![]() He would laugh, and dance, and rave about his momma’s spaghetti cooking. He would revel in the I-have-arrived trappings of his own apartment. He would help recruit hundreds of people to sign a pledge designed to save everyone else from a similar fate. He would wonder aloud about the number of people he knew who had already been murdered. He would spend the next five years collecting a cityful of brothers. He would send friends off to college, help friends bury loved ones. He would help save landmarks of Black history, found a theater, launch four small businesses, blast out big emails with big ideas in the middle of the night. By then, Lewis' activism had grown strong. He cared about people.Įlijah Lewis speaks to a crowd June 4, 2020, at a protest in response to the killing of George Floyd. He wanted everybody to have a slice of the pie, to succeed. He spoke, he moved in a way that made him relatable to children, to his peers, to elders. “Think about your grandchildren and think about their children because whatever you write now will affect generations to come.”Įlijah Lewis would spend the next five years using that voice. “Before you write any bills, before you make any decisions on guns, think about your children,” he said – to the crowd, to the legislators in Olympia perhaps, to everybody. ![]() “We are not afraid,” he said, stepping up to the mic in that way that made sense in the moment but will say so much more, years later. Within weeks, students everywhere were marching for their lives.Įlijah Lewis was barely 18 then, a high school kid still searching for his own voice. Seventeen people died at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Florida on Valentine’s Day 2018. Or somewhere out on the shore of Lake Washington, where children toddle at the water’s edge. I know there must be signs of him, here on Capitol Hill, or at the arts and cultural center on Seattle Boulevard. It was peaceful, mostly, until two shootings at the edge of the zone, one fatal. Played music and handed out food and talked police reform on bullhorns. I know Lewis was here after George Floyd died. It’s here, on Capitol Hill, that people started the CHOP (Capitol Hill Occupied Protest) or the CHAZ (the Autonomous Zone). But I’m looking still, knowing I must be able to find him somewhere. He’s already gone, victim to our most American contagion. ![]() I’ve come to Seattle to look for somebody. Strange to think this city’s heart is broken, until I feel it. Love is everywhere, everything seems to say: On the ground beneath my feet, floating above me, everywhere I look. Salsa music softly plays from an open storefront and a distinct hip-hop bass line licks in the distance. An iridescent balloonlike art installation hovers, seemingly untethered, in the unseasonably blue sky. The colors of the rainbow flag are painted into the crosswalks. SEATTLE – Capitol Hill is all murals of Indigenous people on the walls, Black Lives Matter posters in the windows. ![]()
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