While We Were Building | A Year of Protests
[Louisville Courier Journal, 2021] The protests began May 28, 2020, two months after Taylor, a 26-year-old Black emergency room technician, was shot and killed by Louisville police officers serving a search warrant at her South End apartment.
Spurred by the police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis and the release of audio of a 911 call made by Taylor’s boyfriend, Kenneth Walker, hundreds took to the city’s streets that night, eventually clashing with police who fired tear gas and pepper bullets into the crowd.
“A lot of people ask me, ‘When are y’all going to be finished?'” poet Hannah Drake said in a speech before the small crowd. “I tell them, ‘I’m Black every single day.’ I’m fighting for justice every single day. So it’s not something that you just finish. We’re going to continue to do this every single day until Black people get justice in Louisville, Kentucky.”
