Under a scorching sun and in the thick of the infamous Houston humidity, Toni Hill Kennedy asked herself: have I failed? have I failed my children? has my generation failed?
These questions, packing hundreds of years brutalization, weighed on the high school teacher as if she alone was responsible for correcting a system that was never meant to work for people like her.
“Am I not part of a generation that made change?” she pondered.
She had seen the protests of the past, she had heard her mother’s stories about growing up in South Carolina. Be careful of the police, her grandmother would say.
30 years later we shouldn’t be looking at the same thing, she said. What was different this time around was that everyone else saw it, too. We all were witnesses to what happened in Minneapolis.
“I want to honor the life of the man who died in that manner and those many nameless faces who also died in that manner,” she said, waiting in line for a bus that would take her and hundreds of others to Fountain of Praise Church.
For younger generations, it’s inspiring and yet the more frustrating that new shoulders bear the same weight time after time after time.
Kirsten Budwine knew she wanted to be a lawyer ever since she held hour-long debates with her father. She’s seen firsthand the many shortfalls of the judicial system and she sees it as her responsibility to help those who can’t afford it nor understand the byzantine maze that the courts represent.
“A lot of times, most people don’t get adequate representation. I want to be the one who gives them adequate representation,” she said as she handed out “Register to Vote” forms.
And yet, there’s something different about this … everyone saw what happened. The cops’ lies, often cited as fact and unchallenged by media, were nothing but straw houses.
“This generation does not turn the other cheek,” said Wesley McCoy, a 50-year-old native Houstonian. “We had to back in the day, they went after us and our livelihood. We had no other way.”
The endless lines of mourners continued with reporters from all over the world zigzagging through. A chorus broke out by the entrance. A child asked her mother for water as the sun bore down and the humidity rose.
“People are sick and tired. Sick and tired. And this generation knows what they want and how they’re going to get it,” he emphasized.