Concerning the Events of June 2nd, 2020 Hayes Buchanan
The murder of George Floyd at the hands of Minneapolis police officers sparked protests that dominated the summer of 2020. Since then, there has been much written about the injustice of our criminal justice system, the metastasis on city budgets and citizen sanity perpetrated by policing agencies, and the violence that the society we inherited inflicts on people of color and the poor. I hope that this personal narrative, anecdotal in nature, can be a modest compliment to these bodies of work.
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become ubiquitous as the summer went on. By 8 pm, the sun was beginning to set and I split from the group when we got to Union Square. Just as the Mayor’s curfew was coming into effect, I ran into a smaller group nearby that was in a confrontation with police. The protestors stood their ground and eventually the police retreated to their vehicles and drove away, to much celebration. One protestor carried an upside down American flag. Another, brandishing a lighter, asked if he could burn it.
As a frequent attendee of the New York City protests this past summer, I hoped to document my experience for personal posterity as 2020 drew to a close. My submission to Urban Magazine was the impetus I needed to finally put pen to paper. The following documents a vignette of a night less than a week after the unrest began. I do not believe that this discourse is zero sum, that the presence of my voice in this magazine drowns out that of countless, more deserving others. That being said, it is understandable if the reader is not interested in reading a white man’s perspective. I write using the only perspective I have.
Just as the police left the scene a large group made its way to Union Square, merging with the smaller one I was a part of. This group had several leaders, who I only classify as such because they carried bullhorns, although I would soon learn that to the extent the early protests were organized at all it was ad hoc and these leaders were self-appointed. The self-proclaimed leaders disagreed on which way to take the large crowd and encouraged us to take a knee while a decision was made. During this lull in the noise, the sound of glass shattering split the air. The consternation about looters had already begun in the media, but this was the first time I encountered them. The men with bullhorns lambasted the looters and quickly realized their error in stopping the march. The looters didn’t seem to care. We marched south as dusk settled in.
Around 6 pm on the evening of Tuesday, June 2, I left my apartment and headed to a protest that was taking place on the Upper East Side at Gracie Mansion. Finding the East River Path blocked, I deviated to city streets, in search of a group of protestors in Midtown. Around 7 pm, I joined a group marching along Park Ave, my tongue tepidly shaping the names of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor in chants that would
My memory of the events starts to get a bit hazy after nightfall. I’ll admit that I am a terrible estimator of headcount, but if I were to guess, it felt like there were over a thousand of us in our group, which stretched back in an immeasurable tail. I remember being in the West Village and then Soho. Turning left onto Canal Street in Tribeca. The ad hoc organizing became increasingly more organized - particularly among the minority of cyclists in the pack. As cyclists, we played a unique role,
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