Five years on, Santa Cruz Black leaders reflect on George Floyd’s legacy of activism and art

In the agonizing days after George Floyd was murdered on May 25, 2020, Joy Flynn was at home alone, depressed. So she sent a text to a group chat, Black Girl Magic, made up of 20 Black women in Santa Cruz, telling them to meet her down at the clock tower. 

“I was so deeply lonely and saddened that nobody around me was talking about this and then when everything happened with George Floyd, I felt an even deeper loneliness. I didn’t feel like anybody around me could relate to the pain that I was feeling because nobody around me looked like me,” Flynn told a gathering at the London Nelson Community Center on Monday night.

She was expecting the 20 women in the group to show up. Instead, at least 1,000 people amassed at the clock tower on May 30, 2020, for the start of what would be a summer filled with protest and activism.  

“Something was happening through me, not of me or by me, and I just trusted the process,” Flynn said.

The protests for racial justice in the wake of Floyd’s death were among the largest and most concerted protest movements in Santa Cruz history. Thousands of people marched for racial justice as allies alongside their Black family, friends and neighbors in the summer months of 2020. 

On Monday night, several of Santa Cruz County’s Black civic leaders came together to reflect on how Floyd’s murder united them into a strong community and how the movement they helped lead has changed in the intervening half-decade. Brittnii Potter, County Supervisor Justin Cummings, Flynn and Abi Mustapha all spoke on a panel for From Pain to Power: A Photographic Glimpse into a Defining Moment in Santa Cruz History. The discussion and photography exhibition at London Nelson Community Center, named to honor an early Black Santa Cruzan, was organized by Lookout’s Kevin Painchaud and Santa Cruz Sentinel photojournalist Shmuel Thaler.

The most enduring image of the protest was Thaler’s photograph of then-Santa Cruz police chief Andy Mills and then-Santa Cruz mayor Cummings kneeling together for 9 minutes and 29 seconds, the exact time that Floyd was knelt on by former police officer and now-convicted murderer Derek Chauvin.

The image was seen around the world — a German woman sent Mills a drawing of him and Cummings kneeling. This was the moment for Cummings when he realized what was at stake for the Black community, he said.

It all came to a head the night of June 3, when a mostly white crowd broke windows and vandalized the Santa Cruz police station with graffiti. Cummings had just returned home from a peaceful rally at Lighthouse Point, organized by Esabella Bonner, when he got the call that there was a crowd of people at the police station. While the police stayed inside to not escalate, Cummings sprang into action.

“I got on top of the Butch Baker memorial and got the crowd’s attention, and was just trying to get them to understand that, like, this is not what the Black community wants,” Cummings said. “My goal was to make sure that whatever was taking place in terms of all the different protests and actions that [were] being led by the Black community was reflective of how we wanted to respond in that moment.”

Others contributed artistically. Abi Mustapha led the charge to paint the Black Lives Matter mural in front of city hall on Center Street because she decided to do what “felt like was in my lane.”

George Floyd looked like her dad, she said. She couldn’t believe no one was doing anything, and after she couldn’t meet her friends in Oakland who were going to paint a mural, she decided to go to city hall and paint the mural by herself. 

Cummings convinced her to get a permit. Now the mural has become a longstanding piece of public art, and there is a 10-year requirement that organizers maintain it, according to Mustapha. Every year there is a community event to repaint it. 

The mural has been vandalized three times, but each time people have rallied around it, coming back to repaint and fundraise for Black-led organizations.

Some people questioned whether putting Black Lives Matter on the street under foot and tire signified disrespect. Mustapha said she understands the criticism and she is not sure if she would put it on the ground again if given the choice. However, what’s done is done. 

“It’s been like an entryway for a lot of people, and it’s also something that people can point their finger at and be like, listen, we have this mural, and we don’t see anything changing with Black lives,” Mustapha said. “So there’s people who love it, people who hate it, and people that use it as a scapegoat. And that’s what art does, right?”

Some of the outcomes of the movement locally included increased grants from Community Foundation Santa Cruz County to groups like Rise Together, which advances efforts on racial equity, along with a countywide diversity statement and an anti-racist council formed by the county — Circle on Anti-Racism, Economic, and Social Justice (CARESJ) — to address racial and social justice.

Cummings is optimistic about the strides toward racial equality that have been made in the county in the five year’s since Floyd’s death, but he sees danger in the community’s passivity to new forms of facism rising up. In the first term of President Donald Trump, Black men were shot by police, he said. Now, Latino men and women are grabbed by immigration agents and spirited away to countries they might have never set foot in before. 

“Many people in this room, growing up, learned about the Holocaust, saying that if this had happened when I was alive, I would have done X, Y and Z. Well, now it’s time for us to do X, Y and Z,” Cummings said.

There is also the issue of unaffordability in the Black community. Homeownership is extremely low among Black people in the county, while college education is high, according to Cummings.

The unruly summer of 2020 is over and Trump is the president again, and while some of the panelists still see the moral arc of the universe bending towards justice, there is less hope today. 

“While now in this present moment, I’m not sure the impact will be as big,” said Flynn, a Pajaro Valley Unified School District trustee. “But I feel like it will be long-lasting and that’s what I’m trying to hold on to.”

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