It’s always hard to hear the opinions of those who don’t see things the way you see them. It’s one of the most bitter-sweet beauties of life– our right to disagree.

I recently attended a protest that was to raise awareness for the Black Lives Matter movement. The event was pure-Memphis. It was hastily put together, without good organization, fueled by emotion, teetering on the cusp of volatility, and so full of broken hearts and what we’ve come to know as ‘soul.’ Memphis Soul. The protest ended in a March to the I-40 Bridge. The Memphis Bridge. The Hernando DeSoto bridge. The “m” bridge. The intention was to stop traffic to raise awareness, to get attention, to force people to notice of the injustices happening to people that continue to be swept under the rug by humanity’s short attention span. I was very uncomfortable. I was very unsure. I saw people who were filled with passion, filled with anger, filled with sorrow, filled with love, filled with angst, filled with hope, and filled with disparity.

I saw the entire spectrum of a group of human beings who were completely at a loss for trying to cope with the injustices being done to their people– so much so that the best thing that anyone could think to do was to put their own lives at risk by standing in the middle of the road to block the main source of traffic in and out of a city just to force the world to notice. Many of my peers can’t get past this. Many of my peers think that this was an unnecessary inconvenience. Many of my peers will choose not to acknowledge that an entire group of human beings have been set back due to systemic oppression, an evolved version of the same oppression that each of us have read about in history books, that we choose not to acknowledge because it seems too big and unreal for us to comprehend, so much so that reasonable people stood in the middle of the road to get you to notice them. Reasonable people stood in the middle of the road because it felt like the only way to get people to take notice of things like mass incarceration of black people and consistent police brutality all because the cultural differences of many black people take many white people out of their comfort zone. I stood on a bridge with people who were afraid that they were going to die because no one would listen to them cry for help. #BlackLivesMatter

After the police massacre in Dallas, but before the protest I recorded a podcast with two friends. We shared our experiences on the current events, and tried to come to a conclusion of what we could do to make a positive impact in the world we live in.





I am Travis Thaxton from Memphis, TN. Sometimes I write about things that make me passionate. Most of the time I create silly content for the internet with other friends at Dudes N Space.

Header Photo: Brad Vest/The Commercial Appeal