In small towns and cities with little, if any, recent racial justice activism, newly mobilized protesters like Matthews helped create what Douglas McAdam, a sociologist at Stanford University, called one of the most expansive and diverse protest movements in American history.

In prison, he’d read books by radical Black thinkers and activists like Malcolm X, Eldridge Cleaver and Frantz Fanon, and they’d shaped his thinking about oppression and liberation.

After Floyd’s killing, they were top of mind as he watched — from the comfort of a computer screen — a livestream showing protesters getting tear-gassed by police.

“I was succumbing, like all of those people who have so much to say but aren’t doing anything about it.”.

And on July 25, Matthews led dozens of people calling for justice in the May 30 killing of James Scurlock, a 22-year-old Black man gunned down by a white bar owner in Omaha.

Matthews led the group across the city’s Farnam Street bridge and into a blockade of police officers telling them to immediately disperse.

When they didn’t — with Matthews repeatedly announcing that they were protesting peacefully — officers tackled and arrested him, then placed him in solitary confinement for nearly 24 hours, according to a lawsuit that ProBlac and the American Civil Liberties Union-Nebraska filed last month.

The suit, which names the city of Omaha and its police department as defendants, claims that the officers used excessive force when they “indiscriminately” — and in some cases from point-blank range — fired pepper balls, a chemical agent, at protesters.

ProBlac and the ACLU-Nebraska are demanding that police halt practices that they say restrict free speech and make it too easy for officers to use chemical agents on nonviolent protesters.

Neither the department nor the lawyers defending the city responded to requests for comment, but in a statement posted a few days after the protest, police said that Matthews hadn’t obtained a parade permit for the event and that he and others were breaking the law when they walked in the street.

The police response that night was partly responsible for tempering what Matthews described as the kind of burgeoning racial justice movement that he’d never seen before in Omaha.

ProBlac now has 75 members who — while it was still warm outside — attended weekly protests in a section of downtown Omaha they’ve dubbed “Liberation Square.” Members have helped organize and promote events calling for justice in the killing of Zachary Bearheels, a 29-year-old Native American man who died after police officers shocked him a dozen times in 2017, and they've launched a “copwatching” effort to document potential police misconduct.

But after the killings of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor and Ahmaud Arbery, she wrote in a Facebook post, it was time “to show my very monochromatic town that Black Lives Matter.”.

Hundreds of counterprotesters from three motorcycle gangs, a Second Amendment rights club and a pro-police group flocked to Bethel that Sunday and overwhelmed the space that Gee had secured through the police department, village officials later said.

Brown called the encounter “shameful.” The village’s mayor, Jay Noble, called the “law-breaking behavior” “appalling and disgusting.” Bethel Police Chief Steve Teague said he had so few officers to monitor the event that “preservation of life” took priority over minor assaults.

She was proud of the love and support that she and her fellow protesters showed for Black lives, she said, but for months, her stress levels would spike every time she heard a motorcycle rumble by on the rural road in front of her home.

But the issues she cared most about — workers’ rights, universal health care, access to free education — were an extension of her push for racial justice, she said, a way to “break down the institutions” that perpetuate racism.

A few days after George Floyd’s killing, Jaspreet Kaur was in the living room of her family’s home in Ceres, a city of roughly 45,000 in California’s agricultural heartland, the Central Valley.

The actions of the Minneapolis police reminded them of the corrupt, brutal authorities back in India, Kaur recalled.

To Kaur, the letter had been a necessary introduction — not just for her own family, but for all the young people of Punjabi descent who cared about how police violence affects Black Americans but didn’t know how to talk to their parents about it.

This was especially true for someone like her father, who came from a poor family and had spent years with his head down, working hard, with a simple mantra in mind, Kaur said: “We don’t want any trouble.”.

Even though Kaur’s job is to get all those young people civically engaged — and even though she speaks Punjabi fluently — she found herself stumped, unable to call up the right words to talk with her parents about the issues raised by Floyd’s killing.

So Kaur grabbed a Sharpie, scribbled on some signs, and she, her husband and her parents marched through downtown Ceres with a few hundred other people on a Sunday morning.

But the letter is just one part of a broader approach that Kaur — and the Jakara Movement — are taking: the group developed a series of short videos that are recorded in Punjabi and grapple with issues like the school-to-prison pipeline and how Sikhs have benefitted from the Black American struggle.

This switch, Conner said, is a rule: Unlike him, his son is the low-profile type.

On any given day, the doors of Conner’s pickup might be scrawled with various messages — “jail killer cops,” “Black Lives Matter” or, more recently, the number of people killed by coronavirus in the United States followed by the phrase, “Trump Death Clock.” Attached to the bed of the pickup, he might have a giant Black Lives Matter flag.

But after May 25, two things happened: A CNN crew covering the aftermath of Floyd’s killing was arrested on live television, and the then-sheriff of Clay County, where Conner lives, promised to enlist local gun owners to help crack down on “lawless” protesters

Haney said he started getting notes from friends who’d spot Conner on the street

The event featured a prop plane that Conner hired to fly over with a banner that read, “TAKE IT DOWN BAKKKER COUNTY,” as well as a jarring encounter between a young Black woman and an older white woman in a crowd of counterprotesters

“Some people can let that go,” he said