“I’m not ready to cancel 2020,” Alex Lofton, better known in Mobile as Huggy Bear da Poet, told an audience of about 100 Saturday afternoon in Mobile’s Mardi Gras Park. “Because 10 years down the road we’re going to look at 2020 as the year everything changed. The pendulum shifted.”
Lofton’s poetry provided some of the fieriest moments of a generally calm demonstration organized by Mobile For Us. Active in recent months since the controversial police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis, the group’s primary priority has been calling for police reform. Saturday’s event was in part a response to the police shooting of Jacob Blake in another disputed police encounter in Kenosha, Wis.
Lofton’s imagery about the fear of unfair policing in Black communities, and the toll that fear takes, found a sympathetic audience. Lofton said he felt good about the fact that the turnout for an event with a Black Lives Matter theme was about two-thirds white. “That’s inspiring,” he said. “I feel hope.”
According to promotional information, Mobile For Us presented the event in conjunction with the Central Gulf Coast People’s Council, the South Alabama Alliance of Workers, and the Party for Socialism and Liberation (Central Gulf Coast); Planned Parenthood also was among groups represented.
“As we continue to fight America’s toxic culture of policing and systemic violence and oppression of the state, police departments continue to prove that they are not capable of incorporating these lessons and demands on their own -- our current methods of policing must be abolished, we cannot rely on committees and reform groups that work inside alongside the force,” Mobile For Now posted in advance of the event. “The physical and psychological attack on Jacob Blake and his young family is the most recent example. After his assault and the resulting protestors casualties from want-to-be cop, we stand in solidarity and support the Kenosha protestors … This action will also begin to address the housing/eviction crisis intensified by the pandemic, in which capital is prioritized over human lives.”
Tiffany Trotter of Mobile For Us, at left, speaks to the crowd at a demonstration held Saturday, Aug. 29, in Mardi Gras Park. The event was organized in response to the police shooting of Jacob Blake in Kenosha, Wis.Lawrence Specker | LSpecker@AL.com
Organizer Tiffany Trotter of Mobile For Us criticized the slow pace at which the Mobile Police Department has been releasing redacted portions of its policies and procedures. She also told the crowd that the call to defund police didn’t mean to leave them unable to work. Instead it meant focusing police on their core mission and increasing funding for social service agencies that could prevent crime in the long run. “I’m saying demilitarize the police,” she said.
Trotter said that for her, cases like Jacob Blake -- whatever the disputed circumstances -- took her all the way back to the case of Trayvon Martin, a Black teen fatally shot by a member of a neighborhood community watch in 2012. “That was my first murder,” she said. “That was my Emmitt Till. I was 11.”
“It’s happened again and again and again and again,” she said. “I’m tired of doing this.”
Police maintained stand-off presence around the event, with vehicles stationed at nearby intersections.
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Jacob Blake case fuels demonstration in Mobile - AL.com
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