Q&A With Dr. Apryl Alexander: Black Lives Matter 5280

Anthony Cross: What is the state of the progress that’s been made so far? And what are you seeing on the ground?

Apryl Alexander: I think here in Denver, things really kicked off around May 28. May 28, was kind of the time where someone in our chapter wanted to put together a rally/protest the following day.

So, we quickly got together and organized that for Thursday, May 29, one of the first kind of rallies and protests in downtown Denver, and again, our goals are to once again highlight what some are calling the epidemic orpublic health crisis of police shootings— that we were really mindful that we will not only honoring George Floyd and Breonna Taylor but so many other lives that have been lost to police violence, including those that have happened in Colorado.

A lot of our work that we’ve been doing these last few weeks is a continuation of what we have been doing. Black Lives Matter 5280 just celebrated its fifth anniversary in May. And we started as a chapter by raising awareness of police brutality. So we are really realigning ourselves and thinking about what are additional steps that we can take at this moment to address this problem.

We have been thinking about all sorts of things related to direct action. We connected with all the other Black Lives Matter chapters throughout the country. And last week was the Black Lives Matter, or a Movement for Black Lives, “Week Of Action”. Different chapters handled this differently, but during that week, there were guidelines for each of the days of the week [and] different actions that we wanted to promote...

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