“Wake Up Everybody” was an apt soundtrack to fill the Hook Mill Green in East Hampton on Sunday afternoon, as a public address system came to life while thousands of people converged in a peaceful protest against racism and police brutality.
Forty-five years after it was originally recorded by Harold Melvin and the Blue Notes, the song’s lyrics remain dispiritingly fitting: “No more backward thinkin', time for thinkin' ahead / The world has changed so very much from what it used to be / There is so much hatred, war, and poverty.”
Sunday’s event, which came amid similar protests in recent weeks in Bridgehampton, Sag Harbor, Southampton, Herrick Park in the village, and throughout the country and the world, saw marchers proceed from the green down Gay Lane, circling back up to Main Street, where protesters lay in the street or knelt for eight minutes and 46 seconds, the span in which a white police officer pushed his knee into George Floyd’s neck in Minneapolis on Memorial Day, killing him and sparking waves of angry demonstrations.
Protesters then returned to the green where speakers including Travis Wilkins, Superintendent Richard Burns of the East Hampton School District, the Rev. Walter Thompson of Calvary Baptist Church in East Hampton, the Rev. Leandra Lambert of St. Luke’s Episcopal Church, Cantor/Rabbi Debra Stein of the Jewish Center of the Hamptons, and Minerva Perez of Organizacion Lation Americana of Eastern Long Island, paid moving tribute to Mr. Floyd and others who have died at the hands of police or in racially-motivated violence.
Taliya Hayes and Anna Hoffmann, recent college graduates from East Hampton, organized the protest and also spoke. East Hampton Town Supervisor Peter Van Scoyoc, Councilman Jeff Bragman, and Arthur Graham of the East Hampton Village Board were seen among the crowd.
It was an incongruous sight — faces covered by masks, thousands protesting police violence in the afternoon sunshine in East Hampton Village — but a reflection of the times, amid a pandemic that to date has killed some 110,000 Americans and a spate of civilian-recorded incidents that have brought renewed attention to police brutality and galvanized the nation. “How Many Weren’t Filmed?” one protester’s sign read.
Announcement of a voter registration table on the green grew cheers from the crowd as the collective mood, though angry and fatigued, was also determined. “Just showing up is not enough,” Ms. Hoffmann said toward the event’s conclusion. She and others exhorted all present to participate in campaigns and vote, and to, as one chant expressed, “forget these racist police!”
