With the historic Sixteenth Street Baptist Church and the Birmingham Civil Rights Museum on each side, Kelly Ingram Park in downtown was filled Saturday and Sunday with a diverse group of elected officials, activists and citizens from all over to protest police brutality and voice their anger at the death of George Floyd, the African American man killed by police in Minneapolis, MN early last week.

In Birmingham on Saturday, State Rep. Neil Rafferty (D-54) said to a large group of demonstrators, “Today is about the people whose grievances go unheard, whose lives are marred by the injustices in our society which manifests in sudden violent forms through the pull of a trigger or a knee to the neck.

Over the weekend, Woodfin, Jefferson County Sheriff Mark Pettway, Jefferson County Commissioner Sheila Tyson and former mayor William Bell were among the nearly 1,000 people who gathered downtown to protest the killing of Floyd and call for justice.

Before the mayhem ensued on Sunday evening, Woodfin called Birmingham the “blueprint” for a nation divided by race, adding “the enemy is not each other . . . To say that we as a people are not better off today than we were 50 years ago … that dismisses the sacrifices of the foot soldiers that join us today.

Tyson on Saturday encouraged the attendees to vote for the people who are going to address the issues in our communities, because “our mothers [and] our grandmothers are tired.