On a withering Sunday afternoon in August, 200 people seems an impressive turnout for a Black Lives Matter rally in Williamsport, Pennsylvania, a city of 28,000 along the west branch of the Susquehanna River. This part of the state is overwhelmingly white, rural and conservative. But Frank Manzano, an organizer of the protest who is now dispensing optimism and energy from the steps of City Hall, is secretly disappointed. “I expected Williamsport as a community to show up,” Manzano would later tell me. “I just don’t know what we did wrong.”
In fact, the rally is a well-organized affair, police-permitted and supervised. People can register to vote, sign up to join the NAACP, buy a T-shirt, or receive a face mask or bracingly cold bottle of water for free. The temperature throughout the event’s three and a half hours remains in the 90s. The sun is cruel. “Thank God for this beautiful day,” Manzano says.
Directly across the street, standing in front of a clock tower, are three White men. Two are in jeans, the third in military olive from his hat to his black boots. Only his eyes are visible. On first glance, I failed, somehow, to notice the semi-automatic rifles slung over their shoulders. On closer inspection, Camo Man appears to have enough ammo around his midsection to kill every man, woman and child in attendance. A fourth armed White man soon joins the sedentary posse.
Manzano, who has a knack for exhorting the mixed-race crowd, has found a useful foil. “They walked to the other side of the street,” he says, raising his voice to be sure the posse hears. “They can’t handle the love over here.”
He and his colleagues start a series of chants: “Silence is violence.” “United we stand, divided we fall.” “No good cops in a racist system.” The crowd knows the words and joins in. That’s the source of Manzano’s disappointment. These are veteran protesters. Manzano was hoping for new blood.
Manzano and his group, which is called “If Not Us Then Who,” had invested many hours in generating enthusiasm for the event in Williamsport, which has the largest Black population in the region. They posted flyers. They interviewed people on the street to gauge interest and spur participation. They were expecting to see some of the new faces — especially black faces — who had assured them that they would turn out to protest. After all, a small group of self-avowed Nazis — swastikas and all — had marched in the town only two weekends before.
By the time he spoke in Williamsport, Manzano, who is 24, had been an activist for two months. On May 31, he and his band of “brothers” — consisting of three pairs of actual brothers and one close friend — took to the streets of their hometown, Milton, Pennsylvania, in a spontaneous protest after the killing of George Floyd. The succeeding weeks were a blur of meetings after work -- organizing, protesting and always “educating” themselves and others. The seven men, the oldest of whom is 25, each with at least one Black or Hispanic parent, discovered they had allies across Central Pennsylvania
Indeed, throughout the Susquehanna Valley, in one improbably small town after another, people came out this spring and summer to protest in behalf of Black lives. By the end of June, Lara Putnam, a historian at the University of Pittsburgh and an expert in grassroots political action, had tracked more than 400 anti-racism events in 230 Pennsylvania communities. All but five of the state’s 67 counties, many of them rural, had hosted protests. (By comparison, there were women’s marches in 24 Pennsylvania communities in 2017, and Tea Party “Tax Day” protests in 29 communities in 2009.) A handful of Pennsylvania historians and political scientists I queried could think of no historical analog for the BLM protests.
After a string of successful demonstrations, attracting more supporters than they imagined possible, Manzano and his friends are now pondering what comes next.
Manzano is a bear of a man, but of a distinctly teddy sort. He grins warmly, alternates between calling me “Sir” and “Brother,” and heaps praise on the mentors and colleagues he has collected in the past two months. He also makes himself available for sometimes uncomfortable questions after his long shifts packing shipments at a local Walmart. He will soon start his last year of college at Indiana University of Pennsylvania, where he is studying finance and accounting.
