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A police officer makes a profound statement after pulling over a Black teen

The teen’s emotional response hit him like a punch to the gut.


“Try not to become a man of success but rather try to become a man of value."

In October 2016, that was a quote from Albert Einstein that sat atop the Facebook page of Tim McMillan, a police officer in Georgia.

McMillan become a sensation after a post he wrote on his Facebook wall went viral in 2016. In his post, he explains how he pulled over a Black teen for texting while driving:


“I pulled a car over last night for texting and driving. When I went to talk to the driver, I found a young black male, who was looking at me like he was absolutely terrified with his hands up. He said, 'What do you want me to do officer?' His voice was quivering. He was genuinely scared," McMillan wrote.

Police officer Facebook post

Officer Tim McMillan talks about pulling over a Black teen

Image via Facebook

But McMillan said he wasn't interested in harassing or arresting the young man, let alone inflicting violence upon him. Nonetheless, the teen's emotional response hit McMillan like a punch to the gut.

“I just looked at him for a moment, because what I was seeing made me sad. I said, 'I just don't want you to get hurt.' In which he replied, with his voice still shaking, 'Do you want me to get out of the car.' I said, 'No, I don't want you to text and drive. I don't want you to get in a wreck. I want your mom to always have her baby boy. I want you to grow up and be somebody. I don't even want to write you a ticket. Just please pay attention, and put the phone down. I just don't want you to get hurt,'" he wrote.

McMillan said the interaction made him reflect on a deeply personal level about the national attention being paid to acts of police violence against Black Americans, particularly young Black men.

“I truly don't even care who's fault it is that young man was so scared to have a police officer at his window. Blame the media, blame bad cops, blame protestors, or Colin Kaepernick if you want. It doesn't matter to me who's to blame. I just wish somebody would fix it."

This story originally appeared on GOOD.


This article originally appeared on 08.31.18

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Finally, a white player knelt during an NFL protest — the biggest one so far.

Monday night's NFL game between the Cleveland Browns and the New York Giants wasn't particularly consequential.

It's still the pre-season — the games don't technically count, new players are just getting their feet wet, and the matches unfold with a fraction of the fanfare we'll see on display in October.

But if you happened to watch the game at FirstEnergy Stadium on Aug. 21, you may have witnessed a big moment in NFL history.



The largest NFL national anthem protest to date took place during the game, with nearly a dozen players kneeling in unison.

The league's national anthem protests, which began last year, are focused on drawing attention to the social injustices faced by people of color.

Photo by Joe Robbins/Getty Images.

Another four athletes showed solidarity with their protesting teammates by standing alongside the huddled group, their hands placed supportingly on the kneeling players' shoulders.

As Cleveland's The Plain Dealer reported, Isaiah Crowell, Duke Johnson, Jabrill Peppers, and Christian Kirksey were among the handful of players who participated. But it was tight end Seth DeValve's participation that's especially noteworthy.

DeValve became the first white NFL player to protest by also kneeling during the national anthem on Monday night.

"We wanted to do something with our platform," DeValve told reporters after the game.

The kneeling players, he explained, chose to pray together instead of stand.

The Browns' protest comes almost exactly one year after Colin Kaepernick first made waves for refusing to stand during the national anthem.

Photo by Scott Cunningham/Getty Images.

Kaepernick, a former quarterback for the San Francisco 49ers, had been a lone voice on the sidelines then, contributing his refusal to stand to the systemic mistreatment of people of color — particularly when it came to police brutality.

In the months since, Kaepernick, now a free agent, has had trouble signing with another NFL team. It's a struggle, many have argued, directly resulting from his protests.

But the conversation Kaepernick helped get started on the football field shows no signs of fading away.

The Browns' protest on Monday may have been the largest to date, but it wasn't the first of the pre-season games.

Seattle's Michael Bennett seemed to have picked up where Kaepernick left off, choosing to sit during the national anthem for his pre-season matches.

Photo by Stacy Revere/Getty Images.

"This is what I believe in," Bennett said of his decision. "Changing society, going into communities, doing organic work, and continuing to push the message that things aren't fair."

Last week, teammate Justin Britt supported Bennett, by standing next to him and placing a hand on his shoulder in solidarity.

The continued protests are happening at an especially charged moment when it comes to race relations in the U.S.

It's only been days since a car driven by a purported white supremacist struck a crowd of protesters in Charlottesville, Virginia.

The terror attack — which killed 32-year-old Heather Heyer and injured at least 19 others — reflects the state of a country grappling with a growing resurgence of mainstreamed white supremacy and a president hesitant to condemn their ideology.

"Seeing everything in Virginia and stuff that is going on," Bennet explained, "I just wanted to be able to use my platform to continuously speak out on injustice."

The sports arena has long been a place for social discourse and political expression. It looks like the 2017-2018 NFL season will continue that important tradition.

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Trump agrees to meet with the Congressional Black Caucus after a press conference flub.

On Jan. 19, the Congressional Black Caucus sent Trump a letter. On Feb. 16, he answered.

There were plenty of highlights (and lowlights) from Trump's wild first solo press conference as president, but one moment in particular stood out.

Trump called on April Ryan, a reporter for American Urban Radio Networks, who asked if Trump planned to include the Congressional Black Caucus in discussions surrounding Trump's "inner city agenda."

"Well, I would. I tell you what, do you want to set up the meeting?" responded Trump. "Do you want to set up the meeting? Are they friends of yours? Set up the meeting. Let's go. Set up a meeting."

While Ryan acknowledged that she does know some of the members of the CBC, she's a reporter, and setting up meetings between members of Congress and the president is not her job — at all.

What makes the whole situation even more bizarre is the fact that the CBC has been trying to set up a meeting with the president, even sending him a letter last month.

They took to the president's favorite medium, Twitter, to offer a reminder.

The group's five-page letter, offers a point-by-point response to the "New Deal for Black America" that Trump touted during the campaign, calling his plan "the same old 'Trickle Down' economics assumptions that didn’t work for our communities in the 1980’s or in the 2000’s when these failed experiments were tried before."

Still, the CBC indicated an interest in meeting with the president, ending the letter with a "sincere hope that [he] will accept this invitation to engage in an earnest effort to work together on these issues."

As Trump has a tendency to do, he placed blame on someone else. In this case, CBC member and 11-term Congressman Elijah Cummings.

"I actually thought I had a meeting with Congressman Cummings," Trump said. "And he was all excited and then he said, ‘Well, I can’t move, it might be bad for me politically. I can’t have that meeting.’ I was all set to have that meeting. We called him and called him and he was all set. ... But he was probably told: ‘Don’t meet with Trump. It’s bad politics.’ And that’s part of the problem with this country."

According to Cummings, that never happened. "I have no idea why President Trump would make up a story about me like he did today," he told the Washington Post.

Photo by Mark Wilson/Getty Images.

The entire encounter was a sight to behold, but at least something good seems to be coming out of it: The CBC is finally getting its meeting with Trump.

And yes, it was April Ryan who reported the story (it all comes full circle).

“For whatever reason, the letter the Congressional Black Caucus sent to then President-elect Trump and incoming White House officials on January 19 was not enough to get their attention,” Chairman Cedric Richmond (D-Louisiana) said in a statement obtained by The Hill. "Since the White House has reached out in an appropriate manner to request a meeting with the caucus, I am now in discussions with them about setting one up."

While this situation seems to have resolved itself, this isn't a good look for Trump, who has a less than stellar record on race-related issues (to say the least).

Earlier this month, he delivered a bizarre Black History Month statement that included some bragging about his electoral victory (Trump received just an estimated 8% of the African-American vote) as well as a shoutout to Frederick Douglass, who Trump said, "is an example of somebody who’s done an amazing job and is getting recognized more and more, I notice." (It's not entirely clear whether Trump realized that Douglass has been dead for more than 120 years.)

Trump delivers his Black History Month statement. Photo by Michael Reynolds/Getty Images.

Even if you set these aside as rhetorical flubs, there's a pattern of Trump lumping all black Americans together in one homogeneous group and suggesting that they all live in "inner cities." This kind of stereotyping is wrong, it's offensive, and it doesn't help support Trump's own assertion that he's the "least racist person" you've ever seen.

So yeah, meeting with black leaders in Congress is a start. Let's hope he really hears what they have to say.

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After a protest, Wichita police fired up the grill for a community cookout.

Protests are generally meant to raise awareness and make people pay attention.

And in that regard, the Wichita Black Lives Matter march on July 12, 2016, was an unequivocal success.

On that day, hundreds of Kansans turned out to make their anger heard in response to the continued police killings of black Americans. And while city and state police gathered to keep a watchful eye on the evening's events, they simply watched the protest happen without intervening ('cause, ya know, people have a First Amendment right to assemble and speak out, and it's the job of the police to uphold the law 'n' stuff).

A.J. Bohannen leads a group of Black Lives Matter protesters in Wichita, Kansas, on July 12, 2016. Image via U.S. Latest News/YouTube.

But the day after that protest, things really got cookin'…

According to ABC News in Kansas, Wichita police chief Gordon Ramsay (as opposed to chef Gordon Ramsay) invited local Black Lives Matter leaders to meet with him at the police headquarters the day after the protest — not to reprimand their actions, but to have a discussion about where to go next.

"We definitely want a citizen review board with subpoena power. We want an outside prosecutor to come in and look at these police involved shootings," said BLM organizer A.J. Bohannen, who was in attendance that day, about the changes he wanted to see (you can read his interview with KAKE here).

"Our officers are going call to call to call. They don't have time to build positive relationships," Ramsay said at a press conference the next day, when asked about how his department was functioning, and what he wanted to change. "It's reactive policing. It's not a healthy way to do it. And what I heard from protesters last night is they want to see community policing."

"The heart and soul of who I am: I am about community relationships, and we just need to figure these things out."

Police chief Gordon Ramsay. Image via City of Wichita/YouTube.

Ramsay listened to what protesters had to say and decided that the next big step in figuring things out would be for the police to … cook dinner for everyone.

BLM organizers had been planning another protest for July 17. But that was when they were still expecting their cries to be ignored once again.

After the successful conversation with Ramsay on July 12, the BLM organizers decided to cancel the upcoming protest. Then, Ramsay and his officers hosted a community cookout instead, in an effort to improve relationships, start conversations, and promote positive interactions between officers and citizens.


About 400 people RSVP'd to the appropriately-named First Steps Cook Out on Facebook — and more than 1,000 showed up at McAdams Park on that Sunday evening.

In addition to some tasty burgers and dogs, there were speeches by local community leaders, and a Q&A session with the police to open up the conversation about how to make communities safer and improve respect across the board.


And for those who couldn't attend? Speeches from community leaders of all races and creeds were broadcast over Facebook Live. (Unfortunately, Mark Zuckerberg still hasn't figured out how to make hot dogs available over streaming video.)


For some people in Wichita, it was the first time in decades they actually had a chance to sit with and engage police officers in a civil discussion. While there are plenty of factors that have contributed to this breakdown in police-community relations in the city itself, something as simple as a First Steps Cook Out is an important first step toward changing how the system works.


But mostly, it was also just fun, effective community building.


See, nothing solves problems quite like dancing.


Apparently, some officers even learned about the crucial law enforcement skill known as the whip and nae nae.


And the whole event was perhaps even more impactful given the tragic shootings that occurred in Baton Rouge earlier day.

The First Steps Cook Out was a remarkable testament to the power of activism, both in the community and on the part of the police.

It was still just a first step — but it was a big one in the right direction.

Protests might seem inconvenient — and that's because they're meant to expose grievances that people don't want to talk about. For the Black Lives Matter organizers in Wichita, their actions succeeded in a way that nothing else had up until this point.

Of course, none of this would have been possible if the Wichita police weren't also willing to reach out and connect and try to offer solutions, too. Like most things, it's a two-way street, where a willingness to compromise makes progress come easier.

"This isn't something we're going to change overnight or tonight," Ramsay told the local Channel 12 News. "It's just going to take continual effort on everybody's part. And work on policy changes, relationships. And that's what's going to get to the heart of the issues."

He continued this line of thought in an interview with ABC News: "The biggest point that I want to make is that it starts with me, right? And I have set the tone that we are gonna treat people fairly and with dignity and respect, and it starts with me."

Sometimes that first step is the hardest to take. But Wichita found a way — and hopefully other communities can follow suit.

Here's a video from the event, if you'd like to see it for yourself:


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