How The Manhattan Bridge Standoff Unfolded Through The Eyes Of Four Protesters

On Tuesday evening, throngs of demonstrators began assembling at the Barclays Center in Downtown Brooklyn for the sixth consecutive protest against police violence in New York City. For Mayor Bill de Blasio and his police commissioner, Dermot Shea, the events of the night would be closely scrutinized. Earlier in the day, Governor Andrew Cuomo, referring to brazen acts of looting the previous night, had called the city's performance a "disgrace" and urged the mayor and NYPD to do their jobs.

The night before, de Blasio said he would extend the citywide curfew, but set it for 8 p.m. rather than the previous time of 11 p.m.

The curfew order was an affront to the protest movement in memory of George Floyd, the Minneapolis black man who died at the hands of a policeman, uttering the same last words as Garner. To protesters, the measure felt like a hardline maneuver from a mayor and police force desperate to exert their dominance. In an extraordinary show of force, Shea announced there would now be 8,000 officers spread across the city, double the number of prior days.

Among those who came out to protest that night was Yedoye Travis, a 28-year-old black comedian who grew up in Atlanta. Travis moved to New York City in 2016, and several years later he took part in a Harlem protest for Eric Garner that shut down part of the FDR Drive. Although it had been two years since Garner's chokehold killing by an NYPD officer, his death and last words of "I can't breathe" still reverberated.

Performing on Comedy Central, Travis likened white privilege to the moment where the comic book X-Men character Magneto walks out over open air and suddenly has a bridge materialize under his feet.

For Travis and many of the others that showed up, the objective of this Tuesday's protests was clear.

"The intent from the beginning was we were going to stay out past curfew," he said.

At approximately 8:25 p.m., Travis and an estimated 2,000 protesters would attempt to make their way across the Manhattan Bridge with the purpose of sending a strong message. What unfolded was a tense and at times, frightening standoff, the news of which would ricochet across social media and be broadcast to cable news viewers across the country. Hoping to cross triumphantly into Manhattan as marchers had in prior days, the demonstrators instead found themselves helplessly trapped on the bridge as police blockaded both sides.

At one point, New York Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez tweeted her concern and said she was headed to the site as if it were a hostage crisis.

As the night unraveled, the bridge demonstrators, many young New Yorkers in their 20s and 30s, would find themselves tested, searching for leadership within a leaderless protest.

6 p.m.

Having made her way from her apartment in Fort Greene, Leigh Conner saw a sea of protesters in Park Slope spanning at least three blocks. She had gone by herself that evening, taking only her phone, wallet, and a sign with the names of some of the black women who have died at the hands of law enforcement.

A 33-year-old teacher at a charter school in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Conner felt a special obligation to protest.

"As a white person who teaches almost all black children, I feel like I have a responsibility to advocate for people who live in the communities being targeted," she said.

Conner grew up in Orlando, Florida, a place where bigotry was entrenched. When she was a child, she once told a friend that she had a crush on one of the actors in Kenan and Kel, the Nickelodeon sitcom about two black friends living in Chicago. Her friend, a white girl, responded by quoting a bible passage that has been interpreted by some as prohibiting interracial marriage. "She said, 'Thou shalt not mix yoke,'" Conner remembered. (The actual line from Corinthians 6:14 is "Be ye not unequally yoked together with unbelievers.")

Like many other protesters, she was irked by the early curfew which struck her as arbitrary. After marching in Park Slope, she and others merged with a crowd at Barclays Center at 7:45 p.m. Protesters began receiving the city's buzzing curfew alert on their phones.

The group kneeled and later did some chants. Then as the curfew came and went, she noticed that some of the protesters began to peel away: older folks, families, and many people of color.

Those that remained continued to the foot of the Manhattan Bridge, where they found the lanes blocked by a huge line of police. The marchers then stopped. Following custom, the white allies went to the front. They tried to negotiate with the police officers to let them cross. They got nowhere.

They then proceeded toward Jay Street, where whether by accident or strategy, the outbound ramp was left unguarded. Once they got on the bridge, they found it practically empty. "Probably fewer than 20 cars passed us," Conner said.

8:37 p.m.

Walking across the bridge that night, Karston Tannis observed the beauty of the city. Having been hemmed in on crowded streets, he and the other protesters were suddenly high above the East River, making their way towards a glowing horizon. After chanting, the protesters fell quiet. A cool breeze lifted off the water and a sense of freedom descended on them.

"You can kind of breathe," Tannis said. "It was the most poetic moment of that night."

A 35-year-old portrait photographer, he had joined the others on the bridge because he felt a personal need to document the march. Growing up in Crown Heights, Brooklyn, he was a black city kid, part of the Union Square skater and BMX crowd, bent on finding good skating terrain. Once he and two friends, one black and another Italian American, were stopped by a cop for biking through Washington Square Park. The officer issued him and his black friend a court summons. His white friend was reprimanded and let go.

"At the time you think that’s something normal but as you grow up you realize that’s illegal," he said. "And it’s traumatizing."

He was torn about the risk of getting arrested. At one point, his wife called and urged him to come home. But the sheer size of the crowd convinced him there was safety in numbers.

"I thought it was a safe gamble," he said. "This is a part of history. I want to be able to tell the story from my perspective as well."

But as they made their way toward Manhattan, he saw barricades across all three roadways. Behind them, there were maybe four or five rows deep of NYPD officer, he guessed.

At the front, some of the protesters unsuccessfully tried to persuade the police officers to let the group march peacefully through.

Unable to pass, the group settled into periods of standing, chanting and kneeling. In one surreal New York moment, a person dressed as Spider-Man began scaling one of the columns of the bridge, drawing cheers.

Conner, the teacher from Brooklyn, had decided that she'd had enough. It became clear that the police were not going to let them enter Manhattan.

She began walking back toward Brooklyn. But as she got close, she noticed people were turning around. "What’s going on?" she asked. They told her that the police were not letting people cross the bridge on the ramp. Those who wanted to return to the borough needed to walk back to the Manhattan side and enter through a pedestrian walkway.

Conner was flabbergasted. "There’s no cars, it’s not a safety issue," she said. "They are just punishing us."

She had no choice but to go back and do as the police said. But it turned out that getting to the pedestrian walkway was difficult as well as dangerous. Protesters first had to scale down a 10-foot-wall and then climb over a six-foot rail. One by one, they helped one another get down. There were between 50 and 100 people, she estimated.

Once they started walking on the pedestrian path back to Brooklyn, nobody stopped them.

Meanwhile, Tannis had also decided to call it quits. He was mindful that there was still a pandemic and standing near so many people made him nervous. Holding his bike, he too made the precarious climb down to the pedestrian path. In the process, his camera crashed to the ground and broke. When he got home around 9:45 p.m., he switched on the TV and couldn't believe what he saw.

Hundreds of people were still trapped on the bridge.

10:45 p.m.

When Darren Martin spotted the Department of Corrections van in the distance, he wanted to kick himself. A black first year law student at CUNY, he had come out to protest on his own that night, incensed by the mayor's curfew. Wearing a T-shirt that read "I can't breathe," he was among the protesters who had stayed on the Manhattan side the longest, trying to figure out what to do. The group had argued over their options. Some thought they should stay on the Manhattan side until the curfew officially ended at 5 a.m., but Martin worried that they would fall asleep and become lame ducks for the police.

Ultimately the protesters decided to go back to Brooklyn together as one group. It was when they were about halfway across that Martin saw the lights of the van.

"Here you are in the middle of this bridge with this Corrections van," the 31-year-old thought to himself. "You should be at home by now."

For Martin, New York City had always felt like his true home. He was born in the Bronx and moved to Florida when he was eight. After college, he headed to Washington D.C. where he worked for several years in the White House under the Obama administration. He started in the Office of Presidential Correspondence fielding calls from the public.

"People say that the height of racism and vitriol is under Trump," he said. "But what I listened to day in and day out was 'Get that n--- out of the White House.'" The work of upholding democracy started wearing on him.

In 2018, he got a job in New York City. On the day he moved into an apartment on the Upper West Side, a white woman called 911 on him, accusing him of being a burglar. A team of police officers showed up and detained him in the lobby. He said it took about 15 minutes for the officers to determine that he really was moving in.

Between everything that had happened to him, Martin felt he knew a thing or two about deescalating tense situations.

As he and others approached the van, they were relieved when they saw only four officers.

By then, the protesters were aware that the world was watching them. Sometime during the standoff someone had the idea of creating a Twitter hashtag #letusoffthebridge. It worked. They could see news helicopters above them.

After reaching what they considered to be the first checkpoint, the protesters were still afraid of lay ahead of them. Thoughts of a possible "Manhattan Bridge massacre" loomed in their minds. As they neared Brooklyn, Martin took off his contact lenses and put his glasses on, worried that the police might use tear gas.

He saw the blinding police spotlights before anything else. Then, a protester emerged and said that the police were looking for two volunteers to lead negotiations. He and another black woman said they would do it.

They walked toward four or five police wearing white uniforms and helmets. A red-faced male officer told them that they were going to have to make arrests. Martin tried to keep his cool. "We’ve been peaceful the whole time," he told him. "We're trying to get back to Brooklyn so we can obey the curfew."

He added: "What are you going to do? Arrest all of us?"

In the end, the officer agreed to let them go as long as they stayed on the sidewalks. He tried to get the officer to say he had his word. Who knew? Maybe they would all be arrested anyway. "But you know what, this is all we have right now. It is what it is," he thought to himself.

Borrowing the officer's megaphone, he informed the group of tired and anxious protesters that could leave. On hearing the news, they started cheering.

As they filed past the NYPD officers, many of them held up their arms to say, "Don't shoot," in what has now become a symbol of both surrender and protest.

"It was a really joyous moment," Martin said. In the end, he believed they had prevented the NYPD from escalating the situation by drawing media attention. "It was us getting our voices out."

1:30 a.m.

Finally allowed to leave the bridge, Travis, the comedian, made his way home to Bushwick. He had been among those who watched Martin and the woman negotiate with police. But unlike others, he felt anything but joyous. Being let off the bridge did not feel like a victory, but a loss, or at best a draw.

He was annoyed that the original leadership at Barclays Center had left them. And he was conflicted about those who remained, what to him looked like a predominately white group.

"It’s good because it shows that they support us and we have a buffer between us and the police. But it's bad in the sense that a movement for black people needs to be led by black people," he said.

Ultimately, he believes the lack of leadership hurt them.

"People just want to go home and we can’t agree on how to do that," he said. They began hearing rumors, that de Blasio was awaiting them in Brooklyn and more ominously, that the cops had turned off body cameras.

He remembered at one point, some people pleading with a teacher, the one person who seemed to have experience in corralling a herd of people, to tell them what to do. But she did not want the responsibility.

After the group finally decided to retreat back to Brooklyn, Travis lost his voice yelling at the straddlers to keep marching. "It just fucked me up," he recalled. "It's not a good feeling knowing you're attempting to take over a situation."

He also began to wonder whether the bridge standoff had simply become a distraction, away from the more violent dispersal of protesters that have increased in recent days.

"Ultimately, I just felt this was an opportunity for the police to very easily massage their image into this benevolent force that let protesters go peacefully and without incident."

At his press conference the following day, de Blasio said he been observing the situation at the Manhattan Bridge from "a site very nearby."

"People really should just plain be home, but there was an exceptional effort to respect peaceful protest, understanding this moment in history," he added. "But the notion that folks were going to cross the bridge and just keep going and going into Manhattan, including into places where there had previously been physical damage, that was just not tolerable."

Annie Todd contributed reporting and research to this story.