Fort Worth protests after George Floyd’s death have split into two groups. Here’s why.
On May 31, hundreds of protesters marched toward the West 7th Street bridge. They wanted to take their message against police brutality into the Cultural District and one of the ritziest areas of the city. But row after row of officers, most in riot gear, stopped them.
As the sun set over the Trinity River, protest organizers with the group United My Justice decided to turn back. They told the 300 or so protesters to listen to the officers, and they would return the next night; they did not want anyone hurt. About half the group left with the organizers. The other half stayed. “They literally stopped us for no reason,” said Sarah Russell, one protester who refused to leave the bridge.
About two hours later, police threw flash bombs and tear gas at protesters and made arrests. Protesters slowly backed off the bridge and into the street, but stood their ground even as some gasped for breath and other protesters poured milk onto their faces. Police arrested about 50 people but later said they wouldn’t pursue charges of riot participation.
That night proved to be a critical moment for Fort Worth’s Black Lives Matter movement. The split between protest leaders and those who demanded they stay on the bridge foreshadowed — and contributed to — the eventual fracture of the group as a whole.
This is how Fort Worth’s protest movement split in two, and how the two groups are using different strategies to convince city leaders to listen.
2 separate protests, with separate goals
Starting this week, separate protests have been held in Fort Worth each night by groups that differ in age, strategy and goals.
United My Justice, the group that first organized the protests when they began on May 29, is led by Donnell Ballard, a 49-year-old longtime Fort Worth protester. He has teamed with Carol Harrison-Lafayette, 54, who works at the youth program Community Step Up. She and Ballard have protested together many times, and he asked her to join United My Justice’s cause after George Floyd’s death.
United My Justice wants police reforms that include better training for officers to assist with mental health-related emergencies and regular psychological exams for police. Ballard also wants to see police charged more often with first-degree murder when they use unnecessary lethal force, and to end paid administrative leave for officers being investigated for killing a civilian.
The other group is a coalition of several organizations that include Black Love Fort Worth and Enough Is Enough Fort Worth. Their organizers are mostly in their 20s and 30s. Although they have leaders from various organizations, the coalition doesn’t have a defined leadership structure, a common strategy for protest movements worldwide. “We have come together as, if you will, knights at the roundtable and our King Arthur is justice,” said protester Seychelle Leake. “And that’s what we follow and what we proceed after.”
Leake, 25, graduated from Fort Worth Southwest High School in 2013. “I have been a victim of social and racial injustice since I was 5 years old,” she said. “I’ve had to have child advocate lawyers, all types of things. So I’ve been active in my community.”
Another organizer, Trice Jones, 33, has been involved in protest movements since the early 2010s, after Trayvon Martin was killed by George Zimmerman.
Lucid Shinobi, who is 23 and leads marches with the younger group, was arrested on the bridge the night police tear gassed protesters. He said he did not do anything aggressive toward officers, and one of them punched him above the eye. In jail, he saw the younger protesters who were also arrested — two of whom just turned 18 — and realized they needed someone to stick up for them, and not just at that moment.
“And like every day, I’m getting more information. I’m learning to do this properly and be patient,” he said. “And now I know my role, so I’m going to play it 100 percent. I’m here to protect the people. I’m here to learn from people.
“Because I’m willing this day to fight a battle, a war that we are in right now. People are too casual, too comfortable.”
The group has been asking protesters to sign petitions that indicate their demands of city leaders: They want the city to eliminate police funding for tactical weapons and equipment and to reallocate it for mental health initiatives. They also want the Fort Worth and Crowley school districts to cancel their relationships with the police and replace school resource officers with counselors.
Why United My Justice won’t protest with other group
Ballard said of Fort Worth’s protests, “This is the biggest movement that I have ever seen. I’ve never seen so many young people who are hungry for change.” Yet he said he would no longer protest with the mostly younger group. Ballard said he believes the group is violent and more radical, and he disagrees with its tactics of going inside businesses.
Whereas United My Justice has largely marched in downtown Fort Worth and avoided heavily trafficked areas, the coalition of younger protesters believes in protesting in Fort Worth’s commercial districts, especially West 7th. On Monday night, they marched inside Target and knocked repeatedly on the locked door of Your Mom’s House, a bar that has been accused of racial discrimination.
The split began on Sunday, Ballard said, when some of the younger protesters disrespected him and one person threatened him. One of Ballard’s security officers maced a 16-year-old who was arguing with him.
Trice Jones refutes the implication that the younger group is violent. “People are saying we want to disturb the peace,” she said. “And when I say disturb the peace I don’t mean violence. It’s like if I’m driving down the street with my music up loud. We want to make them uncomfortable enough to where they’re complaining to the managers and they’re like, ‘Why are they in the streets every night and what can we do to get everyone off the streets?’”
Shinobi said he respects United My Justice and wants to help them in any way, but he said UMJ “is not for the people any more. It’s not focused on what it needs to be focused on.”
“They didn’t let the people know really what they needed to get done,” he said. “They just tell people to vote. You tell them the same thing every day.”
He also criticized the UMJ leaders for choosing not to protest on Monday.
“We’re helping them, more than they even know,” Shinobi said. “Because they could have been a part of that, but they chose not to be a part of that, because they didn’t want to come sit down with a bunch of kids. Just because we are young doesn’t mean that we are kids. They think we’re just young, immature, wild rascals with harmful behaviors. No, this is emotion, this is passion.”
Several key members of the younger group spoke at last week’s city council session, and Jones read off their demands. But Harrison-Lafayette said some of those in the younger group do not understand they have to sit down with policymakers to create change. United My Justice met with Mayor Betsy Price, City Manager David Cooke and Police Chief Ed Kraus on Wednesday.
While the meeting did not result in immediate policy changes, Harrison-Lafayette said the group will continue to meet with officials and bring along different, younger group members each time.
“We have more experience when it comes to the way we communicate with our city officials,” she said. “They are the ones that we have elected into office and some of us, we did not vote for them, but we have to communicate with them. We still have got to respect them. It is the way in order to get results done.”
Why protest groups often split
Todd Moye, a history professor at the University of North Texas, said there is nothing unusual about splits in social movements, and most civil rights movements have had multiple groups organizing or marching in the same city.
“Sometimes they started off unified in one group and split up, other times they were never particularly unified because they couldn’t all agree on tactics or even on broad goals to begin with,” said Moye, who has joined several United My Justice marches and marched with Enough is Enough Fort Worth once.
He said the split can even be a healthy sign when people decide they want to go their separate ways peacefully. “There’s no single path to social justice,” he said, “and nobody has all the answers.”
So for now, Fort Wort has two protest groups. And both say they have no plans to stop their demonstrations yet.
This story was originally published June 12, 2020 at 6:00 AM.
