houston.

Before the march started, Bun B had called for participants to kneel for thirty seconds of silence, in memory of Floyd. He repeated calls for a peaceful walk: “We ain’t gonna shed a drop of blood in Houston, Texas.” The march was already well on its way by the time L. and I slipped into the stream, pushing onto Walker Street, hooking just past Discovery Green and farther into the city. The weather was hot and humid in the way that Houston gets this time of year, and the heat emanating from the crowd increased in tandem. More than a handful of Houston’s usual photo-op set turned out—including Joel Olsteen, whose nationally lauded megachurch remained closed to evacuees at the outset of Hurricane Harvey—but even their presence was eclipsed by the swells of everyday Houstonians who had shown up to walk and express solidarity.

The diversity of the marchers can’t be overstated: from the midst of the crowd, it was easy to see why Houston is routinely referred to as the most diverse city in the country. We passed several groups of black women handing out face masks to passersby. We passed several groups of Latinx teens passing out water bottles, shuffling through coolers. We passed a man in a Joker mask waving from a stop sign, imploring passersby to watch where the money was flowing. Some marchers, many of them black, rode in on horseback, gently ambling along. A group of motorcyclists made its way through the crowd blasting chopped-and-screwed rap, at one point pausing to stand on the bikes. (“If they bust their asses out here, who the fuck is gonna come save them?” a woman beside us said.) We passed a number of folks brandishing signs, on cardboard cutouts and poster paper and computer sheets and Tupperware. There were many “Brown Lives for Black Lives” signs. There were many “Asian Lives for Black Lives” signs. I saw several “Black Trans Lives Matter” signs. One man’s sign said that he was there because he had five black children and a black grandchild. A woman’s sign said that she’d attended because black women need to be protected. One sign simply read “Black Mama.” Many signs listed only names: Tamir Rice, Sandra Bland, Tony McDade, Atatiana Jefferson. One white family’s signs read “We Repent.” (Noticing it, one of the teens walking beside me said, “That’s cute.”) A handful of signs said “Breonna Taylor.” At some point, it became clear that my phone wasn’t getting a signal. Every handful of steps or so, a marcher nearby seemed to note that their social-media postings weren’t going through. We all kept walking regardless.

The march swelled to nearly sixty thousand attendees, according to the Houston Chronicle—far more than the projected several thousand.Photograph by David J Phillip / AP / Shutterstock

Once our segment of the crowd made it to City Hall, the pace stalled, and then stopped, and the marchers immediately took up chanting. L. and I slipped from near the center of the road to the edges, and after walking past the city-hall building we saw that speeches were being made in the adjacent park. Several of Floyd’s family members spoke. “This is going to be more like a marathon,” a cousin noted. The activist Tamika Mallory spoke. Trae tha Truth spoke. Bun B spoke again, saying, “We appreciate the Houston Police Department for standing with us today, but make no mistakes about it: we will hold our police department accountable, if they commit acts against the people of this city.” The crowd grew loudest at this and other calls for accountability: since 2015, there have been fifty-six fatal police shootings in Houston. In April and May of this year, there were six in a span of less than six weeks.

On our way back toward East End, around five o’clock, we passed a handful of bars, where occupants were drinking and leaning on the patio gates, wearing jerseys and shades, and eyeing marchers (most of these folks were white), and also a group playing soccer on an indoor court, entirely removed from the proceedings—reminders of just what a massive city we live in. A street later, we crossed paths with a group of at least fifty college-aged folks, and, not even a block behind them, an even larger set of police. But, whereas the officers we’d seen before had been languishing, these were adjusting their mikes and fastening their helmets. L. noted that the police only seemed to be moving toward the march’s end point. We watched several cruisers and trucks inch along. We passed a group of nine or ten cops on horses, each of them heavily armed. Our makeshift group increased our pace a half step quicker.

A few hours later, we’d learn that—literally moments after we’d left the march’s epicenter—the police had notified everyone remaining, on loudspeakers, that the event was over. Despite the city’s lack of a curfew, it was, apparently, time to go home. Everyone remaining in the area would be in violation of the law. It wasn’t long before most of the crowd began to disperse accordingly, but some folks, entirely peacefully, did not—and this was when the trouble began. In the course of the evening, information making it out of the city’s downtown grid was scarce at best, but some details filtered through, in videos of marchers in the area: the police presence had fully solidified, and routes outside of the downtown had been blocked off. Marchers were reportedly being led onto buses. At least one flash-bang grenade was reportedly fired. On social media, people inquired after marchers they hadn’t heard from in hours. On Wednesday morning, the Houston police department announced that it had arrested more than two hundred people the previous night.

L. and I made it out of downtown, sticking to side streets. That evening, we pulled into a Thai restaurant for takeout. Inside, footage of protests in D.C. and L.A. played on a television mounted in the dining room. After taking our order, the woman behind the register noted, offhand, that the damage done to those cities was a shame. L. and I said that we’d actually just come from the march. “The one downtown?” the woman asked. Yes. Really. Yes. The woman asked why we’d gone, and we told her. She pursed her lips, frowning, and I braced myself for what she was going to say. But she only nodded. “Good,” she said. “It’s good to be out there. What they did to him was wrong. Something has to change.”


Race, Policing, and Black Lives Matter Protests