For more than a month, protestors held die-in demonstrations nightly at Grand Central Terminal to bring awareness to the choke hold death of Eric Garner — among other police brutality cases — but then the MTA announced a ban on the practice. After a brief hiatus, demonstrators returned to the bustling transit hub Monday night and no officers on the scene intervened.
According to reports, about a dozen protestors spread out on the floor in the main concourse at least three times in three hours, for up to seven minutes at a time. Nearby police watched from the sidelines, making no arrests. An enraged passerby reportedly made threatening comments to demonstrators saying, “Before you leave, you gotta go through me.”
Timothy Ford, a member of Africans Helping Africans and the People’s Power Assembly, said in a statement, “Grand Central’s a public place. We can walk around Grand Central until we get tired. If people are sitting down on the floor in Grand Central, we can do that, too. It’s our right to do that in a public place.”
Whether demonstrations at Grand Central will once again become a nightly occurrence remains to be seen.
(Photo: RuptlyTV)
