Civil rights activists targeted Sunday-afternoon restaurantgoers in California and New York to remind them of the black lives lost to police violence across the country.
The event, called “Black Brunch,” began last year in Oakland, Calif., according to Yahoo News, after the tragic police killings of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Mo., and Eric Garner in Staten Island, N.Y.
Yahoo News notes that in New York City, some 30 people gathered around 11 a.m. Sunday to protest inside some popular midtown-Manhattan eateries that demonstrators identified as “white spaces.” At each location, the protesters “read the names of African Americans killed by police,” Yahoo reports.
“Every 28 hours, a black person in America is killed by the police,” the protesters chanted, according to the website. “These are our brothers and sisters. Today and every day, we honor their lives.”
In California, around three dozen protesters sang and chanted inside targeted businesses to remind shoppers of the unarmed men who lost their lives to police.
“The small inconvenience felt while we disrupted businesses pales in comparison to the nightmarish reality of being black in America,” the University of California, Berkeley’s Black Student Union, which organized the California demonstrations, wrote in a press release viewed by the Daily Cal.
The hashtag #BlackBrunch trended on Twitter as many stood in solidarity with the movement, though not everyone saw the point of taking the protest off the street and inside establishments.
Read more at Yahoo News and the Daily Cal.