Hundreds of people marched in Roslyn on Saturday in the latest in a wave of organized protests across the North Shore in the wake of the death of George Floyd.
Participants in the Roslyn Rise March gathered at the Roslyn station of the Long Island Rail Road in the early afternoon, armed with cardboard signs and sporting face masks as the temperature outside climbed to 85 degrees Fahrenheit.
Organizer Qiana Hobdy, whose Roslyn Unity Network joined with the NAACP’s North Shore branch for the event, welcomed the participants before their march around the Roslyn area.
“We’re here to rise up against racism, Roslyn,” Hobdy said. “Some people don’t think it exists. Some people don’t think it exists in Roslyn, but here we are together. Together we stand, together we march, together we walk. And together we are going to fight against racism.”
Hobdy reminded the onlookers that “all lives will not matter until black lives matter.”
“All of us matter, but black lives are the ones right now that are statistically being killed unjustly at the hands of police,” Hobdy told the hundreds gathered. “That’s what we’re fighting for today … We’re here for mobilization, to find some solutions and [work on] implementation.”
North Shore NAACP Vice President Annette Dennis, also associate pastor of New Life Christian Ministries in Port Washington, quoted civil rights leader Fannie Lou Hamer in her remarks, and referred to Floyd’s death after a Minneapolis police officer knelt on his neck for nearly nine minutes.
“I am sick and tired of being sick and tired,” Dennis said. “I ask myself, why was Colin Kaepernick banned from the NFL when he took a knee? But here it is, we have in Minneapolis, police officers taking knees. The only difference is that they’re taking knees and putting them on our brothers. Take your knee off my neck!”
“They brought us here in chains, trans-Atlantic passage,” Dennis continued. “Then, we had to endure slavery. We had to endure the master in the cabins. You like our food. You like watching our athletes and you like our women too. We were the wet nurses for their sons, but now we’re not good enough to be your neighbor.”
State Sen. Anna Kaplan (D-Great Neck) spoke briefly, saying that the state had created the Office of Special Investigation and the Law Enforcement Misconduct Investigation Office in response, as well as an anti-chokehold act named for Eric Garner, a Staten Island man who died in police custody after being restrained by a chokehold from a New York City police officer in 2015, and a law against false 911 calls named after Amy Cooper, a white woman from Manhattan who last month falsely claimed on video that a black man was threatening her while she walked her dog in Central Park.
“This crisis that we find ourselves in has brought out the best and the worst in people,” Kaplan said. “Unfortunately, racism, white supremacy and xenophobia have only gotten worse as things have progressed. It is more important than ever that black Americans have a voice and that your voices be heard in the halls of power and beyond, because black lives matter. We’re not going to let change sit on the back burner. It’s time, and it’s time to do it now.”
London Johnson, a student in the Roslyn school district, then spoke on her experiences of being black in the classroom.
“Being black in Roslyn is sometimes hard because of the way people treat you,” Johnson said. “Teachers, for example. Sometimes they treat me and other black students differently. Not all teachers, but some teachers, treat us unfairly. They even talk to black students differently from white students, and not in a good way. It is not right, and should not be allowed. Black students should be able to go to school and focus on learning without anyone making fun of them.”
Fellow Roslyn student Ashley Jackson, 9, followed Johnson with a message of hope, eliciting cheers from those gathered.
“One day I will grow up to be someone great,” Jackson said. “No one will be able to tell me what I can become because of the color of my skin. I will be successful, and no one can stop me.”
Derrick McDonald, a 1999 alumnus of Roslyn High School, later spoke about his experiences as a student.
“There were 376 kids in my graduating class,” McDonald said. “Ten of us were black, and five of us really graduated … Most of our kids were put in special education classes, not because they had learning disabilities, but because they looked like me.”
McDonald recalled a lack of black teachers at the school, and what happened when students asked for a black history program as an elective.
“[The district] interviewed three people, a white woman, a black male, and a black female,” McDonald said. “They hired the white woman because they said that her credentials fit the description of what they were looking for.”
He also remembered when he “first endured racism” in the school district.
“We were doing ‘[The Adventures of] Huckleberry Finn’ in my classroom,” McDonald said. “I walked in and I saw the word ‘nigger’ in bold bubble letters on the chalkboard. I promise you, I almost had a heart attack.”
McDonald then told an administrator, who spoke with his teacher.
“The teacher tried to justify it and say that ‘We wanted him to feel comfortable in hearing the word, because it’ll be used throughout the course of reading this book,'” McDonald said. “I don’t know about you, but I’ll never get comfortable with anyone using that word around me, if you’re white or black.”
The Rev. Monte Malik Chandler, pastor of the Assembly of Prayer Baptist Church in Roslyn Heights, then invoked the words of Harlem Renaissance writer Langston Hughes in his remarks.
“I too sing America,” Chandler recited. “They send me to eat in the kitchen when company comes, but I just laugh, and eat well, and I grow strong. Tomorrow, they’ll never tell me to go to the kitchen, because they’ll look at me and see how beautiful I am, and be ashamed.”
The pastor addressed the present and what he saw as the future, calling for change in the Roslyn school district and creating a “multicultural” curriculum where black authors and philosophers, as well as black history prior to 1965, were studied.
“If you brutalize our brothers and sisters, you should go to jail,” Chandler said. “They need to be punished for what they have done, but I also want us to move forward and know that there is systemic white supremacy in our educational system. That’s where it starts. It starts at the root, so we have to be vigilant about our effort and participation in the school board, and the system right here in Roslyn. We have to make sure there are more black and brown teachers who have tenure, that are mentors.”
Chandler also called for doing away with Columbus Day, which he said was “celebrating a white supremacist every year in October.”
“How silly is that?” Chandler asked the audience. “To pay homage and celebrate a man who did all kinds of crimes against humanity, against our people, against Latino people, and that we give him a holiday for discovering people who were already there?”
The event took place near the town-run Roslyn Community Center, where early voting had been set up. Nearly all the speakers encouraged participants to vote immediately after.
“You have the power in your hands,” Dennis said. “The power is in your vote.”
Hobdy said in her remarks that the marching and walking were meant to create change.
“I can talk all day. I can walk all day. I can continue to walk, but my walking doesn’t mean anything if we don’t have change,” Hobdy said.
