WaPo: “Night after night, they march: parents pushing strollers, a grandma with two hip replacements, preachers, lawyers, lifelong residents and recent transplants. Some are Black, some White — all protesting the death of Andrew Brown Jr., a Black man who was killed in a fusillade of gunfire from sheriff’s deputies.
The April 21 shooting aggravated racial tensions simmering below the surface in this majority-Black hamlet in the far northeastern corner of the state, according to protesters.
The city’s mayor, manager and police chief all are Black. It is home to a historically Black college, and before the Civil War it was a stop on the Underground Railroad, helping people escape slavery along the Pasquotank River and into the nearby Dismal Swamp.
But Brown’s death, and the decision not to release the full body camera footage of the incident, have awakened a deep sense of suspicion and mistrust in a community that had thought it might beinsulated. Through a year of reckoning with racial inequity provoked by the death of George Floyd in Minneapolis, many in Elizabeth City said they feltsafe from the worst trauma.”