This story was published between issues of the newspaper. Reproduced here for accessibility and archival purposes.

Originally published June 1, 2020, on the Virginia Defender Facebook page. Edited on October 21 for style purposes.

By Kat McNeal

I was arrested at a protest last night and spent the night in the Richmond city jail. I was charged with a misdemeanor for breaking the governor’s new 8 p.m. curfew and released after nine hours – approximately three of which I spent on a bus with my hands zip-tied behind my back. When I left the jail premises after 12 hours, there were still people sitting in buses waiting to be processed. From reports this morning, I see that 233 people were arrested.

According to a VPM story, Police Chief William Smith said, “I want to make sure that the citizens of Richmond know that our enforcement of the curfew was directed solely at those that were involved in violence and destruction of our city.”

Police further claimed, according to a WRIC article, to have arrested “members of ANTIFA and numerous people from outside of the Richmond area and Virginia.”

These are absolute lies. From the time I arrived at the Lee monument around 6 p.m. to the point at which I was arrested on Leigh Street around 10 p.m., I didn’t see any kind of violence or even vandalism from any of the many thousands of protesters who took the streets.

The protest was high-energy and vocally militant, but not destructive. The crowd began as a multiracial group slanted heavily to younger people. As the evening wore on and 8 p.m. passed, the proportion of Black protesters and youth only became higher.

Some of those in the crowd may have had out-of-town addresses – Richmond is home to three major universities, with a collective student population in the tens of thousands – and I am certain that many did in fact share “membership” in the ideology of anti-fascism, as I do.

But the cops didn’t bring up the boogeyman of “antifa” or the specter of outside agitators to account for these expected, benign elements of the crowd. They did so, and lied about the actions of those arrested, to tell the public that this was a Bad Protest. By telling us what a Bad Protest looks like, the police are also telling us what a Good Protest looks like: small, nonthreatening, compliant, easily-appeased. This narrative is an establishment tactic to corral the uprising of people enduring the unendurable: Racist murders and brutality at the hands of the country’s police, against which they have no recourse, year after year and death after death – and render them ignorable.

We were not ignorable last night. Black Lives Matter.