Two Crises Convulse a Nation: A Pandemic and Police Violence

Many young people, especially minorities, were gig-economy workers holding two or three part-time jobs that evaporated when the outbreak hit, said Tyler Sit, pastor of the New City Church, which is blocks away from where Mr. Floyd died and from the Third Precinct that was burned in the protests. They were left jobless and worried about not having benefits should they become ill.

Sitting at home during lockdown, with no work and no prospect of finding work for the foreseeable future, he said, they were more aware than usual of news reports and then had the time to react by taking to the streets.

“I hear messages from community members trying to deliberate whether or not they’re going to show up. They don’t want to catch Covid-19 and spread Covid-19 if they happen to be an asymptomatic carrier,” he said. “But there’s a deep feeling of we have to do something because our city is burning.”

In Atlanta, Denver, New York and beyond, protesters have also emerged despite the pandemic. They have slipped on face masks and bandannas to guard against the coronavirus, as well as tear gas.

Anais Nunez, a 31-year-old community organizer from the Allerton neighborhood of the Bronx, said she braved the risk of coming to a crowded protest to show solidarity with others marching against police violence.

“I’m from the Bronx, the epicenter of the epicenter,” she said about the borough that has the city’s highest rates of cases, hospitalizations and deaths from the coronavirus. “We’re already suffering. Having to do all of this, it makes the terrible even worse.”

Rashawn Ray, a sociologist and fellow at the Brookings Institution, said one crucial difference between the two plagues is that the coronavirus, like past diseases, may one day dissipate with a vaccine or medical breakthrough. “We’ve never gotten to a place where racism is not a significant part of everyone’s life in the United States,” he said.

Aaron Randle contributed from New York