As mourners converged on Southern University’s F. G. Clark Center this morning for the funeral of Alton Sterling and with protests expected to follow, the Baton Rouge Police Department has reportedly warned of increased penalties for blocking interstates.
Highways have become a central element of civil rights protest in many states because of their significance to business and local economies, The Washington Post reports.
“If you can find a way to jam up a highway—literally have the city have a heart attack, blocking an artery—it causes people to stand up and pay attention,” Nathan Connolly, a historian at Johns Hopkins University, tells the newspaper. “Highways still perform their historic role from a half-century ago. They help people move very easily across these elaborately segregated landscapes.”
Of the nearly 200 protesters who have been arrested in Baton Rouge following the killing of Sterling by police last week, most have been charged with simple obstruction of a highway, a misdemeanor. But now local police are reportedly warning that protesters who attempt to shut down an interstate could be charged with a felony offense.
In recent protests across the country following the killing of Sterling and Philando Castile in Minnesota, protesters have tied up on-ramps to the Bay Bridge in San Francisco, blocked Interstate 94 for several hours in St. Paul, and shut down the Interstate 75/85 Downtown Connector in Atlanta. Protesters in Chicago have blocked Lake Shore Drive. In New York, they’ve gnarled traffic on the Brooklyn Bridge, and in Washington, D.C., they’ve targeted the 14th Street Bridge.
Charlene Carruthers, a Chicago activist and the national director of Black Youth Project 100, says disrupting highways and streets is about “disrupting business as usual.”
In a forthcoming study, researchers at the Rudin Center for Transportation at New York University, counted more than 1,400 protests in nearly 300 U.S. and international cities related to the Black Lives Matter movement from November 2014 through May 2015.
