Traverse City. Photo credit Harpe Star.
A TALE OF THREE CITIES At Black Lives Matter demonstrations in Cadillac, Petoskey and Traverse City, organizers have different life experiences, but their hearts are in the same place.
By Pat Sullivan On a day in the first week of January, Alex Marshall attended church, dropped family off at his mother’s house, picked up some Chinese food, and headed home. He soon realized he was being followed by a police cruiser. The lights never flashed, and the siren never activated, Marshall said, but when he reached his driveway and got out of his car, the cruiser pulled up behind him. The officer got out, and a barrage of questions followed. The officer said Marshall stumbled out of his car; Marshall said he slid on the ice-covered driveway. Marshall, who is black and who has lived in Cadillac since the fourth grade, had installed surveillance cameras in front of his house. He also started filming the encounter on his cell phone as the officer approached. The videos captured a disturbing scene in which Marshall stood his ground and refused to be questioned. “Have a good day, sir. Have a good day. You didn’t pull me over. I’m not under arrest. Go about your business,” Marshall said in the video, which his sister posted to Facebook. As the officer got closer, Marshall said, “Don’t touch me. Please don’t touch me. Why are you touching me?” He was forcefully taken to the ground, held at gunpoint, and after several minutes, he was arrested as his young children screamed in the background. Five months later, Marshall organized a Black Lives Matter protest in Cadillac.
Around 300 people showed up. The Cadillac News would publish a front-page photo of Marshall kneeling on the ground in solidarity with a police officer from the same department that had arrested him. KNEELING WITH THE POLICE Across northern Michigan, anti-racism rallies have sprung up, usually organized by young people who are fed up not only with the events that have led to protests nationwide but also with the quieter, more out-of-sight racism that they’ve experienced in the place that they live. There were bumps along the way to the protest in Cadillac, which happened downtown on June 6. A protest was announced and had been approved by the city, only to be canceled days later amid online threats of violence. Marshall marshaled on, however, and the rally occurred as planned, nonetheless. “We had a couple people that were worried about some of the guys that were down there with guns,” Marshall said. “But they didn’t let fear overcome them or overtake them.” On the Saturday of the rally, the same police forces that had been the subject of conflict and looming danger in Marshall’s life showed up. This time, they were there to serve and protect. City officials also cooperated with the organizers, he said. “They were very, very, very accommodating,” he said. “They participated, and they did a lot of things to help us to make sure we were safe. The
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director of the city police and the captain reached out to me and made sure my family was safe.” When Marshall returned home that day, he said state police were parked outside. He said he took that as a sign they were watching his house to ensure that he and his family were OK. Nonetheless, Marshall said there is work yet to be done. Racism has been a part of his life since he moved to Cadillac. He remembers his first day at school, when he was told he was “dirty.” An unnerving aspect of experiencing racism, Marshall said, is that it is so perplexing. “I didn’t do nothing wrong, and they hate me for the wrong reason,” he said. But since then, despite the challenges, Marshall said he’s seen reason for hope. He’s known people who were racist, who later made it known that they had changed. Marshall said he hopes the current movement will lead to police reform. “We have to clean up law enforcement and reform different policies with the police,” he said. ‘LET’S GET OUT THERE’ In Petoskey, a group of moms who have biracial children decided that it was an important moment and that the protest should come to the shores of Little Traverse Bay. Sheila Hartson said until now, she had been so busy building her cosmetics business that she didn’t get too involved in political
causes. She admired her friend Meredith Kennedy, though, because it seemed to Hartson that Kennedy always had or made time to speak out. When the Black Lives Matter protests spread across the country, Hartson reached out to Kennedy. “When this went down, I proposed to Meredith, I said, ‘Hey, let’s go out there.’” They chose to stand near the empty heart of Petoskey, the long-vacant block near the city’s center that’s been the site of so many proposed hotel developments over the years. What they found there was anything but an empty heart. A group of teenagers and young adults were already out, holding a socially distanced demonstration. Hartson and Kennedy learned that the younger people had come up with a plan to stage a sign-only demonstration due to coronavirus, then everyone had planned to leave their signs attached to the fence. The police department had nixed that idea, however. “The police department told them that they could not leave signs there, that they had to be attending them,” Hartson said. “I said, ‘Hey, don’t give up.’” Hartson and Kennedy teamed up with the younger activists and together they developed a plan to hold a large-scale socially distanced series of “assemblies,” a term that they prefer over “protests.” The rules: Everyone had to wear masks. Everyone had to stay six feet apart. They used a clothesline and tied a knot every six feet so that participants could measure
