I’m a 70-year-old white woman. Here’s why I joined the protest march in downtown SLO

I am a 70-year-old white woman. I have lived in safety. I have wanted for nothing except opportunities denied me because of my gender.

I was 15 years old in March of 1965 when a white 39-year-old mother of five named Viola Liuzzo was shot to death by a member of the Ku Klux Klan for transporting a black man in her car during the events surrounding the civil rights march from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama. She was stirred to action by the violence that occurred earlier in the same month on what became known as Bloody Sunday, when civil rights marchers were savagely beaten by members of law enforcement as the marchers tried to cross the Edmund Pettus Bridge.

I had a visceral reaction to Mrs. Liuzzo’s death, as I did when the man who killed her and his two accomplices were found not guilty of her witnessed murder. At the time of the trial, the FBI itself was responsible for spreading false information about her morals and her motives.

I have had a visceral reaction to the murder of George Floyd, over half a century later, and to the many travesties in the intervening years. My gut aches. I am not sure what disturbed me more this time — Mr. Floyd’s pleas for the right to breathe, or the sight of the police officer kneeling on his neck while three others looked on. The officer was almost casual about it. He had his hands in his pockets. He had to know he was being filmed, but he persisted, hiding boldly and openly behind the authority of his badge. My reaction to that image now is the same as it was to the violent images of attacks by police and private citizens, the fire hoses, and the attack dogs, the white sheets, the pointed hoods, the lynchings and the burning crosses of the sixties and the decades before.

I have had few encounters with law enforcement in my life. I was stopped by police for driving after I had been drinking in my years of bad decision-making. I was white and young and cute. I was treated respectfully. I am certain that if I were trying to pay for something with a counterfeit bill today, or trying to sell single cigarettes in front of a liquor store in the white enclave where I live, I would receive the same treatment as I did then. I am just as certain that I would be treated differently, harshly, perhaps violently if I were black or brown.

I marched with the young people on Sunday through downtown San Luis Obispo. It was unnerving to see some police carrying shields, dressed in riot protection gear. We sat on the street at one point, silent for the eight minutes and 46 seconds the police officer knelt on George Floyd’s neck. Eight minutes and 46 seconds is a very long time.

Racism lives on, despite the absence of burning crosses. It cannot be denied. It must not be ignored by any of us, presidents, law enforcement personnel and private citizens alike. Silence in the face of such gross cruelty and injustice is consent to it, if not encouragement of it.

If you see something, say something. If you see something, do something. Racist members of law enforcement must be disarmed. Brutality in the name of law enforcement must be prosecuted.

Valerie Ryall Hosford is a family law attorney in San Luis Obispo.