4 Downtown’s Water Street Garage will soon undergo an Insta-worthy makeover. The garage—located at the base of the Acosta Bridge—will be getting a new art piece, titled Emergence, that will feature programmable LED lighting and musical notes from two songs: “Lift Ev’ry Voice and Sing,” written by James Weldon Johnson and John Rosamond Johnson in Jacksonville and first performed in 1900, and “Bridges,” a contemporary piece by the Jacksonville Symphony’s Courtney Bryan.

Just an hour up the road across state lines, a young African-American man went for a Sunday afternoon run. Pounding the pavement came naturally to Ahmaud Marquez Arbery, a frequent jogger and former high school football star once known for smoking his opponents on the turf. The 25-year-old’s gait on February 23 started off leisurely as he breezed through the roads of small-town Brunswick, Georgia. However, as two armed men—both white—slowed their white pickup truck on a neighborhood street in Satilla Shores where Arbery eventually stumbled his final steps, video captured of the disturbing confrontation made it clear that the athlete would soon be running for his life. Travis and Gregory McMichael had chased Arbery down in their vehicle—at one point hitting him with it, as it was later reported.

They came to a stop, as the cell phone video behind them showed. As the jogger fought to break away from the shotgun-wielding Travis McMichael, the weapon red three blasts. e two that struck Arbery’s chest delivered the fatal blows. e man recording the murder on his cellphone from his own vehicle, William “Roddie” Bryan, later told investigators that the 34-year-old shooter had directed a racial slur at an unarmed Arbery as his last drops of life leaked out into the pavement. The killing occurred about 61 miles north of Jacksonville. It took almost as many days—74—for the father and son responsible for Arbery’s death and the man filming what has been called a “modern lynching” to be arrested for the killing. The video of Arbery’s final moments was released to the public over a month after he died while his killers remained free. Outcries and outrage reverberated across the country as loudly as the shotgun blasts that ended his young life.
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“My Black neighbor rides his bicycle in our neighborhood, and he sometimes jogs,” says Tori Lundy, a resident of Jacksonville’s historic Springfield and acting vice president of the city’s unofficial Black Lives Matter chapter. “All I could think was, ‘Ahmaud could have been anybody that I know.’” Lundy says his tragic killing dragged up memories of 17-year-old Trayvon Martin’s death in 2012. The Black teen was shot and killed in Sanford, Florida, seven years and 362 days before Arbery. At the time of Arbery’s death, both men would’ve been the same age.

“These antagonizers, both Greg and Travis, felt as if they could take the law into their own hands, like they could reach this Black man, not even for a crime, but just because he was Black,” Lundy tells Jacksonville Magazine. “That’s what George Zimmerman did, and he got off.” As the McMichaels and Bryan await trial following formal indictments on nine charges each, including felony murder and aggravated assault, protestors continue to ll streets nationwide and locally in outrage against racial injustice and police brutality.
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‘Sick and tired of being sick and tired’

The murder of Arbery by fellow civilians along with the killings of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor at the hands of law enforcement officers have struck a nerve with African Americans and their allies of various ethnic backgrounds who, as Lundy phrases it, have grown “sick and tired of being sick and tired.” Perhaps that’s what’s different this time around as a fresh wave of persistent human rights activists make their voices loudly heard.

“The new generation, the younger folks, the 18- and 22-year-olds, they’re at a place where they’re fearless, educated, knowledgeable and they’re activating their rights,” says Lundy, who herself has marched the streets for the shortened lives of Jacksonville’s Jordan Davis as well as Trayvon Martin. Her fellow Jacksonville Black Lives Matter activists have also been heavily involved in recent local protests. Black Lives Matter is a network of grassroots organizations that advocate against police violence towards Black people. “People are signing petitions, calling mayors and governors and the State Attorney’s Office,” she says. “It’s a beautiful thing to see them out on the front lines.”

“The new generation, the younger folks, the 18- and 22-year-olds, they’re at a place where they’re fearless, educated, knowledgeable and they’re activating their rights.” – Tori Lundy, community activist

Community activist Ben Frazier, who’s also the president and founder of the Northside Coalition of Jacksonville, says the protests happening in both Jacksonville and across the U.S. signify more than a moment—they’re a movement. He tells Jacksonville Magazine that now more than ever, it’s time for the country, with its deep-rooted history of racism, to address the racial challenges that divide its people even in the modern era. “I find it unique and ironic that as we stand at the dawn of the 21st century, we are still here having to stand up and speak out against any form of social, racial and economic injustice,” says Frazier, a Jacksonville native who still recalls the frightening sight as a child of hood-wearing Ku Klux Klan members riding past him and his mother in a flatbed truck. “We still see communities that are marginalized, economically ravaged by poverty, unemployment, economic degradation, racial discrimination and law enforcement and racial bias in the criminal justice system.”
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