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They carried hundreds of handmade signs and called out the names of Floyd and others in the UK like Mark Duggan who had died at the hands of police or were victims of racial injustice such as the murdered teenager Stephen Lawrence.

Frankie Clarence, 28, one of the organisers of the protest, said: “I feel we are now in a period where voices don’t need to be voiceless anymore.” He was one of many who highlighted the case of Belly the black transport worker who died of coronavirus after being spat at at a train station

The demonstrator added: “The British Transport Police said any assault to staff would be prosecuted, fined, and arrested. After hearing the news of Belly Mujinga we found injustice and no action had been taken on her behalf. These guys are contradicting their words and there’s thus injustice not just in the US, but the UK. It’s literally everywhere in the world.”

Calls for police divestment are a dominant theme of protesters’ policy demands. The radical idea is a product of how increased policing “has eaten up so much state and national resources at the expense of investment in black and brown communities,” says Vanita Gupta, the president and CEO of the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, who worked to overhaul departments in Cleveland, Baltimore, Chicago, and Ferguson, Missouri, as the former head of the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division.  

At the federal level, protesters and civil-rights groups are urging Congress to pass, among other reforms, a national prohibition on chokeholds; the elimination of federal programs that offer military equipment to local law enforcement; the creation of a national public database of abusive police officers; and an end to qualified immunity, a doctrine that prevents police from being held liable in certain cases for breaking the law.

“Moments of passion pass and then you have to have people who are still at the table pushing.”

But the protests aren’t all about politics or policy goals, organizers and protesters told me. They’ve been an outlet for black Americans to express their hurt and fury that 400 years after the start of slavery, five decades after the passage of the Civil Rights Act, and six years after the police shot and killed Michael Brown in Ferguson, black Americans are still two and a half times more likely to be killed by police than white people. They are dying of COVID-19 at three times the rate of white people. And they’re more likely than white Americans to have lost jobs in the economic catastrophe spawned by the pandemic

“I remember a movie called Network. I remember [the news anchor] going to the window and saying ‘I’m mad as hell, and I’m not going to take it anymore!’” she told me. That’s how she says she felt when she saw the video of Floyd’s arrest.