‘It could’ve been me’: Why one Kansas City student attended protest for black lives
Pepper spray burned his eyes, his skin, but Brandon Henderson, University of Missouri-Kansas City’s new student body president, would not back down.
Henderson had never been to a protest before this weekend.
But Saturday afternoon the 20-year-old found himself face to face with police in tactical gear, standing on the front line of a protest on the Country Club Plaza.
Henderson held up his 3-foot sign that in bold letters read “Say His Name,” and along with hundreds of other protesters chanted, “Black lives matter.”
Henderson’s sign referred to George Floyd, the unarmed black man who died in Minneapolis on Memorial Day after a white police officer knelt on his neck for several minutes to restrain him. Protests, like the one on the Plaza, erupted in cities across the country. Some, including the one in Kansas City, became violent.
“I hadn’t ever gone to a protest before because other times I just felt, I didn’t need to go. Someone else will go, and they will protest. But something just snapped in me this time,” said Henderson, an African American who grew up in North Kansas City.
“I thought, how long has it been since Trayvon Martin was killed by George Zimmerman? How long has it been since Michael Brown was killed in Ferguson, Missouri? And it is still happening. The police are still killing people out here. At a certain point, me not being out there is me accepting this. I can’t. I feel like it is my duty as a black person to be out there.”
“When I see this happening across the country I’m thinking, it might as well be me. It could have been me. The only thing separating me from George Floyd is chance.”
Henderson said he arrived at the Plaza about 4:30 p.m. with several friends and stood with what he estimated were more than 1,000 protesters near the J.C. Nichols fountain.
“The police had already formed a barricade on the street. People were making their voices heard, saying ‘violence is violence,’“ he said.
Henderson joined in. “Obviously this all flared up because of the killing of George Floyd. But that is not the only reason people were out there. People are feeling frustrated. They have a lot of pent up frustrations, righteous frustration. You know, what is it going to take to build a society where we hold police accountable for killing someone? I am frustrated.”
Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin was charged Friday with third-degree murder and second-degree manslaughter. The three other officers standing by were fired but have not been charged.
Henderson said that shortly after he arrived at the protest, “police started spraying people with pepper spray. There were a couple of times I had to use my sign to block people from getting hit with pepper spray. It had been a completely peaceful protest. I think police were acting disproportionate to the situation. The whole thing seems to become a game of brinkmanship between the police and some of the protesters and I think police were egging it on.”
Police said they administered tear gas cans to “encourage” protesters to stay off the streets.
Protesters in the crowd became agitated, Henderson said. “Some started throwing water bottles at police. But it is important to say that for every one person who threw something, there were about 10 people yelling for them to stop.”
Henderson, who is a senior studying political science at UMKC, said at one point “an older white gentleman from the back of the crowd yelled out at police saying he was a U.S. military veteran and that police were not honoring the same code that he took, to serve and protect. And when some young black men saw this white ally, they went and got him and brought him to the front line with us. It was black, white, young, old, all types of people protesting. It was so awesome, all these people working together.”
Henderson said he marched with the crowd from the Plaza to Westport and back.
He said that during those five hours, “I saw multiple people take a face full of tear gas, go wash it off with milk and come right back to the front line. I think that says something. People were not going to back down.”
While the pepper spray burned his eyes, Henderson said he wasn’t afraid to stand up front. “I wasn’t alone,” he said. “I did get a little nervous when a few times police whipped out their batons and I thought whoa, I’m about to get my ass whipped by police. But I didn’t back down. That would be cowardly. And I knew I wasn’t breaking any laws.”
After the sun went down, Henderson said, the demeanor of some protesters seemed to change. When he heard the crash of a brick breaking through glass at one of the Plaza storefronts, “I left. A lot of people left. That was crossing the line. I knew if I stayed people would assume I was a part of that.”
Henderson said that when he got home, his hands burned from the pepper spray. “They felt like they were on fire.” He thought about the events of the day and the way police had responded to protesters.
“I thought, people when they get home with all their battle wounds and they sit with their eyes and their skin burning and think about who did this, how this happened, it will add to their ill will toward police.”
Henderson planned to return to the Plaza on Sunday to protest again. He said it won’t be his last protest either. “I think I will start doing this a lot more. I know that many of the black students I go to school with at UMKC won’t forget about this, because we can’t. It is our reality. This has definitely changed me.”
Before heading out to protest Sunday, Henderson sent a memo to UMKC students.
“As a black man, I am tired of seeing a new hashtag every week to honor people who look like me dying at the hands of police officers across the country,” the memo said.
“There are many wrongs that need to be righted, policies that need to be enacted, and conversations that need to be held to eliminate the scourge of police brutality in our community. It starts with the protests held this weekend, but it will not end there.”
