Nolan Davies has spearheaded a children’s version of Black Lives Matter protest through the streets of Kirkwood in response to the police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis.
“We are the children, the mighty mighty children. Here to tell you, Black lives matter!” hundreds of children charged as they marched down neighbourhood sidewalks in Kirkwood with their parents on Saturday.
“I’m worried about Black people, like me, getting hurt. Some skin is like chocolate. Some are like vanilla. Some are mixed together like mine. But we’re all people,” Davis said.
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“Even though I’m a kid, it’s important to speak my voice so people can hear me and know they can share their voice too, just like me.”
Earlier, Davies had spoken at a rally in a neighbouring school district and that sparked the idea for a kids rally. “We went to a couple of marches, and he spoke at one of them,” Kristin Davis, Nolan’s mother said. “He then turned to me right after he spoke, and said, ‘can I have my own one for kids?”
According to his mom, Nolan and his five-year-old sister, who are adopted may not understand systemic racism, but they understand what people with skin like theirs have to go through and they ask questions which she doesn’t always have answers to.
“They know what happened to George Floyd and Breonna Taylor and Tamir Rice,” Davis said. “They know all that. I think as much as they can understand it, they do, but they know that it’s okay to talk about.”
With the help of his mum, he made a flyer and shared it on Facebook. “We thought maybe 20, 30 family friends would show up,” Davis said. But as it turned out, although it was raining Saturday morning, hundreds of people came.
“I just can’t believe how many people came,” Davies said. The rally reportedly drew about 700 people on Saturday to a park near their home in Kirkwood, Mo., a suburb of St. Louis.
The crowd, mostly children accompanied by their parents and adults of different races, added their voices to the growing number of people across the United States who have taken to the streets to register their displeasure about how police treat black people and demand change.
Davies, brandishing a placard with the inscription: “Kids can make a change” led the crowd through the neighborhood.
The eight-year-old civil rights activist is looking forward to more of such activities led by children. “They can have their own marches, and then they learn about Black Lives Matter,” he said. “And more people and more people and more people — maybe a dozen thousand.”
