As the Walking While Black demonstration winds down Saturday afternoon, protesters disperse to the various rain-slicked streets surrounding Cal Anderson Park. For hours they had listened to speeches and marched alongside 70-year-old veteran William Wingate, the catalyst for the event, who was arrested in July while going for a stroll, using a golf club as a walking cane.
Speakers decried alleged racial profiling by the Seattle Police Department, before protesters, many carrying golf clubs, called for action to be taken against officer Cynthia Whitlatch, who detained Wingate. Whitlatch alleged that Wingate had threatened her with his club, though a video of the incident released last month showed no such threat.
After most of the crowd has left, Mike Drummond still holds a couple of golf clubs in one hand and his protest sign in the other. His sign reads on one side “Demand Community Control Over the Police” and on the other “Power Concedes Nothing Without a Demand. It Never Did and It Never Will.”
Have you marched before? I was out on the first Monday before Thanksgiving for the Mike Brown protests and met a lot of the people that were here, actually. I’ve been with the Freedom Socialist Party for a few years now through the Occupy movement.
What is the Freedom Socialist Party doing here today? Well, we’re here supporting the cause of [William Wingate], a black man, who was falsely arrested by a Seattle police officer, and we’re calling for her firing and possible arrest.
We’ve been involved in actions and we’ve been meeting a lot of folks. We’re trying to inject our politics into it. We’re against the nationalist viewpoint that maybe white people shouldn’t be a part of this movement. We’re all here and we’re all Americans and we need to work together on even footing whatever we do because that’s what’s really going to make a strong movement, not replicating the class structure on the outside inside the movement.
Do you see lots of your peers here? I think this is very similar to the Occupy movement, because there are lots of young people out here. There are new people rising up in the community and they have good ideas too, and need to be heard and involved in the decision-making process of whatever we do.
What do you hope to gain from marches like this? Well, you can only do so much with marches. They’re rallying points, kind of motivators. Especially on a day like this when we’re getting rained on but people are still out here. It shows they really care and that they have a certain level of commitment towards the organizing.
I don’t think marches alone are going to end this racist system, and we need to organize on a bigger scale and dream bigger. It’s not that marches are bad or anything, they’re great, but it needs to be followed up with organizing towards some concrete goals that can actually change the quality of life for people.
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Profiles in Protest is an ongoing series spotlighting local activists involved in the Black Lives Matter protests. Read past interviews with The Maoist, The Vacuum Cleaner Salesman, The Donut Lady, The Guy Fawkes Guy, Queen Pearl, The Master Student, and The Happy Warrior.
