Longtime Las Vegas activists reflect on the protest movement here

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Steve Marcus

Tenisha Freedom, one of the rally organizers, speaks during the rally against police brutality at Lorenzi Park Saturday, June 6, 2020.

Sun, Jul 12, 2020 (2 a.m.)

Tenisha Freedom and Sol Sanchez have been marching the streets of Las Vegas long before people across the nation entered a collective movement after the death of George Floyd, a Black man who died at the hands of a white police officer in May in Minneapolis.

Veteran activists and family friends for two decades, Freedom and Sanchez lived in the same apartment complex in Las Vegas and later reconnected when they both started to embed themselves in activism.

While aligned with “Black Lives Matter” as a statement, they say they aren’t affiliated with the organization itself. Or as Freedom and other activists she aligns herself with say, “Black lives will matter when we take our power back.”

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Tenisha Freedom, left, and Sol Sanchez are two longtime activists in the Las Vegas community, participating in rallies and demonstrating against racism and police brutality.

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The activists in earlier days

Part of this means, “Our ability to identify our history and to regain our community,” Freedom said.

In 2014, after Eric Garner’s death from being placed in a chokehold by a New York City police officer during an arrest, Freedom, Sanchez and several others started Unity Las Vegas. The focus behind the movement was to address what they called police terrorism on the community, Freedom said.

“Within that group we had some demands so to speak that we listed out, and we had a core six of us going to different community meetings with other leaders in the community and pastors,” she said. “They were having police forums where police would allow us to sit down with the community to have those discussions.”

After Floyd’s death, Freedom was one of the first to take to the streets in Las Vegas. Sanchez and others followed soon after, organizing some of the more prominent protests downtown, including the May 30 rally outside the Container Park.

“We’ve been organizing around this issue (police brutality) for a long time, and you could only hope and wish more people would get involved,” she said. “As an organizer you wait for moments like this.”

The vast majority of the protests in Las Vegas have been peaceful, but some have ended in chaos, with protesters arrested and police dispersing tear gas into the crowd after giving dispersal orders. On June 1, Metro Police shot and killed a protester, authorities said, after he pointed one of the three guns he brought to the protest at officers guarding the federal building downtown. A few miles away on the north Strip where other protesters had gathered, an on-duty Metro officer was shot. He remains paralyzed from the neck down.

But Freedom said much of the narrative of the local movement has been misrepresented by the media.

“A lot of what we’ll see is an image of us marching and the next image is protesters getting arrested and reporting on how many arrests happened. That whole middle part is left out,” she said.

During one protest June 13, Freedom said demonstrators were “cutteled in” by police and later met with tear gas and rubber bullets.

“This was after we were told to disperse and not being allowed to disperse,” she said. “It was literally like an attack. It was crazy to be a part of … that part of the story did not exist in the media. It only existed in our ability to share.”

Organizing a local movement is a learning process, Sanchez said, and there has been some adversity over the past several years. It’s a large undertaking for two working mothers.

“It’s just a matter of doing political education on your own and learning from other movements and the mistakes that they made,” Sanchez said. “Right now we’re really learning from the boots on the ground protest movements, learning how to restructure, learning how to stay safe and learning how to be more tactical.”

The assumed narrative that Las Vegas’ transient nature inhibits any possibility for long-standing veteran organizers is a misconception a lot of newcomers make, Sanchez said.

“What we’re doing is making strides and history so people will be aware of that,” she said.

Freedom and Sanchez are now operating under the name “Organize the State Out,” which they hope to build with more like-minded people. But Sanchez stresses that doesn’t mean the movement is exclusive either.

“We’re willing to organize with anybody that makes sense along the same lines that we’re saying to people,” she said. “We’re all headed to the same destination, but I might be taking a car, you might take a bus, train or plane.”

One initiative both Freedom and Sanchez are trying to introduce is the concept of “police free” zones, where folks can congregate for a couple of hours without police presence. During that time, they would reach out to members of the community who might need financial assistance, health care or discuss means of protection.”

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