Demonstrators Take A Knee For 9 Minutes In Towson Protest

TOWSON, MD – Nearly 150 demonstrators knelt in silence for nine minutes while spread across the city’s governmental center campus Sunday afternoon as part of the national response to the death of George Floyd last week in Minneapolis.

The length of Sunday’s peaceful protest is in correlation to the nine minutes former Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin knelt on Floyd’s neck after Floyd was taken into custody after reportedly attempting to pass a counterfeit bill last week.

Sunday’s event in Towson was organized by local filmmaker Will Schwarz, who founded the Maryland Lynching Memorial Project, along with Ray Bennett, who is also a member of the Lynching Memorial Project.

The protest is part of a nationwide response to last week’s incident in Minneapolis, which led to Chauvin, a 19-year veteran of the city’s police force, being charged with third-degree murder and manslaughter. Protests and angry demonstrations, many of which have turned violent, have been held across the country, including in Baltimore, over the weekend and are expected to continue this week.

According to the Baltimore Sun, Schwarz founded The Memorial Lynching Project as a way of acknowledging the history of racial terror in America so that reconciliation can take place.

Sunday’s rally was held only a few blocks from where 15-year-old Howard Cooper, a black teen, was lynched by a mob of white men in 1885.

“It’s all around us,” Schwarz told demonstrators, according to The Sun. “Towson is not immune.”