Protest Archives - Laura Jedeed

On May 25th, Minneapolis police officers murdered George Floyd.

On May 27th, a handful of indigenous activists occupied the steps of the Portland Justice Center in protest. That was the first night of the Portland protests.

On May 28th, perhaps 150 people gathered for a vigil and to support the occupation. That was the second night of the protests, and my first night out. I went as an activist. Like anyone with a conscience, I was horrified and enraged.

On May 29th, hundreds of people marched from Peninsula Park downtown, then rioted in the name of Black lives. We confronted the first line of many lines of police we would face that summer.

What followed was over 100 days of protest. We went hard. It is an experience I will never forget.

In mid-June, the police began targeting journalists. Major papers stopped sending people to cover the protests–the insurance and liability costs were too high. A number of activists stepped in to cover the protests. I was one of them.

I was never a live-streamer (too difficult to keep protesters out of the shots and film is not my passion) but I realized I was pretty good at composing tweets under pressure. As I began to take this new role seriously, I started consciously distancing myself from the action itself. Though I made (and make) no secret of my support for the movement’s goals, I took on the role of documentarian and ceased all participation in the protests themselves. When the far right returned to Portland, I covered that as well.

I’ve compiled this work into posts. Because they are tweet threads, they do not read gracefully as long-form pieces. Nonetheless, this work took a tremendous amount of time, energy, and sanity that I’ll never get back, and I feel like they should exist somewhere. Why not here?

For a period of time, I live-tweeted with the now-defunct indie press collective DefendPDX. That account is gone and the links no longer work, though archive.org has records of some of them. I have chosen to leave the broken threads up as a monument to things thrown away.

I do not look at this page. The protests did not work in Portland. The police union maintains its stranglehold. Mayor Ted Wheeler, who authorized so much violence, got reelected in November 2020. The people who chanted “Stay Together, Stay Tight!” every single night for more than 100 nights ended up doing neither.

I wish things had turned out differently.

I was a working freelancer before the protests began, at the very start of a career. Covering Portland’s protests gave me a platform, nightly practice, and an absolute certainty that I want to be a writer. People come and go. Dreams burst forth and die horribly. But stories are forever.

Here they are.

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