FROM ‘ASK’ TO ‘DEMAND’
What we went to offer is a positive notion, a positive offering, a positive spirit. Some of it of course expressed both joy and pain. Because, you know, you can’t divorce yourself entirely from standing at that site, and not have that part of the painful aspect in your consciousness. But we cannot stay there. We have to be gettin’ up. Gettin’ up because we know that there was … the fight … the survival … the thrive-al. We have to sustain that, no matter what’s going on. And that’s been endemic of our people. That’s what has made us strong … is that no matter what had happened, our people always found a way to go forward.
—DOUGLAS EWART, on why he has repeatedly brought others together to play live music near the intersection of 38th and Chicago in Minneapolis since George Floyd was killed there on May 25
n May 30, the Saturday after George Floyd’s death, hundreds of (socially distancing) people from the community where the killing took place gathered in Minneapolis’ Powderhorn Park. Among them were multi-instrumentalist Douglas Ewart and vocalist/composer/culture worker Mankwe Ndosi, who played music for the crowd as a duo. “I wouldn’t call it a performance,” Ndosi says a few weeks later in Minneapolis. “I would consider it closer to what we did as a hunter-gatherer species to energize people before the hunt, before they had to rise to address a challenge. That was a time in which, because of the nature of the atrocity of Mr. Floyd being killed by those who we as citizens of Minneapolis pay to protect us, and [because] this is just another example—an extreme one—of the abuse that Black people, poor people, go through
