Some demonstrators, and in some cases the police, have paused to kneel, recalling the manner of George Floyd’s death and the gesture by Colin Kaepernick.
It is a simple gesture, swaddled in outrage and long-endured grief, that gained powerful currency through the protest against police brutality and racial injustice led by quarterback Colin Kaepernick on the fields of the National Football League.
Taking a knee.
Across the nation these last hard, uncertain days, demonstrators have turned to the gesture on city streets. At a nighttime march in Minneapolis on Wednesday, a crowd of 400 knelt for nearly five somber minutes. On the same day, George Floyd’s son, Quincy Mason, walked through a crowd at the site where a white police officer had pinned his father to the ground by a knee to the neck. There, before a makeshift memorial, Mason dropped to a knee.
The gesture has even been made sporadically by law enforcement officers, members of the National Guard and by prominent politicians as an act of solidarity or effort to pacify.
In New York, an N. Y. P. D. commander knelt with activists outside Washington Square Park. In Portland, Ore., police in riot gear knelt before cheering demonstrators, some of whom responded by walking toward the officers to shake their hands. Mayor Eric Garcetti of Los Angeles walked amid a demonstration and knelt. And the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee, Joseph R. Biden Jr., took a knee at a campaign visit to a black church in Delaware.
Kaepernick has not played in the N. F. L. since Jan. 1,2017, his career cut short when no team would sign him following a season of player protest he led with the help of a teammate, Eric Reid.
But his kneeling objection during the playing of the national anthem has boomeranged through the choppy slipstream of the American consciousness, and is again at the center of a turbulent moment with newfound force, and for the N. F. L., renewed debate.
“It’s a powerful, peaceful way to say you’re not OK with what’s been happening,” said Hibes Galeano, 32, a Latina who attended a protest in Minneapolis this week. Others who knelt spoke of Kaepernick with reverence. “He did what a lot of other athletes wouldn’t have done,” said Dorien Harris, a black, 19-year-old marcher who wore a face mask inscribed with the words “I Can’t Breathe” as he knelt.
“It took a lot of guts for him to do that, a lot of heart,” he added. “He knows what the community needs. It needs that strength. He was saying to stand up for what you believe in, no matter your position.”
While some demonstrators say they have had Kaepernick and his campaign in mind when kneeling, the gesture is also — intended or not — an echo to the manner of Floyd’s death.
