Deona Marie and the epidemic of car attacks against racial justice activists

Not long before the SUV hit, killing one and injuring three, a small group of protesters in downtown Minneapolis were playing a game, seeing how long a circle of people could keep a volleyball up in the air.

It was the night of 13 June, and demonstrators had been holding a block in the city’s bustling Uptown section since earlier that month. Although they found a moment for lightness, the reason the group was there was just the opposite: on 3 June, the same day George Floyd Square was dismantled by authorities, police in Minneapolis killed yet another Black man, Winston Smith, a local entertainer they’d been pursuing since he missed a sentencing hearing on a previous charge.

This time, although a recent federal policy allowed officers to make recordings, there was no body camera video, and no promise of getting the officer’s names since they were working undercover. All anyone in the city has are sparse reports that a squadron of unmarked cars on a joint fugitive taskforce descended on Mr Smith in a parking garage as he left an afternoon date and killed him in a gunfight. A mix of exhaustion and under-information meant the same city-swallowing crowds that showed up last summer for America’s much touted “racial reckoning” were nowhere to be seen now in the place where it began.

So, the small group of activists, many of them just teenagers, did what they’ve been doing for the last year and took to the streets. Some had never left since the killings of George Floyd and Daunte Wright. If the police weren’t going to keep people who looked like them safe, at least no one would be able to ignore them anymore. Or so they thought.

Not long after the volleyball game, a Black Jeep SUV tore down the street straight into the demonstration, ramming a parked car into the crowd, killing one woman, Deona Marie Erickson, and injuring three other people. The demonstrators restrained the driver, Nicholas Kraus, until the police they were protesting showed up in riot gear threatening to arrest them, as well eventually detaining the white man who had just killed someone. Officers arrived before an ambulance did, witnesses said. (Kraus has since been charged with murder).

Ms Erickson, an activist who worked with disabled adults, had parked her car in front of the group to shield them from danger. She was one of the first people who joined the crowd of activists in Uptown, according to one, Comrade Link, who asked to use a pseudonym for his safety. Ms Erickson was there long before Smith’s name was even getting the subdued local and national attention it is now. At the time, news outlets were erroneously reporting Mr Smith was a murder suspect. Ms Erickson was holding a sign that said, ‘I will never understand, but I stand’.

“That was incredible,” Link said. “It didn’t have a lot of support behind it then. For her to be there, and saying, ‘I don’t care if he had a gun, I don’t care if he shot’. That was amazing. For a stranger, a white stranger nonetheless, that was beautiful.”

While those there will never forget the trauma that night, or the ally and friend they had in Ms Erickson, the incident seems to have hardly registered with city officials or the nation at large, when compared to similar incidents in previous years, or the reaction one would imagine to an identical Islamist terror attack, rather than a potential white supremacist one.

On 15 June, Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey called the killing a “car accident” and promised that officers would meet the besieged demonstrators with de-escalation tactics. Later that night, police armed with silenced assault rifles and long wooden clubs helped clear out the protesters’ barricades, and witnesses say they didn’t hear a promised dispersal warning before people began being arrested.

What happened in Minneapolis is far from an isolated incident. The last decade has seen a surge in car attacks against anti-racist demonstrators, and officials on the left and right have both found ways to put activists further in danger, either by limiting protest – or openly courting more violence.

Last summer, between May and July alone, there were 104 vehicular attacks at Black Lives Matter protests all across the country, according to a USA Today analysis, from Albuquerque to Visalia, California, to Minneapolis, where a man drove a semi-truck through a crowd of demonstrators on Interstate 35.

In some cases, as with a June 2020 attack in a Richmond, Virginia, suburb, or the 2017 killing of Heather Heyer, who was protesting against a neo-Nazi rally in Charlottesville, the drivers had explicit ties to white supremacist groups. In others, as with a May 2020 Black Lives Matter protest in Brooklyn, it’s the police themselves ramming demonstrators.

Officials have not yet commented on what motive Kraus, who had a past criminal record including domestic abuse and DWI cases, may have had, though they noted in police documents he sped up upon seeing the protesters.

But for those on the ground each night in Minneapolis, they have no doubts about why they were targeted.

“No one on the ground thinks that it was someone driving in an accident,” one activist, who uses the pseudonym Thursday, told The Independent.

While the popular image of the last year’s Black Lives Matter protest involves big crowds and pithy signs, the reality is much more dangerous for committed activists in Minneapolis and everywhere else.

“Everyone who’s been out there thinks about it constantly. We know someone could come at any time and just murder is with their car,” said Thursday, who carries an armoured vest with him to protests for this reason. “I didn’t know Deona personally, but I know that she tried to protect us, and people like that mean so much to us, because we are so scared of this. It’s something we have nightmares about.”

Just as past waves of Black liberation activism has inspired violent backlash from the KKK and others, a cluster of vehicle attacks against protesters began around 2015, as a new generation of justice activists rallied around Black Lives Matter and stopping the Dakota Access Pipeline.

Even before Charlottesville, “run them over” became a popular meme in right wing circles, and local officials were caught posting things on social media like, “All lives splatter”, with crude drawings of cars hitting protesters. The Daily Caller, a news outlet co-founded by Fox News personality Tucker Carlson, published a video titled “Here’s a reel of cars plowing through protestors trying to block the road,” which a Fox News affiliate later republished. And after the infamous neo-Nazi rally, Republicans across the country proposed a suite of bills lowering penalties on drivers who hit demonstrators.

Donald Trump poured fuel on this fire, according to extremism experts, further emboldening the violent far-right in the streets and online, discursive spaces which are merging more with each passing year. Even though Mr Trump is out of the White House, the violent currents in US political culture he helped strengthen are still with us, according to Shane Burley, author of Why We Fight: Essays on Fascism, Resistance, and Surviving the Apocalypse.

“The effectiveness of Trumpism was not in his successful use of legislation – he was in general a pretty common Republican in that case—but his ability to communicate a politics of extrajudicial violence was really important,” Mr Burley told The Independent. “That’s not something that goes away quickly.”

Indeed, according to CrimetheInc, right-wing Minnesotans on social media joked about driving through protesters in the days before Ms Erickson was killed.

What’s more, in Republican-controlled states like Florida, Iowa, and Oklahoma and elsewhere, authorities are pushing to lower criminal penalties on drivers who mow down demonstrators, part of a broader crackdown on protest rights in more than 30 states that have followed last summer’s mass demonstrations. In the political imagination of the GOP in many states, it seems that left-wing protesters doing largely peaceful civil disobedience are a greater existential threat than those like the right-wing mob that attacked the Capitol, even as federal officials say white supremacists are the greatest US homeland security challenge.

“The car attack is somehow being shielded from what it actually is, and that is just creating an epidemic of car attacks,” Mr Burley added. “Those committing car attacks and attacks on civil rights demonstrators were at least upfront about their ideological orientation. When the Klan attacked in the early ‘60s in Birmingham, they said they were the ones doing it. Now there’s this deeply laid denial.”

In addition, according to those on the ground, liberals and Democrats have played a role as well in the risk now facing protesters, at least in Minneapolis. Officials in Minneapolis, like Mayor Jacob Frey, walled off large sections of the downtown in anticipation of rioting that never came during the Derek Chauvin trial, but have cracked down on far lower-profile protest spaces like George Floyd Square and the small cadre of activists in Uptown demanding transparency around Winston Smith’s killing, sending in city public works crews and officers to tear down barricades.

“The same barricades that are currently protecting protesters. How do you want them to be removed, after someone just got killed?” said Lucina Kayee, one of the founders of Atlas of Blackness, an organisation that works with foster youth, including training them to document protests. “If those barricades weren’t up there, way more people would’ve been killed that night.”

Even with the threat of more car attacks, the demonstrators in Minneapolis say they won’t stop until they get accountability for Mr Smith and Ms Erickson, and a remade city where both would still be alive.

“We’re in too deep,” Thursday told The Independent. “I could not have gotten through the last year without the people I have fought with at these things. There’s a very tight, cohesive bond that forms. We’re our only hope. We see it as survival. We either fight it out together, or we’re done.”

Their work has deeply bonded them to each other, and the threats they face as a result of that work have only strengthened their resolve, even though they know heading out each night is fraught with peril and trauma.

“You’ve gotta keep going. People get shell-shocked when they hear an engine rev. It is traumatic. And terrifying,” Comrade Link said. “But if that happens and people stay home, then they win. The police assassinate a Black man and then a white supremacist murders someone when we were down here mourning,” adding, “We’re going to practice our First Amendment until they come and take it from us.”