Two young women who met on Twitter in the wake of George Floyd's death have formed a new anti-racist group called Freedom Fighters DC and have organized rallies and sit-ins with the hope of taking the movement nationwide.
This report produced by Zachary Goelman.
A newly-created anti-racist group called the Freedom Fighters DC organized a march in Washington on Saturday from a Senate office building to Lafayette Park in front of the White House.
The event was organized by two young women who connected over Twitter in the wake of George Floyd's death.
"Honestly, it's crazy because we met - we basically met through a tweet." Jaqueline Labayne and Kerrigan Williams didn't meet in person until last week, at a sit-in they organized in front of the U.S. Capitol.
"And it's amazing how well we've worked together without ever meeting each other." Within hours of Floyd's death, they had founded Freedom Fighters DC, which now counts 10,000 Twitter followers, 20,000 Instagram followers, and brought hundreds of demonstrators to the nation's capital in recent days, most of them members of "Generation Z," born in the 1990's, with little or no memory of a pre-internet era.
They have been using social media, which they call a "tool of justice," to rally a new, ethnically-diverse generation of young activists connecting online to protest Floyd's May 25 death and push for civil rights reforms in the nation's capital.
"In terms of the diversity of the event, we asked white allies to get to the front because it seems in these in these times, in this revolution of 2020, it seems that white bodies are valued more.
So we asked our white allies to get in the front of a black person if you see that they're being antagonized by the police.
And we ask like just a blockade, a white blockade, if you will.
Just serve their allyship a little bit more and just protect the person that has a target on their back, which is a black life." Tens of thousands of demonstrators have gathered in Washington and other U.S. cities protesting racism and police brutality.
"We have representation from different races, gender, sexual orientation, religion.
And we really have come together and form some type of family.
Like it's honestly crazy thinking about it now because I feel like I've known Kerrigan my whole life now." "I'm not sure if the protests are going to stop at one day or one single minute, but our underserved communities are going to come together, rally behind each other.
We're gonna have their back and continue on.
It's going to start from here and then go nationwide."
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