RALEIGH, N.C. — Marchers in Elizabeth City protesting the April 21 officer shooting of Andrew Brown Jr. quickly fell into a rhythm last Tuesday night, their feet and voices rising and falling almost in unison.
Through the streets of downtown, their now-familiar chants ricocheting off the old brick buildings. They returned again and again to a refrain that — after five weeks of marching — has become both a rallying cry and a solemn promise.
“No justice?” they shouted. “No peace!
“No justice?
“NO PEACE!”
They have been lauded by civic leaders and national news writers as the epitome of “peaceful protesters,” refraining from so much as littering while some counterparts in Raleigh, Durham, Charlotte and cities across the country have broken shop windows, set fires and clashed with police during a year’s worth of protests since Officer Derek Chauvin killed George Floyd in Minneapolis.
But organizers in Elizabeth City say there is no such thing as peaceful protest, and anyway, that is not their goal.
“Peaceful protest?” Keith Rivers, head of the Pasquotank County NAACP asked during an interview. “What is that? When did that phrase even come into play?
“If I stand out here screaming with my bullhorn, that ain’t peaceful. You never heard Dr. (Martin Luther) King say, ‘I’m going to have a peaceful demonstration.’ He said, ‘We do direct action with nonviolent methodology.
“We are committed to nonviolence. But we’re trying to bring about structural change, and that’s usually anything but peaceful.”
Since Brown, an unarmed Black man, was shot to death in his car while trying to evade a swarm of Pasquotank County sheriff’s deputies serving warrants on drug charges, hundreds of marchers have logged thousands of hours in Elizabeth City’s streets protesting police violence against Black people.
Most marches are held in the evening, starting near the county’s Public Safety Building on East Colonial Avenue, wending south toward the city’s main commercial artery, Ehringhaus Street, and circling back downtown a couple of hours later.
Some marches draw 300 people, including activists from out of town, and some may have 30, with a core of local stalwarts.
At least one person always has a bullhorn to lead chants and keep momentum. When one person’s voice gets hoarse, they pass the horn to someone else.
Not everyone admires the protesters or their tactics.
Elizabeth City Manager Montre Freeman said he gets calls almost daily from residents and business owners frustrated by the near-nightly marches, which prompt road closures, reroute local traffic and force the city and the county to hire additional law enforcement officers.
As of this week, Freeman said, the city had spent about $325,000 for extra public safety measures since Brown was killed. The county had spent between $175,000 and $200,000 for extra measures, according to County Manager Sparty Hammett.
Freeman said extra police are needed during the protests for traffic control to keep protesters and motorists safe and to try to prevent incidents such as one last Monday evening, when a woman drove her car into a group of marchers. Lisa Michelle O’Quinn, 42, of Greenville, allegedly struck and injured at least two marchers and has been charged with two felony counts of assault with a deadly weapon with intent to kill, careless and reckless driving, and unsafe movement.
Freeman said officers also have been monitoring discussions by white-supremacist groups interested in protesting against or clashing with Elizabeth City marchers. So far, he said, there have been no such incidents.
Elizabeth City requires protesters to apply for a permit, including a planned route, at least 15 days in advance of any march, though Freeman said he waived the requirement immediately following Brown’s shooting.
Others have argued that marching night after night, chanting and carrying “Black Lives Matter” posters is too timid a response to Brown’s death at the hands of police officers when Black people are killed by U.S. law enforcement at more than twice the rate per million population compared to whites.
A man who identified himself as a member of the New Black Panther Party from Washington, D.C., interrupted a press conference by Brown’s family attorneys last month, saying lawyers were doing nothing and that, “The streets are going to get justice.”
When he hears calls for amping up protests in ways that suggest physical violence or property destruction, Freeman said, “The first thing that goes through my mind is fear. The reality is that those types of energy have the potential to completely destroy our city.”
But then, he said, he looks at the ethos of Elizabeth City protesters so far. “And then I get a sense of a sense of calm because our citizens have been very intentional about getting their message across without destroying our city.”
At rallies and during marches, protesters have called for Pasquotank County Sheriff Tommy S. Wooten II to release all video of the incident outside Brown’s house, not just redacted versions shown so far. Attorneys and protesters also have called for an independent investigation of practices at the sheriff’s department and of officers’ conduct that day.
After reviewing a State Bureau of Investigation report on Brown’s shooting, Andrew Womble, district attorney for the region that includes Pasquotank County, said on May 17 the shooting was justified and he would not bring charges against officers involved.
The U.S. Justice Department announced in late April it had opened an investigation into whether deputies had violated Brown’s federal civil rights. That investigation is ongoing.
Meanwhile, the protesters keep marching, wearing out shoes long past the time when those brought into the streets of other cities and towns have returned to their couches and their normal routines.
The marchers’ dedication, historians say, is a tribute to a long line of Americans who have used civil disobedience and nonviolent direct action as a way to call attention to systems or institutions that need to change.
“What happens most of the time in most of the world is that political repression becomes violent and the people who want equality, democracy and justice get weary and they lose patience,” said writer, professor and historian Tim Tyson. “These are tyrannies where they will take you out and kill you in front of your mama if you disagree with their social vision. It happens all over the world.”
Under tyrannical regimes, Tyson said, “The powerless cannot take power, but they can make the place unlivable. So they engage in things like burning buildings down and blowing them up, and sometimes people get hurt. ... But what is going on is so unacceptable that they cannot live with it. Things get awful and it becomes an unstable society.
Compare that, Tyson said, to nonviolent direct action, which confronts power “but in a way that allows them to be heard in two ways: one, as a moral witness against what’s going on but two, as an affirmation of the humanity of the opponent.”
“I think what those protests are doing,” Tyson said, “is letting people know that what is going on is utterly unacceptable and just continually sending out the message that this is not democracy and this is not justice.”
North Carolina’s civil rights history has often been shaped by nonviolent direct action, such as sit-ins, strikes, picket lines and economic boycotts to try to bring about fair workplaces and the desegregation of schools, public accommodations, the ranks of the National Guard and even municipal cemeteries.
One of the most famous, the sit-in at the lunch counter at the Greensboro Woolworth store, began on Feb. 1, 1960 when four Black students from A&T State University perched on stools and refused to leave without being served. The protests continued daily until July 25 of that year, when Woolworth announced a change in policy: It would now serve Black patrons at its lunch counters.
While nonviolent direct action sometimes looks like a spur-of-the-moment response to a longstanding or egregious indignity, historians say it’s often the product of study and preparation done in anticipation of the right moment.
Rosa Parks didn’t suddenly tire of surrendering her bus seat to white people on Dec. 1, 1955. She had attended a workshop on implementing integration the previous summer, and the Montgomery, Alabama, NAACP had been looking for someone to test the constitutionality of the city’s segregated buses. Her arrest prompted a boycott of the bus system that lasted more than a year and resulted in a U.S. Supreme Court ruling that the segregation violated the 14th Amendment.
Historian, writer and Eastern North Carolina native David Cecelski said nonviolent direct action has philosophical and often religious underpinnings that help steel protesters in volatile situations.
“Because it’s not easy,” Cecelski said. “Nonviolence direct action requires a kind of self-discipline and a commitment to the cause and to your opponent that doesn’t come naturally to most people.”
If protesters are met by excessive physical force from law enforcement, or if a motorist drives into a crowd of marchers, Cecelski said, “People can lose it. An incident like that is a test for any social movement.”
In Elizabeth City, despite at least one night where protesters were met by a phalanx of N.C. Highway Patrol officers carrying riot shields, only a few have been arrested. In defiance of city orders, marchers occasionally have blocked the highway bridge that leads across the Pasquotank River from Camden County, threatening to keep potential shoppers and diners from coming into Elizabeth City.
Recently, protesters and others pushing for transparency and accountability in Brown’s shooting have used social media to push “Spendless Wednesdays,” during which locals refrain from buying anything in Pasquotank County to try to make a dent in county sales tax receipts.
Theodore M. Shaw, the Julius L. Chambers Distinguished Professor of Law and director of the Center for Civil Rights at the UNC School of Law, said the protests and other nonviolent actions stand in contrast to the violence that activists see built into the systems they are trying to reform.
Just as America responded to the televised brutality of “Bloody Sunday” in Alabama in 1965 with the passage of the Voting Rights Act, protesters hope the country will now respond to videos of unarmed Black people being killed by police and of civilians protesting against the practice by pushing for changes in police practices.
Destruction in response to police killings of Black people may satisfy an angry urge, Shaw said, “But some people will point to the destruction of property and think that’s more important than the problem of police killings of unarmed Black folks.”
“In Elizabeth City, it seems they are conscious of that and they are trying to keep the attention focused on the death of Mr. Brown. They are not giving anybody any opportunity to deflect attention away from that and towards the conduct of protesters," Shaw said.
“It’s a tactic that has a lot of force and power.”
