COLUMBUS, Ohio _ He had held the line for hours, never flinching as protesters screamed insults, hurled rocks and frozen water bottles, and dared the men and women to take off their uniforms and fight.
Then someone zeroed in on his black skin.
Protesters soon advanced on Columbus police Officer Phillip "P.J." Jackson, circling back to him time and again.
"You're disgusting. You standing on the wrong side," one Black woman shouted in his face. "We stand with our people. ... I know you can hear me. I hope you can sleep good at night. Remember my voice, Black man. Remember my voice."
And oh, how he does. The insults hurt, Jackson said, and the personal attacks cut him as surely as a sharp knife.
Yet that pain only has steeled his resolve for how he can best bring about change from the inside. It reminds him how those who judge him only by his uniform are no better than any officer who judges those they police simply by the color of their skin.
"Because I was a Black officer, I became a focal point and a target," he said. "Not knowing me, not knowing who I am, what I have been through, what I've done in my community and what I still continue to do."
He held his position in that line of officers at the intersection of Broad and High streets downtown as the agitated crowd swelled to hundreds as the night wore on.
It was Thursday, May 28, the first night of protests in Columbus decrying police brutality and demanding widespread change in the name of George Floyd, who died in Minneapolis after a police officer pinned him down by his neck for about eight minutes during an arrest on minor charges.
And it was a night like no other Jackson has experienced in his 14 years with the Columbus Division of Police or as a state corrections officer or as part of a U.S. Marshal's task force before that.
Sure, he has had his blackness used against him before and yes, people on the streets as he works his mid-watch shift have questioned his loyalty. But he said he's always been able to talk to people, to show them who he really is and what he stands for, what his colleagues stand for.
These are his streets, after all. This is where he came from, having grown up in the Linden neighborhood and then spending 20-plus years as a youth football coach there.
But this? This one May night and all the nights that have followed? They are different.
"It hurts," the 46-year-old Jackson said. He knows deep in his bones that he can, in fact, be a Black man and wear police blue at the same time. It shouldn't require him to split his loyalties.
He said he is as angry about what police did to Floyd as the people marching through the city, but he has never been ashamed to be a Black police officer. And he isn't now.
"I knew what was happening to that man on the ground," he said of Floyd. "Yes, I felt that pain. But ... separating your Blackness from the uniform? You're gonna be Black regardless. You can't turn that off."
