Peaceful protests continue in SLO County through the weekend
Protests related to the death George Floyd, a black man who died after Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin knelt on his neck for more than eight minutes, continued into the weekend in San Luis Obispo County.
Sunday marked the eighth consecutive day of protests around the county, from Nipomo to Paso Robles, joining the multitude of protests around the nation.
On Saturday, a protest in Morro Bay gathered about 100 to 200 residents. The peaceful protest began at 3 p.m. at the Morro Bay City Park and lasted about two hours, according to protest organizer and Morro Bay resident Nathan Moran.
“I, like many others, saw the awful video of what happened to George Floyd ... I felt like I needed to step up and I started going to protests last Tuesday,” Moran said.
He said after attending a protest in Paso Robles and the NAACP protest in San Luis Obispo, he wanted to organize one in Morro Bay. The protest was not affiliated with any organization.
He said he organized the march in support of the Black Lives Matter movement and hopes to bring about police reform.
“I understand that there are a lot of different goals that this movement has ... This is the largest civil rights movement in history,” he said, referencing the nationwide and global protests against racial injustice.
He said he originally anticipated about 25 to 50 people would go and was happily surprised that more than 100 people gathered to support the movement.
Moran said while police were present, none had riot gear. As protesters marched they held signs and chanted “no justice, no peace.”
“While we are a small community, it doesn’t give us a right to sit by an let other people do the fighting,” Moran said of Morro Bay.
On Sunday, about 200 residents gathered for an hour-long peaceful protest in Atascadero.
The protest began at 4 p.m. at the Sunken Gardens, and protesters marched to the Atascadero Police Station.
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Before heading back to the gardens, protesters held an 8 minute and 46 second moment of silence — the amount of time Chauvin had his knee on Floyd’s neck.
At one point in the protest, the crowd was split in two, with half chanting “George Floyd” and the other half chanting “Breonna Taylor,” who was killed March 13 in Louisville, Kentucky, when police officers rammed into her home and shot her at least eight times.
This protest also did not appear to be affiliated with an organization.
Protests in the county began May 30 and there has been at least one protest per day in San Luis Obispo County. A protest on Thursday which was organized by the NAACP garnered an estimated 3,000 people.
This story was originally published June 7, 2020 at 6:53 PM.
