Scenes from Sunday’s Car Caravan, “Justice for George Floyd and Breonna Taylor”

Text by Ruwi Shaikh. Images by Eric Ruud

This weekend saw protests, clashes, and now, curfews all over the country as ordinary people took the streets to protest racist police brutality in city after city.

While Friday and Saturday protests in Oakland were met with heavy police opposition, the Sunday afternoon car caravan, “Justice for George Floyd and Breonna Taylor,” organized by the Anti Police-Terror Project, proceeded through the city without serious interference.

The atmosphere was vastly different from the previous two nights’ protests, and people expressed their anger by writing slogans on their cars, ranging from “Black Lives Matter” to “White Silence = Violence.” The traffic was moving slow and steady, and horns sounded continually to show unity and solidarity. Some people got out of their cars with megaphones to speak on their own personal experiences with the police, while some from different ethnic backgrounds showed their solidarity by waving a flag from their country. Medics were on hand and the traffic marshals did an excellent job in facilitating the movement of cars. There were young people, there were older people, but the sweetest moment of all was when a little girl stuck her head out the window and raised a fist. There will be justice. For her, for black lives. Fuck the cops. Disarm, dismantle, and defund OPD.