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Then a source texted on the move to the square, and I started recording video. I grew up in Arkansas and have reported from this town for years, and I was almost stunned by what I witnessed next. Coming down the hill toward the courthouse was a lone Black man, dressed in tactical gear, wearing a green military backpack and carrying a shotgun strapped with bullets. Marching behind him was a large group, almost all white people, waving protest signs and chanting I cant breathe, I cant breathe, silence is violence.

Here was a Black Lives Matter rally in one of the countrys most notorious havens for white supremacists.

WHEN MAYA HOOD was offered a basketball scholarship to play at North Arkansas College, she threw the letter in the trash right in front of the coach. She needed that scholarship badly, but North Arkansas College is located in Harrison, and as Hood put it, growing up Black in Arkansas, you do not go through Harrison. Youll get hung from a tree, or somebody will shoot you down at the gas station.

For an alarming number of extremists, this town in the Ozark Mountains, one of the most beautiful places in America, is a white mans paradise. For many Black people, its still referred to as a sundown town, a place you should never get caught after dark.

When I was a kid growing up in Arkansas, we would pass by the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan adopt-a-highway signs on road trips near here. Im white, but their casual existence terrified me. I would imagine men in long white robes getting filthy picking up trash along the highway at night, lit up by a burning swastika. Even today, a number of white power billboards stand prominently, one right under an advertisement for Jason Robb, the local lawyer who represents the KKK. His father, Thomas Robb, succeeded David Duke as the Klans leader in the 1980s. Many people in Harrison say they resent the billboards and the KKK reputation, but the message to outsiders is clear: This is our town.

Remarkably, Maya Hood accepted that basketball scholarship in Harrison. It was the only offer she got, and she really wanted to play ball. Every day on the way to school she passed by those racist billboards. It made her sick to her stomach. In class, she says, three women told the teacher out loud were not going to work with the brown girl. Hood was studying to be a nursing assistant, and she experienced abuse from patients, who called her the n-word with an ease and entitlement she found shocking, until she just got used to it. One feeble old man, she recalls, refused to let her touch him even though he was stuck on the toilet and a white nurse wouldnt be coming to check on him for four days.

Hood wanted to quit and go home. Those first couple of years, she cried a lot. Im like, Im literally gonna die, thats what I thought in my head, how am I going to survive? But she loved her basketball coach and her teammates, and even some of her classmates became close friends. And the mountains and the rivers its all so beautiful. I tell everybody, Im like I honestly believe in my heart I was put in Harrison for a reason.

HARRISON WASNT ALWAYS a white town. After slavery was abolished a thriving community of Black people lived here along Crooked Creek. But in 1905 and 1909, after crimes were allegedly committed by Black citizens, white mobs seized the opportunity to storm the jail looking for prisoners to beat and torture. They lynched Black people and burned down their property. Eventually, on January 29, 1909, the Arkansas Gazette reported: Negroes leave Boone County.

For the most part, they have never come back. There are 37,000 people in the county, and 96 percent of them are white.

A number of years ago, in a back room of the Harrison public library, I interviewed a man named Mike Hallimore. He wouldnt let me come to his house because he thought I was a spy trying to get a look at his white power publishing empire. He was old and deceptively harmless looking. After a home health aide helped him out of the passenger side of his car, Hallimore handed my film crew bumper stickers that expressed a vile sentiment about white women who date outside of their race.

Hallimore came to Harrison from California in the 1950s because it had the right combination of anti-government fervor and cheap land. And most importantly for him, nearly everyone in town was white. For years, Hallimore was the worlds leading distributor of books on Christian Identity, a twisted theology favored by the KKK and Aryan Nations. It preaches that Black people are not human and that Jews are descendants of Satan. At least half of the material, he told me, goes out to prison addresses.

In the 1980s, Hallimore persuaded the Christian Identity pastor Thom Robb to move the headquarters of the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan from Louisiana to Harrison. Later Robb brought into his fold the neo-Nazi leader Billy Roper and the racist radio host Freeland Roy Dunscombe. Robb sometimes hosts rallies, youth camps, and church services on his compound outside of town, though these days he spends most of his time online preaching hate and peddling racist memorabilia like rebel flag bedspreads and KKK trucker hats and promoting Harrisons outdated legacy. Hallimore once told me he was upset that a few Black people had started moving into town and that one is too many as far as I am concerned. Harrisons racist reputation, he said, serves the purpose to keep them out.

AMANDA CAMPBELL WAS thinking about that reputation in her home in Harrison while she watched nationwide footage of Black Lives Matter protests after the George Floyd killing. Campbell, 39, is white, a former Republican, and the mother to seven children. She said she suddenly felt an almost divine call to action. Changing the image of Harrison wouldnt be enough, she said; it was important to draw attention to the fact that white supremacists are still in town. This may not be a sundown town by law, she said, but its just barely out of that stage, you know.

Campbell and a white friend, Amber Weaver, set up a group chat online to plan a protest in Harrison. Maya Hood was on there too. My first thought was wow, Hood said, like, theres no way that was going to happen in Harrison. In the first post, Campbell wrote: Remember to keep this with those you trust. Ideally we do not want our plans leaked out to the local white supremacist groups. But within hours, someone did just that. The post went viral around town. Family members, old coworkers, anybody that knew me was getting messages . . . it just went insane. Her brother asked Campbell to stop using her maiden name on Facebook so people wouldnt know they were related. She was called a cop hater and a criminal lover. One guy seemed to be threatening to shoot her. The jab that confounded her the most was that she was trying to turn the whole police brutality thing into a racial issue.

Something else was making Campbell uneasy: It didnt feel right for a white woman to lead a Black Lives Matter protest. But Harrison is less than 1 percent Black, and she wondered if it would be irresponsible to ask the few Black people she knew to risk coming out to this protest, much less to be featured speakers. Maya Hood, for one, didnt think she could do it. I said no because someone in my family said if you say anything you will have a target on your back, Hood said. Her grandmother went further: If something happens, and bullets were to start flying and youre on the front line, theyre not gonna miss you. You know they might miss some other people, but theyre not gonna miss you.

Someone in the group suggested Campbell contact Quinn Foster, a young African American man who started an organization called Arkansas Hate Watch. He drives around the state monitoring white nationalist activity, in a pickup truck with the phrases Nazi Go Home and Black Lives Matter painted on it. There was just one potentially incendiary problem. When Quinn Foster comes to town, he brings his guns with him.

There is a racial culture in Arkansas that is destructive, he said. The white nationalist groups in Harrison consider this sort of their seat of power. I made a very clear point that if I did come up here to speak and if I did rally, I was not going to be unarmed.

Campbell knew the white nationalists and the militia groups would be out there with military-style rifles, and she was afraid that having a Black man with a gun at the march would be like throwing gasoline on the fire. But Foster persuaded her otherwise. He told her he already was getting constant threats from racist groups anyway, and more importantly, they needed to make a clear statement in Harrison. Let people know, Hey, we will go as far as we have to to protect ourselves. We are not taking a step back anymore. Were not giving you all the power that you guys enjoy, the reputation you guys enjoy, or the ability to continue this nonsense. It has to come to an end now.

ON THE MORNING of the protest someone opposed to the march spread a rumor that busloads of antifa protesters were on their way to burn Harrison to the ground. Its a hoax that has cropped up elsewhere in the country too. This fired up more militia types to come out to the square, including Amanda Campbells own brother, who, she says, showed up wearing a bulletproof vest and carrying a rifle.

Quinn Foster was starting to worry. He said he had gotten threats from local white supremacist groups. What if this went spectacularly wrong? To try and mediate things, Foster reached out his opponents not as a Black Lives Matter protester, but as a fellow pro-Second Amendment guy, a believer in openly carrying guns. They assured him that they were ready to go down fighting if things went bad, but that they wouldnt shoot first. He took them at their word and decided to proceed with the rally.

Maya Hood was an emotional wreck. She hadnt told Campbell yet, but she had decided that if things didnt turn violent, she wanted to speak. Its not like Martin Luther King speaking at the Capitol or something, but Im just like, I have a chance to speak in a place where Black people were hated and ran out of this town, and I now have the chance as a 22-year-old Black woman to stand on this stage and speak for Black lives.

AROUND 4:30 P.M. on June 5, Foster led the protest into the Harrison town square, past flag-waving armed militiamen, past a guy on a portable speaker yelling why do Black lives matter?, past a pro-life activist carrying a sign showing an aborted fetus, and past groups of people who seemed to be there for no other reason than to show their support for Donald Trump. Amanda Campbell was right behind him, fist in the air, yelling the familiar chants of Black Lives Matter movements everywhere.

The police held back and quieted the counter protesters. One cop told a group of men and boys waiving Trump flags: Come on guys, lets let them have their day. I wonder if things might have gone very differently in Harrison had the protesters opponents not been so willing to please the authorities.

The Black Lives Matter group made their way to the south side of the square, facing the road that was still open to traffic, and waved their signs to a mixed bag of supporters, curious onlookers, and outright detractors like the man on a motorcycle with a rebel flag bandana pulled up over his face.

Of course, busloads of antifa protesters never materialized. A handful of people gave speeches, and it was almost over within an hour. Campbell had promised the police department and the mayor that they would clear the square by 5:30 p.m., a concession she now regrets. But she also knew some of the protesters wanted to be out of the town before dark, and so she asked if anyone else wanted to say something before they left. Hood raised her hand.

My name is Maya and first off I just want to say how proud I am of this town, she said. Growing up where I grew up, they tell Black kids dont go to Harrison.

Thats a lie! A woman in the crowd yelled.

Hood raised her voice to speak over her, and made it through a few more sentences. All lives cannot matter until black lives matter. Then she froze up.

I was just overwhelmed with emotions, she recalled later. She thought of not just the white woman yelling, but also her stressful job treating heart patients at the hospital, the Internet trolls harassing her, the pressure to be the voice of Black people everywhere. I wasnt doing it for the attention, I was doing it because I knew the attention would be there, and I knew that my voice would be heard by somebody you know.

For a few long seconds, Hood just stood there quietly. Campbell and the other women organizers came forward and gave her a group hug. The crowd cheered. Hood wiped her eyes and went on: It has to start with each and every one of us. It has to start here in our hearts, it has to start in your mind. Educate your children, educate the people around you. Do not stay silent, silence is violence. Say their names, and now go, and get the job done.

It was one of the bravest things I think I have ever seen.

A COUPLE OF days after the march, the KKK leader Thom Robb responded via a sermon posted online, entitled Troubled Nation. He told his worldwide Internet audience that the sermon was meant for the white people of Harrison.

I know many people stood in the square in Harrison with your weapons to demonstrate that you would not let this bunch of cultural terrorists destroy our city, Robb said. They dont fear just the idea that you have a gun, but they fear your commitment and loyalty to God, race, and nation.

Robb showed video from the march and posted still pictures of the protesters on the screen, and encouraged people to confront them if they saw them in town. Every one of those protests have been designed to create hatred for law enforcement. Thats the purpose. Why? Because law and order is one of the most fundamental characteristics of a white society.

I asked Campbell and Hood what they thought of Robbs sermon. Campbell said: You know the majority of people in Harrison are not racist, are not KKK, but that minority, even though its small, is the loudest. Thats what people hear. They hear those voices screaming hate. Thats what they hear all over the country. We want to drown that out.

Hood took the question more personally: Even if they had a gun to my face, I still dont believe that I would be scared. We are literally living through history, you know like a textbook. And its like, Im a part of something that can possibly be one of the greatest things to ever happen, you know?

Brent Renaud is a writer, filmmaker, and photojournalist from Little Rock, Ark.

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Black Lives Matter in a haven for white supremacists - The Boston Globe

This piece was originally published on Medium by LION Publishers. It has been republished with permission. You can learn more about LION Publishers here, and while youre there, sign up for their newsletter.

As an association, our primary role atLION Publishersis to support our members in building financially sustainable, independently owned news businesses. We believe at the core of a successful news business is listening and serving your community of readers especially those whose voices are often underrepresented in the mainstream conversation.

At LION, we believe that Black lives matter heres how some of our members are taking steps to show they do, too.

This week were highlighting 13 LION members who have taken the time to listen and uplift those voices in their communities or who have thought critically about their role in ensuring media is created by more diverse voices. Weve chosen examples that go beyond reporting on whats happening, and offer more context and analysis or introspection of a publications internal practices. All of these examples are replicable or adaptable for other news organizations, and we hope they inspire the work youre doing.

CalMattersshareda breakdown of their staff demographics based on gender and race, and also offered an analysis of salary equity across the organization and their hiring practices. CEO Neil Chase, who is a white man, writes, The most obvious challenge at CalMatters is in my mirror. The organizations top executives are white. He adds that the organizations journalists are forming committees to look at the diversity of our sources, the ways we use words and phrases and labels, and our hiring process as well.

ChalkbeatCEO Elizabeth Green said the organizationadded anti-racism to their core values, which guide our work and govern our team. Shetweeted, As professor Ibram X. Kendi has written, it is not enough to be not racist. We must be anti-racist. The idea that standing against racism by adding a line to a web page might be newsworthy or even brave is a shameful commentary. But I believe (and hope) that we can do our job better by making our values transparent and clear.

Kelsey Ryan, publisher ofThe Beacon(and LIONs communications/membership manager), and her team hosted alive chatthat answered reader questions to provide an inside look into decisions our newsroom is making in real time about covering protests around police brutality. The teamalso shared with their readersthat they were participating in a three-part webinar focused on diversity, equity and inclusion to formalize their organizations stated mission around diversity, equity and inclusion.

Publisher Mukhtar Ibrahim left his reporting job at the Minneapolis Star Tribune in early 2019 to launchSahan Journal, a publication covering the states immigrant communities. Earlier this month, CNNinterviewedMukhtar, whose publication has been covering angles that national media has missed. You see young people being really frustrated and you wonder why. Why is everyone frustrated? Why do they hate the police? Why the cursing at the police? Whats causing that? Im always more curious to learn about that than just covering the latest developments. An example? Thisstoryaboutwhyyoung Minnesota Somalis are protesting.

Project Q Atlanta is for gay men, lesbians, bixsexuals, transgender people and all of those that make up our queer village, according to theirabout page. Founder Matt Hennie hosteda live virtual conversationabout how two pieces of legislation introduced in 2019 could help address police brutality and hate crimes, and how racial justice is an LGBTQ issue.

Understand how police use news coverage to surveil black communities. Dont allow police to use you, or your coverage, to do their jobs. Thats from aguideon covering protests from the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press and Racial Equity in Journalism Fund at Borealis Philanthropy. Wendi C. Thomas ofMLK50: Justice Through Journalism, said she applied these principles to our recentcoverageof a civil disobedience training that drew more than 350 people. While we know the names of the people we talked to, if participants werent comfortable using their whole name or showing their entire face, we protected their identity. Wendi alsoshared her own experienceof being surveilled by the Memphis Police Department.

Long Beach PostPublisher David Sommers created a community editorial board in response to whathe saysis his failure to build up a leadership team and corps of journalists that fully reflects the diversity of the community we cover. To accomplish that goal, hes formed a seven-person editorial board, which will include representation from his organization, though community members will hold a supermajority position. He writes, Board members will be welcomed and encouraged to write opinion columns during the year on issues and subjects in which they have a personal interest, experience or expertise. David said hes received nearly 90 applications so far, and is offering stipends to the editorial board members.

Richland Source, when approached by a black-owned barbershop, collaborated with the shop owner and other partners to launch Shop Talk, a conversation series focused on race and reconciliation in their Ohio community. Thefirst meetingwas held May 31 at a barbershop with a group of people including city employees, a sheriffs deputy, pastors, small business owners, a class of 2020 high school graduate, and a university grad student who were black and white, young and old. Publisher Jay Allred (who is on the LION board of directors) facilitated that first meeting using the 22 Questions that Complicate the Narrative framework, aguidecreated by Amanda Ripley for the Solutions Journalism Network. They hosted the second conversationlast weekand plan to continue the series.

Last summer,LAistput out a call for reader stories about race and published reader essays in response. They recentlyre-upped their calloutsaying, Our job is not to lose focus on this. We are asking for your help, both in joining the conversation and holding us accountable to keep it going. They want to continue publishing reader stories about how race and ethnicity shape their lives, so that we can all keep on talking. Because we have to.

Berkeleysidehas published two useful guides one focused on 5 things you can do to support the Black community and another updated list of Black Lives Matterdemonstrations.

The team atThe Plug, run by founder and publisher Sherrell Dorsey,trackedmore than 190 tech companies on whether they spoke up about racial injustice in response to the Black Lives Matter demonstrations, and how that squared with their total percentage of Black employees. The goal? To evaluate the companies internal commitments to supporting Black workers, Sherrell said. (P.S. If youre a LION member, dont forget toRSVP for Sherrells LION Lessonon June 25 that will emphasize best practices on diversity, equity and inclusion.)

The Devil Strippublished this page ofanti-racism resources, linked and easy to find from its homepage, in response to several readers asking what they can do to help bring about change and support our Black neighbors. Their response? One of the most important actions non-Black folks can take is to educate themselves on systemic racism and privilege. Also,Scalawags managing editor Lovey Cooper published this guide, Reckoning with white supremacy: Five fundamentals for white folks, which offers historical context and additional resources.

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How 13 local news publishers have responded to the Black Lives Matter demonstrations - Poynter

Black Lives Matter protesters in Cedar Park marched around The Parke shopping center June 19. (Taylor Girtman/Community Impact Newspaper)

The protest started at the Cedar Park Recreation Center. Calls for justice and change were made, and speeches explained the reason and goal of the event.

"No justice, no peace" and other chants led protesters in a march around The Parke shopping center. The protest was peaceful and nonviolent.

The march date coincided with Juneteenth, a holiday that celebrates a June 19, 1865, proclamation in Galveston, Texas. The proclamation announced the end of slavery in the United Statesover two years after the Emancipation Proclamation and end of the Civil War.

Juneteenth became a Texas state holiday in 1980.

On June 18, the city mayors of Cedar Park and Leander proclaimed June 19, 2020, as "CELEBRATE JUNETEENTH DAY" and "Juneteenth Celebration Day," respectively.

Organizer Ashley Thompson, a Leander resident and University of Texas at San Antonio student, said the date was an important part of the protest and march. When Thompson asked how many in the protest group were celebrating Juneteenth for the first time, a majority of hands were raised.

The Cedar Park protest and march follows local and nationwide protests against police brutality and the deaths of George Floyd, Ahmaud Arbery, Breonna Taylor, Mike Ramos and others.

Cedar Park Police Chief Mike Harmon said there were no issues at the protest or march, and officers were stationed throughout the march route for the safety of protestors.

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GALLERY: More than 150 people march in Black Lives Matter protest on Juneteenth in Cedar Park - Community Impact Newspaper

As protesters marched through Brooklyn past curfew one night in early June, the young man holding the bullhorn at the front of the crowd kept repeating one date: June 23.

It wasnt the date of George Floyds death. It was the date of the New York Democratic primary. Nothing is going to change if we just protest, explains Yahshiyah Vines, 19, who was leading the crowd. All these people out here: use your emotions in the polls, use your emotions in the voting booth.

The last few weeks have illustrated the power of the rising racial-justice movement in the wake of Floyds death. In less than a month, the protests have shifted public opinion on systemic racism, toppled high-profile executives and gathered momentum in their quest to defund police departments. The next few weeks and months will test whether the movement can translate its social and cultural might into political power.

The first test comes on June 23, when several young Black candidates who have aligned themselves with the Black Lives Matter movement are running in competitive Democratic primaries. Those races could in some ways be a preview of the presidential election in November, when presumptive Democratic nominee Joe Biden hopes to ride strong turnout among African Americans to victory. The protests could be a political bonanza for Democrats, political strategists say, galvanizing its most reliable voting bloc and boosting voter registration. But its not yet clear whether the party is poised to take advantage, especially at the national level.

Already, the movement has fired up some voters. The progressive non-profit Rock The Vote registered 150,000 new voters in the first two weeks of June, the highest tally of any two-week period in the 2020 election cycle. And despite significant obstacles at the polls, Democrats in Georgia cast more than 1 million ballots in the states June 9 primary, breaking the record set in the 2008 contest between Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton. People were in line for hours, says Nse Ufot, executive director of the New Georgia Project, which registered hundreds of voters at Black Lives Matter protests ahead of the primary. Can you imagine the strength, the resolve, the steely-eyed determination that folks are going to have when they go to the polls in November?

The New Georgia Project is among a handful of organizations actively registering voters in person at protests around the country. But so far the effort to convert the energy of the movement into votes is spontaneous, localized and disjointed, much like the protests themselves. The most expansive national efforts are digital: The Collective PAC, aimed at building Black political power, has launched a new effort to collect cell phone data from protesters in order to serve them ads about registering to vote. Michael Bloomberg has given $2 million to the Collective PACs efforts to register 250,000 Black voters in key battleground states.

It makes more sense to do it digitally, from a safety perspective, says Quentin James, co-founder of Collective PAC. We know who the unregistered African Americans are, we have their names, we have their address, we know the Black people who are purged, and we are targeting them specifically. James says that in six days, more than 1,000 people have clicked on the ads the group has run through the geo-targeting effort.

National Democratic organizations, meanwhile, have been slow to capitalize on the movements energy. The DCCC and DSCC are not coordinating national efforts to register voters at protests, and the Biden campaign has not been actively registering demonstrators, according to spokespeople. Such an effort would be logistically difficult: many actions planned by local organizers are spontaneous and vaporous, operating outside the party structure, which makes it difficult to coordinate voter-registration efforts.

Above all, the protests are both a gift and a challenge for Biden, who has supported the movements goals without embracing activists more controversial demands. This movement has politicized young Black voters in particular, says LaTosha Brown, co-founder of Black Voters Matter, which aims to register Black voters in overlooked areas. Theyre taking a much harder look at his record. And that doesnt necessarily work in his favor.

The former vice president, whose support among Black voters rescued his sinking campaign with a critical victory in South Carolina, has knelt with demonstrators, given a well-received speech about Americas long struggle against racial injustice and spoken at Floyds funeral. He has also touted his criminal justice reform plans, which include a $20 billion grant program to encourage states to move towards violence-prevention rather than incarceration, decriminalizing marijuana, ending cash bail, and using the power of the Justice Department to crack down on systemic misconduct in police departments. Since the protests, he has called for a ban on chokeholds and an end to qualified immunity as well as stopping the transfer of weapons of war to police departments. Yet he has rejected activists demands to defund the police, doubling down instead on his police reform plan that provides $300 million for community policing.

So far, the balancing act seems to be working: Trumps attempts to paint him as a radical dont appear to have stuck, while new polling has emerged suggesting that 58% of Americans oppose the call to defund the police. And Biden has maintained his solid lead in key battleground states. What we say to young people is that we hear your concerns, we share your pain, we share your enthusiasm, says Biden senior advisor Symone Sanders. We have similar goals, we want change, we want police reform in this country, and I think we all agree that this moment has given us an opportunity to do just that.

The next test of the Black Lives Matter movements political power comes June 23, when several states hold primaries featuring young black candidates. In New Yorks 16th congressional district, which stretches from the Bronx up into lower Westchester, middle-school principal Jamaal Bowman is running to unseat 16-term Democratic incumbent Eliot Engel. In New Yorks 17th district, Mondaire Jones is attempting to become the first openly gay Black member of Congress, competing in a crowded primary to replace a retiring Democrat. And in Kentucky, state Rep. Charles Booker is running against a well-funded opponent, Amy McGrath, for the Democratic nomination to take on Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell.

All three candidates have explicitly aligned themselves with the movement. Weve centered racial and economic injustice from the very beginning of our campaign, Bowman says of his bid to unseat Engel. In terms of volunteers signing up to phone bank, people making contributions to the campaign, all that stuff has increased exponentially over the last several weeks. It didnt help that Engel, the chair of the House Foreign Affairs committee, has been a scarce presence in his district and recently was caught on a hot mic at a protest, saying that if I didnt have a primary, I wouldnt care.

In May, Bowman was getting roughly 30 to 40 volunteer signups a day, according to data provided by the campaign. Floyd died on May 25. By June 4, the number of volunteers had doubled; by June 10, it had tripled. Bowman raised nearly $265,000 in three days in early Junealmost a third what hed raised in the entire previous year. After endorsements from Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Sens. Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, even more money flowed into his campaign. A week into June, hed surpassed a million dollars.

Jones, an attorney who worked in the Obama Administration, says hes also seen a significant increase in donations from the wealthier, whiter parts of his Westchester district. I think what people have to come to grips with is that if they want to see racial justice, then they have to support progressive candidates like myself, he says.

As for Booker, his family knew Breonna Taylor, the Black woman who was shot and killed in March by cops executing a no-knock warrant. Hes become a fixture at the Kentucky marches demanding justice for her death. Standing in the streets crying with people who are facing trauma, the same trauma I carry from cousins who have been murdered over the last four years, the Commonwealth has really taken note, Booker says. It has amounted to a big boost in fundraising, a big boost in support.

Before the protests began, Booker was raising roughly $100,000 a month. Hes raised roughly $2 million in the month of June, according to his campaign, enough to fund an ad accusing McGrath of skipping the protests. He says hes working to mobilize historically disenfranchised black voters in Kentucky with a volunteer network of hundreds of people across the state who hadnt been involved in politics before. Before Memorial Day, his campaign averaged about 300 phone bank shifts a week, his campaign says; now they have more than 100 a day. We get ignored, we get taken for granted, and the only time people talk to us is when they want us to vote for them and then they disappear on us, he says. Were helping redefine what it means to be involved in politics.

Polling remains scarce in Democratic congressional and Senate primaries, so its hard to tell which of these candidates is likely to prevail on the 23rd. According to one Data for Progress poll, Bowman now leads Engel by 10 points, including a 46-point lead with Black voters (the poll had a margin of error of roughly 5 points). A Public Policy Polling survey has Jones leading by more than 10 points in a crowded primary. The Booker campaign points to internal polling that shows him catching up to McGrath. But the true electoral impact of the movement wont become clear until the votes are counted.

As younger Black men, candidates like Booker, Bowman and Jones can speak personally about the scourge of systemic racism and police brutality. Biden is a different matter. While he has a strong connection with many Black voters, some Democrats worry his unwillingness to meet the movements demands could cost him enthusiasm and votes. A coalition of more than 50 progressive groups recently wrote Biden a letter urging him to adjust his positions on policing, demanding he revise his platform to ensure that the federal government permanently ends and ceases any further appropriation of funding to local law enforcement in any form.

You cannot win the election without the enthusiastic support of Black voters, and how you act in this moment of crisis will play a big role in determining how Black votersand all voters concerned with racial justicerespond to your candidacy, the groups wrote. A return to normalcy will not suffice.

Veteran organizers say that while older Black voters are loyal Democrats who delivered Biden the nomination, the young activists flooding the streets are demanding more. If Biden does not come correct, hes going to take a hit, says Brown of Black Voters Matter. He needs Black folks and young folks. He cannot win without either.

As Republican strategist Stuart Stevens points out, President Trumps chances of winning spike if Democratic voters of color stay home. Stevens, who advised GOP presidential nominee Mitt Romney in 2012, notes that Ronald Reagan got 55% of the white vote in 1980 and won, while John McCain got 55% of the white vote in 2008 and lost, largely because nonwhite voters turned up for Obama. In 2016, Hillary Clinton lost partly because of depressed Black turnout in big cities in Wisconsin and Pennsylvania.

If Biden can get nonwhite turnout up to what it was in 12, 08, or 04, he wins if everything else stays the same, Stevens says. He doesnt need to win one more white voter.

Ultimately, many activists say they plan to vote for Biden even if he doesnt meet all of their demands. A lot of people might feel disenchanted, but I also think it will make a lot of people go out and vote, because what else is there to do? says Dara Hyacinthe, a 25-year old freelancer in Brooklyn. Its a two-pronged attack, really: you protest, and then you vote.

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Write to Charlotte Alter at charlotte.alter@time.com.

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How Black Lives Matter Could Reshape the 2020 Elections - TIME

A week ago, the Bush theatre asked six writers for their dramatised responses to the killing of George Floyd in Minnesota, the global protests that followed and the state society is in now. These protest plays, curated by Daniel Bailey, are the result of that quickfire commission. Combining political theatre with digital technology, they are available across the Bushs social media platforms, including Twitter and Instagram, and on YouTube. They range in length from one to nine minutes and are honest, impactful pieces that turn life, as it is happening, into story and sometimes song.

Just as in the case of Channel Fours week-long series of short films, Take Your Knee Off My Neck, these works are by black British (or mixed-heritage) writers. Issues range from the use of the N-word to negotiating mixed-heritage identity and the emotional load of having to articulate the trauma caused by racism over and over again, the last of which is expressed in Benedict Lombes direct address, Do You Hear Us Now?

Fehinti Balogun, who appears in Michaela Coels BBC/HBO series I May Destroy You, bases his film, You Just Dont Get it And it Hurts, on a recent conversation with a friend. It is a series of text messages between Chelsea, who is white, and an unnamed black friend. They begin debating Chelseas use of the N-word while singing along to a rap song in a predominantly white crowd. Chelsea promises to listen to her friends objections open-mindedly (I wont be offended) but is unwilling to examine her values, clinging to an argument around her right to free speech. It is noxious everyday racism and their conversation, played out with the typing and erasing of words, is both intellectually engaging and emotive, right until Chelseas final, undermining text.

Roy Williamss film, Black, packs another punch at just over a minute long. Performed by Aaron Pierre, it features a man in internal, anguished dialogue with himself as he tries to fight his fear of attending a protest rally: Im scared, no word of a lie Why they have to beat us like that? It is a moving snapshot of vulnerable black masculinity in light of Floyds killing and the increased threat felt by black men in Britain. The Fire This Time is a rap by Kalungi Ssebandeke (featuring Anoushka Lucas) and a more straight-up protest song against police violence. You will no longer kill us, sings Ssebandeke against footage of street protests, riots and arrests.

In Hey Kid, Matilda Ibini speaks to a photographic montage of her younger selves: Hold on to your voice, kid, Ibini tells the child in a nursery school pinafore. People will tell you that everything about you is wrong Please do not stay silent. It is both a warning of the structural racism that awaits this child and a call to arms, with echoes of the consciousness-raising letters written by James Baldwin to his young nephew in 1962 and Ta-Nehisi Coates to his son in 2015.

Alongside the pain and anger, a sense of exhaustion is also expressed in several films at the repeated cycles of protest at white-on-black violence over the decades. Anoushka Lucas, in Your Work, which is delivered partly in song, sings: All the things Ive heard before are coming around again, while Lombe is more explicit: After black squares and hashtags and outrage, will you still show up?

It is a powerful question asked of the world and it remains unanswered.

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The Protest review superb set of dramas for the Black Lives Matter movement - The Guardian