A demonstration in support of justice for Black lives and Black Lives Matter will be held in Barrie, Ont., on Thursday afternoon.
Protesters will meet at Barrie city hall at 5 p.m. and march down Mulcaster Street before turning onto Simcoe Street and then into Meridian Place.
“We picked Meridian Place as the actual place of the demonstration so that we could physically distance and also provide space for people,” Brandon Rhéal Amyot, one of the event’s organizers, told Global News.
“That is where we will hear speeches.”
The local demonstration comes over a week after the killing of George Floyd, a Black man who died after former Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin kneeled on his neck for more than eight minutes, and a week after the death of Regis Korchinski-Paquet, a Black woman who fell to her death from a 24th-floor Toronto balcony after police were called.
The protest also calls for justice for Olando Brown, a Black man who died while in custody of the Barrie Police Service in June 2018, as well as Tony McDade of Tallahassee, Fl., Breonna Taylor of Louisville, Ky., and all victims of police violence.
“The protest is about just showing solidarity across North America and in the smaller cities with Black Lives Matter and trying to promote change,” Shaniqua Goodridge, a co-host of the event, said.
“We need to show that this is still an ongoing issue and that it won’t be tolerated for much longer.”
Rhéal Amyot said a few hundred people are expected to attend the protest Thursday. As of early Wednesday afternoon, over 500 people had replied that they’re attending to the demonstration’s Facebook event page.
“Yes, we are in the middle of a global pandemic,” Rhéal Amyot said.
“It’s very clear that Black lives are being systemically brutalized by police, by institutions, by communities, and so we need to speak out, and we need to do more than that. We need to act.”
If people aren’t able to physically attend the protest in Barrie, there are other ways to show solidarity with the Black community, Goodridge said, including speaking out against racism and discrimination, as well as donating to fundraisers that support the Black community.
“There’s so many times that people will just stay quiet and be a bystander, and we can’t have that,” Goodridge said.
Rhéal Amyot said people who attend the protest should ensure they’re physically distancing up to two metres from one another as much as possible and wear a mask.
“It’s never the wrong time to speak up for injustice,” Rhéal Amyot said.
“We can’t lose sight of this, and we have to use this moment to actually make something happen.”
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