For Samari Brown, it’s about educating the uneducated. She just graduated from high school in Pittsford, a suburb of Rochester, New York, with a largely White and well-off population. She understands what it was like being called racial slurs, not seeing yourself mirrored in the curriculum, and being the lone African-American student everyone looks at in history class during the lesson about slavery. It was important to make the rest of her community understand these types of experiences.
The killing of George Floyd, and the outrage it generated, inspired her to co-organize a protest in Pittsford with her 18-year-old friend and former classmate Christina Mack. On June 10, nearly 200 people gathered in the town’s Thornell Farm Park. For Brown and Mack, and many of the other organizers across the U.S. fueling this recent wave of activism, such gatherings represent hope for change. “Our generation is going to fix the problems of racial inequality,” Brown says. “These are our lives we’re protesting about. I’m fighting for my little brother. I don’t want him to question his life because of the color of his skin.”
