https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/03/opinion/police-protests-atlanta-keisha-bottoms.html

By Keisha Lance Bottoms
Ms. Bottoms is the mayor of Atlanta.

June 3, 2020, 5:00 a.m. ET

ATLANTA — I frantically screamed into the phone to my teenage son: “Lance, WHERE ARE YOU?!”

Social media posts were swirling that protests were being planned in Atlanta in response to the death of George Floyd, a black Minnesotan, while a police officer knelt on his neck.

Although as mayor, the chief of police reports to me, in that moment, I knew what every other parent to a black child in America knows: I could not protect my son. To anyone who saw him, he was simply who he is, a black man-child in the promised land that we all know as America.

I know that as a mayor of one of the largest cities in our country, I should now be offering solutions. But the only comforting words I have to offer so far are those that I know to be most true: that we are better than this; that we as a country are better than the barbaric actions that we are forced to keep watching play out on our screens like a grotesque horror movie stuck on repeat. We are better than the hatred and anger that consumes so many of us. We are better than this deplorable disease called racism that remains so rampant.

With each passing second separating me from the peace of mind a mother feels having secured the safety of her children, I could not waste minutes articulating all of those things to my son. All I could say was, “Baby, please come home — now! It’s not safe for black boys to be out today.”

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