This Subway Protest From 1986 Mirrors Black Resistance Today
Black History Year
PushBlack
4.6 • 2.2K Ratings
🗓️ 9 January 2025
⏱️ 3 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
It was a breaking point. They spilled out onto the streets, the bridge, the neighborhoods. And when they climbed onto the train tracks, risking everything, who would have known history would repeat itself only 36 years later?
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Here's the truth about AI. |
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| 0:27.8 | slash UK slash AI for people. It was a breaking point. They spilled out onto the streets, |
| 0:36.5 | the bridge, and the neighborhoods, |
| 0:38.5 | and when they climbed onto the train tracks, risking everything, who would have known history |
| 0:43.1 | would repeat itself only 36 years later? This is two-minute-back history, what you didn't learn |
| 0:49.2 | in school. One winter morning in 1986, |
| 1:01.8 | 23-year-old Michael Griffith traveled from Brooklyn to Howard Beach |
| 1:06.0 | Queens to collect his paycheck. |
| 1:08.3 | But instead, he got severely beaten by a mob in this majority white community. |
| 1:13.7 | Then the son of a NYPD officer hit and killed Griffith with his car as he tried to escape. |
| 1:21.6 | It was a lynching, and Black New York responded accordingly. |
| 1:45.6 | Hundreds marched in the streets of Howard Beach, blocked the Brooklyn Bridge and surrounded a police precinct, but others also traveled below ground. About 150 people climbed on two train tracks, |
| 1:53.2 | shutting four subway lines down at the height of rush hour. In 2023, New Yorkers filed themselves into subway tracks again for |
| 2:03.7 | Jordan Neely. Police arrested protesters, officials lectured about more peaceful protesting. But traffic |
| 2:11.8 | disruption has historically been critical to black protests, along with sit-ins, stand-ins, and drive-ins. |
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