She Deserved to Dream: Statement on Ma’Khia Bryant’s murder and the Derek Chauvin verdict
April 21, 2021
From OOC’s Co-Executive Directors Prentiss Haney and Molly Shack:
“Yesterday, while the country exhaled after a guilty verdict for George Floyd’s murderer, a 16-year-old Black girl named Ma’Khia Bryant was killed at the hands of Columbus Police.
Yesterday was another painful reminder of the terror that lives here at home in Ohio.
Yesterday reminded us of how our current policing system upholds and enforces a violent status quo that so often claims Black lives with impunity.
We do not claim to be surprised by the violence of this system and how it dehumanizes Black children and girls like Ma’Khia. But Derek Chauvin’s guilty verdict still offered us a shred of hope, a glimmer of light for our families. It offered us a seed of accountability for the centuries of terror, brutalization, and indiscriminate death that Black people have suffered under white supremacy. It made us hope for a brief moment that Black voices would finally be heard, and that Black lives would finally matter.
And yet, Columbus Police killed a child who deserved to live and see her dreams come true. Ma’Khia is not the only one. In recent months, we have also seen the lives of Black men like Miles Jackson, Casey Goodson Jr., and Andre Hill stolen away from us by police.
We have much further to go. Black and brown families in Columbus deserve to live in communities safe from the terror of police violence. Important steps like a powerful new ballot initiative in Cleveland will allow directly impacted families to adjudicate police misconduct cannot be denied. It starts in our communities. We are the only ones who can keep us safe.
Until then, we #SayTheirNames. We grieve. We mourn. We hope. And we fight.
As the Rev. Dr. Jacqui Lewis says, we don’t dream of police officers convicted when they murder.
We dream of Black folks living old and thriving.”
