Police Brutality In Praying For Sheetrock

Police Brutality is something that we have become unfortunately familiar with in this day and age. Many websites, newspaper articles, and news broadcasts educate the public on these reoccurring events. Many protests quickly follow these reports as people are outraged on these never ending incidents. Most of these incidents are due to racial discrimination and almost all are towards the Black population in America. In Praying for Sheetrock, we learn about McIntosh County in Georgia and the community response towards the police brutality against Ed Finch, a black man, on March 22nd, 1972. When comparing and contrasting the protest of Ed Finch, a black man, in the novel, the community response against the recent cases for Eric Garner, Michael Brown, and Freddie Gray, who were also black men, they all share similarities and differences. This essay will explore the feedback from the community and their likeness and variance with that of Ed Finch. To begin with, To begin with, Eric Garner was an African American man who was murdered at the hands of a police officer in Staten Island, New York. He was placed in a chokehold for 15 seconds in broad daylight, which was not police procedure, and died on July 17th 2014. Much like Ed Finch, once news got out of the situation a shockwave of protesters released onto the streets to bring light to the dilemma. In both protests regarding the two black men, people who did not even know them nor each other were able to come together in an attempt to bring justice where it was most deserved, “It was amazing to see that many people… People come from twenty miles away. Everybody was just that hot about it” (Greene 128). Although both men received the support from their communities, there were some variations between how the protestors handled the situation at hand. Finch was found justice peacefully in his small home of McIntosh County while Garner’s case sent a riot of angry people onto the streets of New York. This differentiation might have occurred because Garner also had a much larger crowd of people, which even spread across the nation. BP #2: In addition, Michael Brown was another black man that died at the hands of a police officer. His death occurred August 9th, 2014 in Ferguson, …show more content…
He was also African American and suffered from the abuse of policemen which resulted in his sudden death. This event occurred in Maryland in April of 2015. Nobody truly knowns what happened to Gray but he did sustain spinal injuries when in police custody which caused him to die on April 19th 2015. Finch and Gray share similarities when comparing the protests that soon followed their police altercations. One similarity is how quickly the news of the event spread. Some differences when contracting the two protests that followed these tragedies included the issue that Finch’s protests were harmless and the protestors of Finch even exclaimed that “Some guys wanted to find out would we be violent. So we told them this was nothing about being violent” while Gray’s protests caused a lot of issues to the point where protestors were being arrested (Greene 128). Another difference was that Gray’s protest were nationwide, similar to the other black males discussed in this