Hundreds march in Bellingham to honor Stonewall riots, Black Lives Matter movement
Several hundred protesters marched from Maritime Heritage Park in Bellingham Sunday afternoon, June 28, to listen to speakers at City Hall in honor of the 51st anniversary of the Stonewall riots, in solidarity with the Black Lives Matter movement and to defund the Bellingham Police Department.
The first of several speakers, Felixia, who identified herself as a bisexual, socialist Latina, said she is white-passing, and that you don’t need to be a person of color to treat them with respect, but that you do have to recognize that there are systemic injustices.
“If we do not struggle together, then we will not be free together,” she said, adding that gains made toward queer liberation and the Black Lives Matter movement are entwined.
She continued to speak about how entwined the Black, Indigenous and people of color and queer liberation struggles are. She said large corporations have co-opted Pride parades and other social movements. “We need queer liberation, not rainbow capitalism,” she said.
She said she wants Bellingham Police Department’s budget cut in half, qualified immunity ended and the police disarmed.
Bellingham Mayor Seth Fleetwood previously said he will ask the City Council to set a special meeting on Bellingham Police Department accountability where many of the reforms protesters are seeking locally and nationwide could be discussed. The Bellingham Police Department currently receives about one-third of the city’s revised 2020 general fund budget, or $30.7 million out of the city’s total $92.7 million.
Protest organizers said at the end of the event every local elected leader was invited to attend, but none participated.
Earlier in the afternoon, the crowd stopped the march at the Bellingham Police Department satellite station at the Whatcom Transit Authority Bellingham bus station on Railroad Avenue. Many took a knee and were silent for 8 minutes, 46 seconds — the amount of time that George Floyd, who was Black, had a white Minneapolis police officer’s knee on his neck. Floyd’s death from that incident on May 25 has sparked nationwide protests.
The crowd stretched for several blocks as it approached City Hall, marching and shouting “Out of your homes and into the streets” and “Whose lives matter? Black lives matter.”
After most protesters had left, one of the organizers tried to stop a small group of white people, all dressed in black, who were seen taking down the flags at city hall and burning them on the steps after spray-painting on the building.
Working together
A half-dozen people spoke on the steps of City Hall at the otherwise peaceful event.
A Lummi Nation member, who was identified as Bill, told the crowd this land is of the Coast Salish First Nations people and is his home.
“This is my place of origin. I don’t come from somewhere else. Nobody can tell me ‘go back where you came from’,” he said.
He said that when he got out of the U.S. Air Force in 1969, two members of his squadron were discharged for bad conduct because they were gay. He then taught the crowd how to say “two spirits” in the Lummi language. “Honor yourselves. You are not dishonorable, and you are free,” he said.
Ashanti Monts-Tréviska is deaf and had a translator as she told the crowd that her recent unsuccessful run for City Council was challenging for many reasons. She said it’s astounding how much we don’t realize systematic oppression and racism is ingrained in everything.
She added that the air George Floyd had was sacred, and it was taken away from him. She said his death has shaken the world.
Monts-Tréviska said we can all contribute to the change that needs to happen, and we all need to work to dismantle it. “We truly need to work together to dismantle the system,” she said.
She added that black deaf people have trouble during arrests because police don’t recognize that they’re trying to sign and need their hands for communication.
She said defunding the police is necessary not only for the larger whole of society, but especially for deaf, Black, Indigenous and people of color individuals. She said she’s tired, and that she’s fighting for her liberation and the liberation of future generations. She asked the crowd to fight with her.
Local educators, part of a group organizing to remove Bellingham police from local schools, who were identified as Michelle and Manuel, spoke about the “school-to-prison” pipeline where a disproportionate number of youth, who are often people of color, and come from disadvantaged backgrounds become incarcerated due to increasingly harsh school and municipal policies. They said the one resource officer for the 23 schools in the Bellingham school district spends more time at the schools with higher percentages of minority students. “None of our students need to be policed,” the speakers said.
A petition has been started to remove police presence from Bellingham Public Schools and they urged the crowd to reach out to school board members and Superintendent Greg Baker.
A speaker, identified as Ashe, asked the white people in the crowd what concrete steps and actions they’re willing to take to dismantle their own internalized racism and systemic racism. She said said it’s great that they showed up for the protest, but there needs to be more. She encouraged the white people in the crowd to redistribute their own money and wealth, and to stand up and let people who are marginalized take places before white people.
Ashe said Indigenous people have been fighting against their oppression since America began, and often times that fight has been violent. She said that Stonewall was a riot, and that windows were broken and businesses closed.
“Right now we need to get free and if we’re going to get free, then we need to be real about the historical context in which freedom has taken place before today,” she said.
The Stonewall riots, which lasted from June 28, 1969, through July 3, 1969, were a series of protests by members of the LGBTQ community after a police raid at the Stonewall Inn in New York City. The riots were considered one of the first major events to launch the gay rights movement.
Another speaker, identified as Amy, said she is the queer child of a Kenyan immigrant and an intersectional advocate. She said violations of human rights have taken place in Whatcom County and promoted the push to defund the Bellingham Police Department and reinvest that money back into the community.
She said now is not only the time to make petitions but to stand by them. She said people can take their money and make sure the programs they want and need are funded. “If they want to defend us, they need to be with us,” she said.
Zora Carter, who is Okanagan Westbank First Nations and a transgender woman, a “two spirit”, was the final speaker. She said she wore her first dress in a Pride parade in Bellingham in 2018, surrounded by a community proud to have her there.
“I love our village by the Salish sea, but I have also felt the sting of racism here. A racism that uses its police force like a bludgeon against its citizens who are Black or Indigenous. The police are used as a weapon against the most marginalized of our citizens, those in mental crisis, those who are victims of poverty and those left hopeless due to the piracy of cutthroat real estate practices,” Carter said.
She said she was on a class field trip to Seattle in 1999 when the WTO protests broke out, and she witnessed police brutality for the first time.
Carter then detailed several interactions she’s had with Bellingham police over the past two decades, including once in 2005 when she had garbage thrown at her from a car filled with white men. Carter called the police, but the officer who arrived said there was nothing they could do and started questioning her instead.
Carter said better officers will not be produced with more training, and that oversight committees or a department liaison aren’t the answer. “What has always been done will no longer do,” she said.
“Whatcom County needs homes, not holding cells. We need medical equipment not medical gear. We need libraries not law enforcement. We need parks not patrol cars,” she said, calling for local police to be defunded and the money reinvested.
She added that Bellingham can be a leader for the nation in defunding and reinvesting.
The march and protest Sunday in Bellingham was organized by various political, social justice and activist groups, including the Whatcom Democratic Socialists of America, Imagine No Kages, the Whatcom Peace & Justice Center, WWU Shred the Contract, Western Washington’s youth chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America, the Racial Justice Coalition, Showing Up for Racial Justice group, Stand Speak Listen, Sunrise Movement Bellingham, WWU Community Aid and the Bellingham Unitarian Fellowship’s Social & Environmental Justice Committee.
Most protesters wore masks to protect from the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. No infections have been traced to recent marches and rallies for Black Lives Matter — which drew hundreds and sometimes thousands of people, almost all of them wearing masks. As reported June 22 by The Bellingham Herald, Whatcom County Health Director Erika Lautenbach told the Bellingham City Council that the recent surge in new coronavirus cases has been traced to social events in Lynden, Ferndale and Blaine where people were not wearing face coverings or masks.
This story was originally published June 28, 2020 at 3:11 PM.
