Story Summary: A crowd of over 3,000 gather in downtown Louisville before slowly walking to Jefferson Square Park. Many remain peaceful while others gather around the Louisville courthouse. Some yell, others break windows, others tear down a Kentucky state flag from a pole, throw it on the ground and burn it.
A few weeks later, a crowd gathers two miles away from the Georgia Governor’s Mansion, home of Governor Brian Kemp. Cars drive by slowly, people march, then walk closer to the mansion with a mission to wake up the affluent neighborhood. One person in the crowd yells over a microphone, “Wake up America, Black Lives Matter,” before they are met with sheriffs and police officers, many of whom are African-American. A few of the people in the rowdy crowd call a black police officer guarding the mansion a coon and some urge the younger black officers to join them. The police allow the crowd to protest, even with the crowd becoming intensely louder past midnight. One protestor yell’s at the officers, “Why do you think people are out here at 1 o’clock in the morning. We want to stop dying in the fucking streets. So y’all can go home if we just stop dying in the streets, damn.”
Much of the anger in Louisville came from the police shooting death of Breonna Taylor in this Kentucky city, while the unrest in Atlanta was a result of the police shootings of Rayshard Brooks and neighborhood shooting of Ahmaud Arbery in Georgia. Though two of these shootings happened earlier in 2020, it was the video footage showing George Floyd dying under the knee of Derek Chauvin, a Minneapolis police officer, that reopened these wounds in Kentucky and Georgia, as well as the rest of the country.

First Caption: Dakota Walton, 7, along with her father, visited the Wendy’s location where the deadly shooting of Rayshard Brooks took place, shot by a police officer. The location would turn into a location of protest for several weeks. Atlanta rapper Lil Baby used it as a b