Democratic California Rep. Maxine Waters is 81 years old.
I’m not trying to put auntie on blast, I’m just pointing out that 81 years of fighting for civil rights hasn’t stopped this queen from taking on the President of the United States and even stopping to make sure a police officer wasn’t violating one of her district’s voter’s rights.
Queen Maxine was driving through her Los Angeles district when she saw a police officer who had stopped a Black man, so she stopped just to make sure no rights were being violated on her watch.
“They stopped a brother, so I stopped to see what they were doing,” Waters told a person who recorded the incident on South Vermont Avenue on Friday, TMZ reported.
“They said I’m in the wrong place and that they’re going to give me a ticket,” she adds about the L.A. County sheriff’s deputies, the New York Post reports. “That’s OK as long as I watch them.”
“Gotta do what you gotta do! Make sure!” a woman can be heard shouting.
The brief confrontation comes as America is facing a reckoning of sorts after George Floyd was killed by a Minneapolis police officer who kneeled on his neck for 8 minutes and 46 seconds after he was already in police custody.
The Post notes that Waters founded the Black Women’s Forum and has fought to ban the use of chokeholds by law enforcement.
“It needs to be done all over the nation and any iteration of that, whether it is the arm or the knee or a piece of equipment, used to cut off the breathing to interfere with the ability for those who are the victims of these tactics to be killed,” she said.
Off-camera, a man can be heard shouting, “Bye, Maxine!” and just like that, the superhero was gone.