For each of the past two nights, large protests have broken out on the streets of downtown Louisville, Kentucky, much as they have in cities across the country after Minneapolis police killed George Floyd, a Black man, on Monday.
In 2004, McKenzie Mattingly, a white Louisville metro police officer, killed Michael Newby, a Black teenager, after an undercover drug deal gone wrong.
It was the seventh police killing of a Black male in Louisville in a five-year span and sparked mass protests in the city.
The city nearly reached the sort of breaking point that happened instead, a decade later, in Ferguson, Missouri, after the killing of Black teenager Michael Brown by a white police officer touched off protests that drew nationwide attention to police brutality and helped launch the Black Lives Matter movement.
Frustration has mounted in Black communities over continued police abuses and white Louisville’s refusal to listen, said Christopher 2X, whose Game Changers organization works with young Louisvillians in an effort to reduce violence.
