Eugene activist speaks out about the past 9 months of protests
After George Floyd died under police custody, his death launched a wave of activism for racial and social justice. In the Eugene community people came together to march for change.
That’s when Midas Well — a Eugene man that is well known for his leadership roles in the past — was approached by a group of activists called Black Unity and asked him to become one of their leaders. The Torch reached out to Midas Well to do a Q&A.
What is Black Unity?
Black Unity is an abolitionist organization whose mission is to completely defund and get rid of the police department nationwide. As well as the liberation of black, poor, indigenous people, and finding a way to better their community by solving the housing, food and education problems that people in lower-income communities face.
What sort of community outreach does Black Unity do?
We are huge on community outreach. We have a tutoring program for any student from K-12 as well as give school supplies. We have a Black Unity youth program led by one of our comrades Nona who’s a high school sophomore. We do a lot of training, meetings and teachings with younger kids and we teach them about their rights and storytime. But especially with our young children of color, we teach them that Black is beautiful. We have a homeless outreach program that I ran during the fire season. We collected over $3,000 and handed out food. We also had two nurses on-site providing wound care, and passing out medical supplies as well as safe drug use supplies. We are also partnering with people in the Whiteaker and do a massive Thanksgiving feast for the homeless. We’re just not here to protest in the streets, we are also here for our community which isn’t just the Black community, it’s human beings — the working class
In the beginning, there was a lot of activity with the hashtag Black Lives Matter as well as people spreading awareness and information by sharing pictures of them at the protests. Do you believe that everyone that attended the protest was there because of the movement or just for a social media post and the looting?
It definitely depends on the protest. I want to make it super clear that there was no looting past the first night. That was the only night that there was anything that could have been considered a riot. The cops definitely treated us like we were rioting, we got tear-gassed for the next two weeks but that was the only time I saw any destruction at that scale, but that was long before Black Unity even existed. To answer your question on our Sunday afternoon protest people weren’t coming to those because they wanted to see rioting and destruction. But we did notice that after our Springfield protest where we got our shit kicked out of us by the cops, the next time we were in Springfield we had twice as many people. And we realized people want violence, people like drama, people wanna see things pop off. People want that Snapchat they can take and say, “Hey mom, I was in the riot.” But, at the end of the day, it makes me wonder if they are here for Black lives, are they here for Black liberation, are they here for the movement.
What does Black Unity believe will happen after this election results?
I am really scared that we are gonna lose momentum. Say what you will about Trump but he radicalized an entire generation against him, and we saw that the numbers of the voters provided were record-breaking. I went to the march on D.C for the anniversary of MLK march and thousands of people were standing there at the Lincoln memorial as Alfred Sharpton is speaking, praising Kamala Harris and Joe Biden and everyone there cheering, these are all BLM activists. These are people from all over the country that have been on the streets fighting every day and they are cheering for the possibility of Joe and Kamala leading our country. At that moment I realized if they win these people are gonna go home. These people are gonna think we won, they are gonna think the movement is over. These next four years are gonna be spent personally reminding people that this is nowhere near over. Nothing has changed, we cut off one head and two more have risen. We still have two more enemies in the White House.
