Community members and local leaders reacted Friday to a string of shootings in Louisiana, Minnesota and Dallas, heartbroken and determined to create change.
Some 150 people gathered on the Amherst Town Common for a two-hour vigil, titled Every28hours, to mourn the deaths of those killed in police shootings.
People of all ages, races and walks of life linked arms in a circle around the common and listened to event organizer Amilcar Shabazz. Small children held hands with their parents, played barefoot in the grass and held signs that said “Black Lives Matter.”
“Take a moment to reflect on what kind of world we want to live in,” Shabazz said, encouraging attendees to express love to those around them. “Things have got to change.”
Shabazz, dressed in all white, told the crowd he spoke with Amherst Police Chief Scott P. Livingstone, saying the chief expressed solidarity with the black community. Moving forward, Shabazz said he hopes Livingstone will continue his step in the right direction by acting as a leader for other police officers around the country.
“It is important to turn to each other and not on each other,” Shabazz added.
Later, the crowd spilled onto the common to listen to about a dozen protesters who took turns stepping up to the microphone, offering poetry, prayers and anecdotes about their own experiences with racism.
A small child, high school students and several town officials were among those who spoke. The speakers called for action and understanding, saying in-person dialogue between community members is more powerful than any online post could ever be.
Trevor Baptiste and Vira Douangmany Cage of the Amherst-Pelham Regional School Committee and former member Rick Hood were among the speakers, assembling teachers and committee members in the audience to promise students of color their support.
“We are in it together,” Cage told the crowd.
The title of the event, Every28hours, is an often quoted statistic from “Operation Ghetto Storm,” a report from the Malcolm X Grassroots Movement. The report claims that an unarmed black person is killed by police every 28 hours, though its accuracy has been questioned since it was released in 2013.
The Amherst event was pulled together in less than 24 hours by Shabazz and Sovann-Malis Loeung, both of Amherst.
“I get emotional when I think about how I can’t tell my kids ‘be safe.’ It’s not enough,” Loeung told the crowd. “I have black children and I’m very concerned … How can we bring peace to this world if we don’t talk about it?”
In a phone call before the vigil, Russ Vernon-Jones, longtime Amherst elementary school principal and co-organizer of the Coming Together anti-racism project in Amherst, said he was heartbroken by the recent violence.
“It is just so deeply heartbreaking to see young black men again gunned down … it takes a deep toll on the black community and it is a deep hurt to all of us. It shows just how much work we need to do to move toward racial justice in this country,” Vernon-Jones said.
Vernon-Jones, who attended the vigil Friday, said it is time to “roll up our sleeves and get serious about racism and violence in this country.”
Rev. Todd Weir of First Churches in Northampton was busy rewriting his sermon for Sunday in the wake of the shootings, he said by telephone Friday morning. Weir said First Churches will continue to consistently talk about racial issues as it has since Michael Brown was shot in Ferguson in 2014.
“It’s been almost two years since Ferguson. On a regular basis we’ve been talking about this,” Weir said. “The escalation of violence in our country is heartbreaking, especially seeing people killed in routine police encounters.
“Two wrongs don’t make a right. Police were killed by a someone at a peaceful rally. A rally for nonviolent change was marred by shooting a police officer. It is awful.”
Weir said he hopes recent events will be a “wake up call” that spark community engagement and cause a change in how police practice law enforcement.
Jacquelyn Smith-Crooks, an associate minister at Alden Baptist Church in Springfield, has dealt with racism her entire life. Growing up in Macon, Georgia, Smith-Crooks recalled her father being beaten by police and the KKK lighting a fire outside a house her family planned to move to when she was a child.
For Smith-Crooks, something about the shooting in Minnesota resonated with her and reminded her of those experiences growing up.
“I was just in a daze. When I heard about it, I walked around for a few minutes, and then I started crying uncontrollably … This tugged at the very core of who I am,” she said.
Moving to Amherst, she expected things to be different. Though the racism seems more subtle in Amherst, she said it exists psychologically. Smith-Crooks she feels that confronting racism has become an intellectual exercise in Amherst, and she hopes to see the community move beyond that exercise to reality.
“I would love to have an ideallic place where justice means more than a word,” Smith-Crooks said.