Story updated on June 10.
Four San Jose residents hosted the Black American Experience, an organized discussion about Black experiences and ways to prevent civil injustices, police brutality and reform the city’s judicial system, at the San Jose State University Olympic Black Power Statue Saturday.
Nearly 300 people gathered on the grass and listened to mothers who have lost their children to police brutality and then engaged in a forum with curated questions to spark discussion.
“We created this event in an effort for our community to understand our pain, our struggles and our rage,” San Jose resident Jordan Covington said.
Covington, along with Jaydin Donte Geer, Korryn Williamson and Les Nyako, organized the event after initially meeting on Twitter.
“Recently, we have seen change with the murderers of George Floyd finally being charged for their actions [and Los Angeles’] mayor announcing a plan for defunding the police department,” Covington said.
He said while funds will hopefully be redirected to health care, education and community programs, change is happening because people are speaking up.
In a news release Monday, San Jose Mayor Sam Liccardo rejected the call to defund the police, stating law enforcement needs reform, not reduction.
"We have much work to do to confront our long and terrible history of police brutality against Black and brown Americans,” Liccardo said. "Defunding urban police departments won’t help us do it. It is the wrong idea at the worst possible time and the budget released [Tuesday] will reflect that."
Liccardo said the people who suffered the most from systemic racism will be hurt by defunding the police.
“The police reforms started in San Jose in previous years need to go farther, including changes to union contracts and laws that create obstacles to ensuring officer accountability, particularly the firing of bad cops,” he said.
Liccardo’s rejection of defunding the police department will be showcased in the San Jose budget, which will be released Tuesday, according to the news release.
He said that police reform cannot come at the expense of the city’s obligation to protect every resident, regardless of color.
During Saturday’s event, Williamson discussed the $150 million that will be taken from the Los Angeles Police Department’s budget to be repurposed for jobs and health initiatives. She said the same thing can be done to San Jose’s Police Department too.
“If you see a marginalized group of people getting f------- bullied and killed on an everyday basis, clearly all lives do not matter,” Geer said. “This isn’t a race thing, it's basic human rights.”
Because Saturday also marked Tommie Smith’s 76th birthday, Williamson led the crowd in singing “Happy Birthday” toward the Olympic Black Power Statue at the beginning of the event.
The statue commemorates Tommie Smith and John Carlos' protest at the 1968 Olympics.
“Since slavery, our community has never been unified as one,” Geer said. “All of you are experiencing and have been experiencing modern day slavery, but with a new face. You ask for basic human rights and you are silenced or killed.”
Geer also said the argument that more Black people kill each other on an everyday basis isn’t fair because the crime is not in correlation to race, it is correlation to survival.
“There’s lack of businesses for job opportunities, lack of school for education, lack of community and lack of money, but there’s a bunch of f------ liquor stores,” Geer said. “What happens when you mix alcoholism with stress, anger and lack of opportunities? You get violence.”
Covington spoke after Geer and said that every week he hears about black people dying at the hands of the police.
“Growing up as a Black kid in America, you get to have these kinds of conversations at night,” Covington said. “‘Don’t put a hood on your head, you look like a delinquent’ [and] ‘Smile a little wider than everyone else so people don’t think you’ll harm them.’ ”
Covington said he never realized the severity of these conversations until 2012, when 17-year-old Trayvon Martin was killed after purchasing snacks at a convenience store.
“I’ve been traveling all over the world showing this picture right here and what they do to us when we are being executed in the community,” said Dionne Smith-Downs, as she showed a picture of her son’s dead body, who died from police brutality.
Smith-Downs said her 16-year-old son, James Rivera Jr., was sewn back together after Stockton police used handguns and semi-automatic guns to shoot and kill him, despite Rivera being unarmed.
Sharon Watkins, mother of deceased 23-year-old Phillip Watkins, said the trauma of losing a child never goes away.
Watkins was working in Clark Hall at SJSU the day she got the phone call about her son and she said while she continues to work there, the building and the 5th level of the parking garage continue to be triggers.
“It doesn't take another person suffering at the hands of the police to have it come back,” she said.
Watkins said the day her son was killed, he talked about killing himself while armed with a knife when San Jose police officers shot and killed Phillip outside his home.
“We should be telling all the pigs all over 52 states of Amurdica 'Ceasefire, ceasefire, ceasefire,’ ” said Lisa Simpson, mother of deceased 18-year-old Richard Risher, who was killed by LAPD officers.
“Amurdica” is the word combination of “America” and “murder.”
Event organizer Les Nyako said he was shot by San Jose Police Department officer Jared Yuen, who is under investigation after antagonizing protesters in downtown San Jose May 29.
“On multiple occasions I witnessed [Yuen] shoot unjustly without consideration . . . I was one of the victims,” Nyako said. “I had to get shot in front of my younger sister.”
Nyako said he expected more as a native of San Jose and called on the crowd to put pressure on the city.
Korryn Williamson, event organizer, said police brutality does not just affect men or one group, but everyone in the Black community.
“In order for us to really make change, we need Black women to also be liberated,” Williamson said. “We exist at the intersection of race, gender and class oppression.”
LGBTQ+ activist Tassiana Williams said Black women experience anti-Blackness even within their own Black community and Black spaces.
“Likewise, queer people experience anti-Blackness within the Black community,” Williams said.
Williams said the movement shouldn’t just be about abolishing the police, but about inclusivity. She said it should be about not telling young boys that they can’t cry or telling young girls that they can’t play with Power Rangers.
“We’re talking about allowing Blackness to be what it wants to be in all spaces and ways,” she said.
Geer said the Black American experience is not bound by one idea, thought or experience.
“This [event] is an expression, a conversation,” said Kyle Dacallos, an Asian Milpitas resident and member of the National Association for Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) Youth Council. “The first step of advocacy is being aware.”
Dacallos said anti-Blackness is prevalent throughout the Asian community because of an acquired colonial mindset.
He said his parents would warn him about going outside as he was growing up because his skin would get darker and “ugly.”
It wasn’t until he educated himself and his family about these issues that they started to understand.
In the Q&A portion of the event, Williamson asked people who had walked up to the microphone, what end goal they want to see from the Black Lives Matter movement.
Milpitas resident Alyssa Gutierrez said she needs to see the Milpitas police force defunded.
“I am sexual assault victim and a survivor of that,” Gutierrez said. “I went with my case to the Milpitas police . . . I was living in fear of seeing my attacker on the streets.”
She said if the man was Black or Latino, it’s unquestionable that he would have been arrested or charged, but he wasn’t because he was white.
“I get to walk around with my rapist still in the same city as me,” Gutierrez said. “[Police officers] don’t do shit for me, they see me as a statistic.”
