Four years ago, after 32-year-old Philando Castile was killed by a police officer outside St. Paul, Minnesota, Allentown resident Justan Parker posted a simple Facebook status.
He stood at the city’s Soldiers & Sailors monument at Seventh and Hamilton streets on July 9, 2016, with his fist in the air in silent protest, “for my brothers and sisters being executed,” he wrote, with an invitation for others to join him. He stayed outside for hours, but only a few people dropped by to show their support.
In May, after George Floyd died beneath the knee of a Minneapolis police officer, Parker did the same thing ? only this time his Facebook post inspired a dramatically different response.
Where four years ago he stood relatively alone, in May he stood before a crowd of hundreds that filled Hamilton Street. His 13-year-old son by his side, he yelled, and they chanted: “Black Lives Matter.”
The Lehigh Valley soon shook with peaceful protests, several each weekend, amid national calls for police reform and against systemic racism that pervades powerful institutions.
Initially, several of those marches were set up quickly by different people picking up the torch that Floyd’s death lit. Then those people found one another and formed an unofficial coalition ? a coalition that is now organizing in the Lehigh Valley from all angles: in the streets, in council chambers and at the polls.
Parts of the coalition represent some familiar organizations — the Unidos Foundation, Lehigh Valley Stands Up, POWER Lehigh Valley, Cohesion — and some brand new ones: Action Town Activists, Change Now!, and a still-forming Lehigh Valley chapter of Black Lives Matter, founded by Parker, 36.
This is the united front demanding systemic change not just in the wake of George Floyd’s death, but in the immediate aftermath of an Allentown incident that reminded protesters of Floyd’s death: the restraint of a man of color outside St. Luke’s Hospital-Sacred Heart on July 11, captured on video, in which an officer kneels on his head, near his neck. On Friday, Lehigh County District Attorney Jim Martin ruled that the force used was not excessive, and that the takedown by two Allentown officers was “reasonable.”
The coalition is demanding a reimagining of how policing is done in Allentown and beyond, including defunding the police department and establishing an external accountability system, like a criminal justice review board, to address issues across all three Lehigh Valley cities.
From different backgrounds and with different strengths and strategies, the collective has one goal: equity for all, which includes justice for Black lives.
“We’re very organized,” said Vic Laboy, founder of Action Town Activists. “This is a new generation; we’re not here to play.”
The groundswell has been coming for some time, believes Hasshan Batts, executive director of Promise Neighborhoods of the Lehigh Valley and a linchpin figure for coalition leaders. George Floyd and the coronavirus crisis might have been the perfect storm to stir the right people into collective action, but the seeds were already planted.
“I don’t think there’s any turning back. People of all demographics are listening,” he said. “This moment has created an opportunity for this to emerge.”
How they came together
Laboy, 29, was in the crowd at Parker’s first impromptu protest as hundreds marched down Hamilton Street chanting “I can’t breathe” and “Black Lives Matter.”
Laboy grew up more on the streets than in a home in Allentown, running with drugs and gangs and getting kicked out of Allen High School. He turned his life around after meeting his now wife, and in recent years started a record label and clothing line. More importantly, he let his spirituality come forward.
Up until this moment, he felt content to let others lead the way on the streets. But George Floyd’s death spurred him to step forward, even if he didn’t know how exactly.
“I said, ‘This is my time,'” he said. “Even though it’s uncomfortable, I said, ‘Who’s more uncomfortable, me, or the family of George Floyd right now?'”
When he left Parker’s protest, he walked past the Lehigh County Jail and heard knocking on some windows. He put up his fist, and in response, he heard knocking and banging all over. That’s when he started organizing his first protest.
He would go on to lead three themed youth marches drawing attention to the school-to-prison pipeline, the disproportionate mass incarceration of Black Americans and the need to invest in youth — where proper education is badly needed and where change can start.
It’s not a novel message, he said, but sometimes it takes the right people to come together and deliver it.
“This message pops up every so often and sometimes it dies down,” Laboy said. “But we’re at a place right now where the momentum is only getting greater, so we don’t plan on stopping.”
The right people, he said, did come together.
Inspired by Laboy’s message, Cohesion directors Darian and Yolanda Colbert reached out to him. Yamelisa Taveras, founder of The Unidos Foundation, gave them a space to meet. Then she reached out to Parker, Ashleigh Strange — regional organizer for Lehigh Valley Stands Up — and a few others who helped organize the already numerous protests.
“Let’s all get in the same room and have a conversation,” Taveras thought.
For some, that first meeting of the coalition was the first time they’d met.
“But we knew that we were all in there for a reason,” Strange said. “And the reason is that everything around us is broken, and we’re living in a time where people are standing up. Ordinary, everyday people.”
The approach
The coalition has a common goal, but its members have different backgrounds, strategies and strengths to work toward it, like different parts of a machine.
Though not pigeonholed to these roles, Parker is often the one who meets with local, federal and state politicians and outlines proposals. Strange, in addition to her communications savvy, helps get out the vote and recruit candidates. Laboy mobilizes the masses. Taveras often handles logistics, including helping Parker and Laboy with the details of starting their respective nonprofits, Change Now! and Action Town Activists.
Also part of the collective is Rodney Bushe, 32, who has volunteered and worked for POWER Lehigh Valley and other nonprofits for years since the death of Trayvon Martin woke him up. He’s now the manager.
“I’m kind of like the rebel,” Bushe said.
The son of Resurrected Life pastor Gregory Edwards, Bushe is no stranger to strong rhetoric. Even family vacations didn’t exempt him from book report assignments on key figures such as Malcolm X and Frederick Douglass when he was a child.
Bushe has talked about his approach publicly: taking power by force. To him, that means either voting different people into office or forcing officeholders’ hands through massive public support for reform.
“We know what we want and what [Allentown] needs, we’re going to force you to give it to us if they don’t give it to us willingly,” he said.
Strange puts it this way: It’s taking the machine apart piece by piece. If there are people in office who have the capacity to make change but won’t, replace them. If there are people in office who want to change but don’t have the capacity, modify the laws.
For that to happen, she said, there needs to be an informed, activated electorate.
Lehigh Valley Stands Up, a chapter of Pennsylvania Stands Up, launched in January under Strange’s helm with a small team of organizers. Its main strategy is what’s known as deep canvassing: not just door knocking in neighborhoods likely to turn a certain electoral color, but collecting phone numbers at events like protests and then following up with long, painful conversations to find out why people don’t vote. It’s about figuring out what people want for their personal lives. And they may not always be successful.
“If what they want is just to make sure their kids don’t die before they turn 18, then it’s hard to say, ‘Well then vote,'” Strange said. But maybe there are candidates they can support who won’t vote to defund certain federal or community programs they rely on.
The organization’s goal is to recruit a lineup of candidates for all sorts of offices, from local judges to Congress, for whenever those offices are slated to open.
As the coalition meets weekly, its influence is expanding. Three teens in the Slate Belt organized a march in Pen Argyl in late June and plan to do more. A group of three women in Easton, calling themselves Women of Justice, led two protests in the small city. In Emmaus, there’s an equal rights coalition discussing opportunities for change with municipal officials and organizing rallies, including one Sunday.
The coalition in Allentown has focused its attention on the city largely, but like its ever expanding circle, its goals are Lehigh Valley-wide.
Just like Taveras mentored Parker in setting up his nonprofit, Change Now!, he said he plans to help another young person looking to start an organization.
“We want to pay it forward and make sure that the collective keeps growing,” he said.
What they want
Behind the scenes, Parker has met with Allentown City Council members, state legislators including Democratic Rep. Peter Schweyer, and U.S. Sen. Bob Casey. Parker and others are looking carefully at budgets, searching for line items they can ask questions about and demand change.
He worked with Allentown Councilman Josh Siegel and Lehigh County Controller Mark Pinsley on a set of recommendations for police reform, which include making the Allentown Police Department’s use-of-force policy public and developing a Lehigh Valley-wide interdepartmental database of ethics complaints, disciplinary reviews and reasons for dismissals of officers.
Gov. Tom Wolf signed a police reform bill supported by Schweyer that establishes such a database at the state level, though it won’t be public. Both Allentown and Bethlehem police departments made their use-of-force policies public.
The use-of-force incident July 11 in Allentown reinforced the group’s push for a criminal justice review board to address issues related to racism, social injustices and police brutality in Allentown, Bethlehem and Easton — one of six demands issued on the Black Lives Matter to Lehigh Valley Facebook page in response to the incident.
But the biggest priority for the coalition, and the central rallying cry of protests of late, is broad: Defund the police, or, put in other terms, reallocate funds from police departments toward community programming and social services that might relieve some of the problems police are called to respond to in the first place. For example, if there’s an argument or a noise complaint in a neighborhood, perhaps a counselor comes out instead.
The vision does not go so far as to say there shouldn’t be police officers.
“We’re not their enemy — that’s something we want to make clear,” said Kevin Jefferson, Parker’s director of operations for Change Now!.
“But we will hold them accountable,” Parker added.
Allentown police Chief Glenn Granitz Jr. said the groups have remained entirely peaceful. Police intend to be a part of the reform discussion, but it needs to be grounded in data, as the city population is expected to grow and continue to place pressure on a short-handed staff, he said.
“Basically, if there is a conversation on how to better assist the police department with responding to so many of these things, that’s a conversation we want to be a part of,” Granitz said.
The coalition wants greater investment in schools and reformed curricula that teach students more than just Rosa Parks and Martin Luther King Jr. It wants better representation among the leadership over a city that is majority-minority. And, Taveras said, it wants to revisit cases of police brutality in the city in which police weren’t held accountable.
Court records show Allentown has paid $1.7 million to settle police brutality lawsuits since 2015.
“If you’re blind by choice, we’ll help you see,” Taveras said.
In the case of Allentown’s latest use-of-force investigation, in a protest Monday and at a City Council meeting Wednesday, organizers demanded the suspension of the officers involved pending investigation and the release of body camera footage.
How to get there
Not long ago, Allentown Councilwoman Ce-Ce Gerlach was on the other side.
A decade ago, she led protests with a group called Congregations for United Neighborhood Action against the development in the neighborhood surrounding Hamilton Street. Over the years, the team pushed for community benefits agreements, jobs reserved for Allentown residents within the Neighborhood Improvement Zone, and inclusionary zoning.
She was sworn in to council in January. These recent protests were the first she attended that didn’t have to do with development issues.
Having been on both sides, she knows what the coalition needs: research-backed proposals with lots of data. It needs to know more than the power structure knows, and its demands have to specific, she said.
“I want to make changes, they want to make changes. I just need to hear what they want,” she said. “Particulars, not just ‘defund the police,’ ‘more accountability.’ Vague terms, we’re beyond that. … Doesn’t mean everything’s going to be given, but we have to know.”
As the movement to defund the police reads now, there isn’t unanimous support among council members.
Councilwoman Candida Affa said she worries funding cuts would affect training and result in lower-quality officers — outweighing the potential cost savings of alleviating some of their duties.
Affa is a product of the ’60s, someone who marched for civil rights and owned a gay bar in Allentown for decades. She understands protests and said she sees a need for change.
But she believes that change needs to originate among people, because people and societies with discriminatory views created racist systems in the first place.
At 76, she said she sees hope for change. Recently she sat in a park at dusk, eating a sandwich, as a police vehicle drove by. She waved, and the officer continued on, but for the first time, she wondered: If she were a person of color, would the officer have stopped?
If George Floyd were white, would he have died?
“We can have as many marches as we want, we can blame the police department, but if we don’t change as humans, it’ll never change,” she said.
Gerlach is hopeful the coalition will have more success than she did in the past. She’s never seen a collective with one voice come together like this ? it’s usually one group or nonprofit that leads the way.
For the macro-level goals they’re working toward, one organization couldn’t do it all, Strange said.
And the target audience of reform is not just Black people. The fight is supposed to benefit everybody.
“This isn’t a children-in-Africa thing,” Strange said. “White supremacy kills everybody. It’s just killing white people a little bit slower. The way the system works, all of our voices are marginalized.”
What happens now?
Marches will continue until change becomes apparent in the books, members of the collective say. Though they may become less frequent, protests are what keep the message visible and the community involved.
“The run may slow down to a jog,” Parker said, but the race continues — to get more people registered to vote, to achieve better representation in government.
The coalition has placed heavy focus on getting youth involved, particularly with Laboy’s youth marches, where members of Allen High’s first Black Student Union led the way.
“The Black Lives Matter movement has sparked and engaged new blood,” Batts said.
And they’ve already started to take some of the helm, hosting community discussions about the presence of school resource officers in their schools, for example.
It was a unique set of circumstances that brought the coalition of forces to the forefront: a pandemic leaving many at home with fewer distractions, and thus, more eyes on the injustice that killed George Floyd. So momentum is critical, Bushe said.
“If we don’t capitalize on this moment right now, I don’t know when we’re going to get this again,” he said. “Because people are paying attention now.”
To Parker and the collective, the damage done by what the community saw in the video outside St. Luke’s Hospital-Sacred Heart is irrevocable, regardless of what the investigation finds. To them, there is no context that would justify what they saw.
The feeling is perhaps best captured by what a passenger in a car said as he watched the scene unfold, with a camera rolling next to him.
“I thought we mattered,” he repeated twice, as the man on the ground yelled “Look” in Spanish. “We don’t matter, bro. He can’t breathe!”
Morning Call reporter Kayla Dwyer can be reached at 610-820-6554 or at kdwyer@mcall.com.
