Black residents in Enid look back a year after George Floyd's death

May 23—A year after George Floyd was murdered by a white police officer in Minnesota, Black residents in Enid gave mixed reviews when asked whether any "true change" has occurred regarding police treatment of Blacks.

Enid resident Milton Mitchell said people didn't talk about race at all when he was a teenager in Enid. Compared to now, the 1960s and '70s were worse times to be a Black man in America, the associate pastor and retired businessman said.

Mitchell said that when he was 14 years old, Enid's police chief took him by the neck, lifted him off the ground and held him in the air, and Mitchell said he couldn't do anything in the chokehold. All Mitchell said he had done was walk into the wrong restaurant.

"That's where it was when you talk about how I was back in the day," said Mitchell, who ran for mayor in 2019. "So now here we are in 2021, and we're dealing with a lot of the same things. And you know there's been progress, but you know there's still a ways to go."

Today, Mitchell is a member of the Enid Police Civil Service Commission.

Enid resident Shawnta Solomon, Mitchell's great-niece, began a Facebook group for the Black Lives Matter movement in Enid and greater Oklahoma after videos of Derek Chauvin kneeling on Floyd's neck went viral. It now has thousands of members.

Solomon said she was going to have a local vigil commemorating Chauvin's conviction last month and remembering other Black people who had lost their lives at the hands of police.

But the same day Chauvin's verdict was reached, Ma'Khia Bryant, a 16-year-old Black girl from Ohio was shot and killed by law enforcement. Bryant had a knife as she charged at a young woman pinned against a car before an officer fired four times; the National Fraternal Order of Police called it "another demonstration of the impossible situations" police face.

On May 7, Chauvin and three other former Minneapolis officers also were indicted by a federal grand jury on civil rights charges. The charges were partly related to Floyd's death — Chauvin also was indicted for violating the rights of a 14-year-old boy in 2017, accused of holding the boy by the neck, kneeling on his neck and hitting him repeatedly with a flashlight.

"There have been slight improvements, but I don't really see a true change," since Floyd's death, Solomon said. "The only thing that's changed is officers being charged, finally."

More than 190 Black people have been killed in their homes by police since 2014, she said, with Bryant the youngest person so far.

Floyd's death sparked last summer's reigniting of the Black Lives Matter movement, which began in 2014 in the aftermath of Michael Brown's death in Ferguson, Mo., and Eric Garner's death in New York City — both at the hands of white officers.

"It's really a chain of events that's happened since then," Solomon said. "There are killings that happened before (Floyd), and when it got to him ... the people were fed up."

So many people were posting in her Facebook group about attacks, encounters and incidents with police that she said it made her start crying every day.

"It just put my mind in a place where I just got real sad. And it's hard to fathom all this stuff," she said. "You don't have to know these people or run across them. You still feel the pain."

Solomon organized a rally in Enid last summer, as part of nationwide BLM protests that then kept on through the fall on the coasts. During that time, people falsely claimed BLM was a terrorist organization, but a report found 93% of protests in the summer of 2020 were peaceful. Meanwhile, not a single week went by without an incident of police brutality — or use of excessive force — since the end of May, according to newspaper reports.

Looters who gutted businesses or vehicles were not part of the BLM movement, which didn't condone violence, Solomon said. Then-U.S. Attorney General William Barr said outside radicals and agitators were exploiting the situation. "With the rioting that is occurring in many of our cities around the country, the voices of peaceful protest are being hijacked by violent radical elements," Barr said.

Enid's several marches and demonstrations appeared to fizzle out after the summer, and were peaceful, as well. Police officers handed out water bottles and responded to smaller, nearby counter protests.

Pastor Wilbur Flynn, with First Missionary Baptist Church, said he believes the Enid community has an excellent rapport with Enid's police officers, who stay visible in the community and when "things are going on" like last summer's protests or annual commemorations of Martin Luther King Jr. Day.

"Here in Enid, it has been wonderful. We have no complaints whatsoever," with police officers, Flynn said. "If you have police officers that you know that want to be a part of the community ... and they're in the community making themselves visible ... when they come up to you, you don't have to be afraid."

Solomon, with BLM, also said police killings of Black people aren't a problem in Enid, but she still takes precautions when stopped. She said she keeps her license and insurance in her car visor and keeps her hands up when an officer pulls her over.

Jonathan Waddell recently started teaching his 16-year-old daughter how to drive — which in this case includes telling her how to keep her hands on the top of the steering wheel. If she ever gets stopped, Waddell has told her to announce every action before she does it.

Waddell said when his son was 17, he wanted to play midnight tag in their northern Enid neighborhood with his friends who are white, hiding out in hedges or yards then jumping out. But Waddell told him that's just not something "we can do." In either case, what could happen is his children could get arrested, or worse, shot. Waddell, a former Enid city commissioner, said there's no "singular Black voice" — and that it certainly isn't his — but African Americans have had a common experience since the beginning of their time in the United States.

A Black person experiences oppression, then is taught to accept it, he said.

"That's just the reality of it," Waddell said. "That's just kind of the way that it is. You just get used to it.

"And all I can do is laugh. What are you supposed to do?"

Pastor Devon Krause noticed after what he called a "visioning process" that much of his congregation at First United Methodist Church is white. Noticing is the first step, but he also said he doesn't want to give up on it there.

Krause, who's also white, said he read and learned in seminary to not be color-blind, but be "color-aware," much like being aware of the diversity in the body of Christ.

"The more you can sit across from somebody and see them and learn from them, I think the better off we are," he said, "and it's sad that things like the death of somebody like George Floyd are what it takes for people to realize that."

Staff Writer Kelci McKendrick contributed to this story.

Ewald is copy editor and city/education reporter for the Enid News & Eagle.

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