Last summer, after George Floyd died under Derek Chauvin’s knee, protesters in Pensacola, Florida, held a week’s worth of rallies and sit-ins. On June 6, those protests reached a dramatic peak as protesters linked arms on the Pensacola Bay Bridge on the westernmost edge of the Florida Panhandle. As they blocked traffic, protesters demanded that the city’s mayor come to the bridge to respond to their policing reform demands. Mayor Grover Robinson soon arrived in a bright-yellow rain jacket.
The initial shouts gave way to serious negotiations, until Robinson agreed to appoint Haley Morrissette, a leader of that day’s protest and an organizer for Dream Defenders, a local civil rights group, to a newly formed citizens’ police advisory committee. The 12-person committee was first proposed after the death of Tymar Crawford, a 28-year-old Black man who was killed by a Pensacola police officer in 2019. Morrissette broke down in tears; the protesters cheered, and soon moved off the road to let cars through.
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