Oluwatoyin Salau, a 19-year-old Tallahassee activist who spoke out against racial injustice, was found dead Saturday, one week after being reported missing.
Salau’s cause of death is not yet known, but she tweeted that a man offered to give her a ride to shelter and to collect her belongings at a church where she previously found refuge. She wrote that he was aware of a previous sexual assault she experienced in March, but proceeded to molest her anyway. She fled while the man was asleep and had been missing ever since. “He came disguised as a man of God,” Salau wrote. “I trusted the holy spirit to keep me safe.”
Salau’s death is being investigated as part of a double homicide case, according to the Tallahassee Police Department. The police now say a suspect is in custody.
Salau, known to friends as “Toyin,” was like many of us. She found her voice in the call for justice. “Can’t nobody silence me,” Salau said at a protest for Tony McDade, a Black trans man and Tallahassee resident who was killed by police 10 days before her disappearance.
“We’re doing this for [Tony McDade], we’re doing this for our brothers and our sisters who got shot,” Salau said. “But we’re doing this for every Black person, because at the end of the day, I cannot take my fucking skin color off…Our lives matter, Black lives matter. Black trans lives matter.”
The last time anyone saw the radiance of Salau, who was a part-time student at Tallahassee Community College, was on June 6, near Orange Avenue and Wahnish Way. The Tallahassee Community Action Committee conducted a community search party at Bethel A.M.E. Church on Wednesday — no more than 300 ft. away from the intersection she was last seen.
Oluwatoyin Salau was right. Nobody can silence her. We will remember her name and what she fought for. Rest in power, Oluwatoyin Salau.
LGBT workers are protected by federal law from workplace discrimination, the U.S. Supreme Court announced on Monday. The 6-3 opinion comes after the court heard three cases in late 2019 in which employers fired workers after learning of their gender or sexual orientation.
Conservative Justice Neil Gorsuch wrote the majority opinion, citing Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 which “prohibits employment discrimination based on race, color, religion, sex and national origin.” Gorsuch was joined by Justices John Roberts, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Stephen Breyer, Elena Kagan, and Sonia Sotomayor.
“Today, we must decide whether an employer can fire someone simply for being homosexual or transgender,” the majority opinion reads. “The answer is clear. An employer who fires an individual for being homosexual or transgender fires that person for traits or actions it would not have questioned in members of a different sex. Sex plays a necessary and undisguisable role in the decision, exactly what Title VII forbids.”
The decision relies on the legal theory of textualism. Textualists adhere to the idea that the plain text of a statute should be used to determine the meaning of legislation, and that the intent or interpretation of the original writers does not matter.
“Ours is a society of written laws,” Gorsuch writes near the end of the opinion. “Judges are not free to overlook plain statutory commands on the strength of nothing more than suppositions about intentions or guesswork about expectations.”
Title VII made it illegal for an employer to rely on an employee’s sex when deciding to fire them. Gorsuch continued: “We do not hesitate to recognize today a necessary consequence of that legislative choice: An employer who fires an individual merely for being gay or transgender defies the law.”
The full opinion of the court — including a lengthy dissenting opinion from Justice Samuel Alito — is available online. This Supreme Court ruling does not affect the Trump administration’s decision to reverse protections for transgender people in the U.S. health care system last Friday.
Before this decision, nearly half of LGBT people lived in states that did not have explicit workplace protections for gay and trans people, according to the Gallup Daily Tracking Survey. Equality maps from the Movement Advancement Project now include the federal protections, but still indicate which states lag behind in legal protection and support. This includes areas like housing, health care, adoption rights, education, and criminal justice.
Aimee Stephens, one of the original plaintiffs in the case, died in May 2020 without knowing the historic result. Stephen’s employer fired her after she came out to her coworkers as a transgender woman in 2013.
The widely celebrated announcement came during a week of anger and grief for LGBT communities across the United States as they mourn the recent deaths of two Black transgender women, Riah Milton and Dominique “Rem’Mie” Fells. The Human Rights Campaign reports that at least 14 transgender and gender non-conforming people in the U.S. (including Puerto Rico) have been violently killed since the start of 2020. Marches in support of Black trans lives — like the one in front of the Brooklyn Museum on Sunday— have garnered thousands of supporters so far.
“I see that you’re a journalist,” said the person who approached me, the whiteness of their press pass glinting in the sun. It must have been the Canon Rebel T7i swinging from my neck. Was I a rebel? Given the number of police who’d swarmed the crowd gathered at the Stonewall Inn, demanding justice for black trans people killed by law enforcement, I could be considered one. That label was implied by the color of my skin. “Would you be interested in being interviewed…or your friend?” said the reporter.
As a journalist who loves political topics, I know there is an art of delicacy when covering protests. Quotes are hard to get. Most people often want to remain anonymous when supporting anything that could be deemed controversial. Activists fear that their message could be lost in translation. Yet, I did not trust this journalist to handle my story with care. I did not think that they would give a second thought to how the state was using every opportunity to criminalize black protestors.
“No, and be careful with that,” I said, referencing their camera and notepad. “You might kill someone.” Silence marked the end of that conversation. As they slunk back into the collective scream — “No justice, no peace!” — I wondered if I’d been dramatic. No, I reasoned, I wasn’t being dramatic.
A protestor holds up a sign with a scale that shows the relationship between racism, police brutality, and white privilege. Photo by author.
I wasn’t being dramatic because six activists, tied to the 2014 protests in Ferguson over the murdering of unarmed teenager Michael Brown by a police officer, had died.
Deandre Joshua, a close friend of Dorian Johnson who had witnessed the killing of Brown, died at 20 years old in 2014. He was found shot in the head inside of a burning car, near the place of Brown’s death. Darren Seals, 29, a community advocate and co-founder of HandsUp United — an organization for black and brown liberation created in response to Brown’s death — was also found dead in 2016 with gunshot wounds inside of a blazing vehicle. The deaths of 23-year-old community organizer MarShawn McCarrel, 27-year-old protestor Edward Crawford Jr., and 24-year-old Danye Jones, son of Ferguson activist Melissa McKines, were all ruled as “suicide.” They died in 2016, 2017, and 2018 respectively. Jones was found hanging from a tree; his mother called his killing a lynching. An officer was fired after calling McCarrel’s death “a happy ending.” When speaking of Crawford’s death, his father told the St. Louis Post-Dispatch,“I don’t believe it was a suicide,” noting his son’s good mood two days prior to his death. Bassem Masri, 31, was ruled to have died of a fentanyl overdose in 2018. Alarmingly, a month before his death, he tweeted in response to reports of Danye Jones’ death, “If they ever say I suicided myself it’s not true…If I get murdered I get murdered.”
Their deaths were spread over four years, leaving huge gaps in the patchwork of organizers, activists, and protestors involved in social justice related to the Ferguson protests. Beyond advocating against police brutality, the only thing these activists of color had in common was that they’d been captured by the camera’s gaze. Their visibility was a death sentence. Allegedly.
I could still be giving the pen, or the lens, too much power. That reporter only wanted to record my words. My name, however, would come after the quotations. Would that be a death sentence, too?
Gil Scott-Heron proclaimed fifty years ago at 125th Street and Lenox Avenue that, “The Revolution Will Not Be Televised.” My first photograph of the resurgent #BlackLivesMatter movement was of people marching from 125th and Adam Clayton Powell Jr. Boulevard. I had made my way to them by the time they reached Madison Avenue, right by Central Park. In 2020, many people are trying to televise the revolution. Out of the people I’ve seen attempting to “televise” the protests, in the streets and in the media, very few were black.
The Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) has stated that it holds the authority to surveil people at the George Floyd protests. We were and are being watched. As cameras swept the perimeter of Christopher Park to capture the black trans and non-binary speakers and their allies in action, my palm often flew to my face to evade incriminating digital footprints. Right after, my right index finger would press the trigger of the camera to document the unfolding scene of unrest. I was taught by my parents that knowing one’s true history was a source of empowerment. As a photojournalist, documenting my history felt like a natural duty, yet each image felt like my subject’s obituary.
The guilt I carry found its salve in the reality that people were live streaming, filming, reporting, and photographing the protests already. The history that was unfolding was part of my narrative, and I could not miss the opportunity to tell our story. My storytelling would never sacrifice the safety of black people because I am black. I suspected, long before I was told, that I was being watched and targeted. Living while black under the auspices of white supremacy means that you are always being watched and targeted, meaning I would not be like the reporter who hawkishly pointed his camera at my friend. I decided I would take images of the scenes in front of me as though they were peripheral, avoiding any detail that made any particular person stand out. I compromised by “capturing” the feeling of what was happening around me, rather than features and faces. I promised myself that these images would never see the light of day if they couldn’t be disseminated safely.
After my first two protests, one of the many journalists I follow tweeted about an image scrubber tool used for things like erasing metadata and blurring faces. It made my need to document feel a little less unethical. But the media continues to fuel my worries, like when ABC7 Chicago recently aired a video of a black protestor walking down a line of armed white alt-right individuals, but only blurred the latter’s faces.
Two people stand on a car mere blocks away from Union Square, as rows of people next to them march in the streets. Photo by author.
As instances of police brutality against members of the press are highlighted across the country, newsrooms may reconsider their role in aiding government surveillance tactics. However, many photojournalists take few, if any, measures to protect the communities that they document. One only needs to look at the latest photo coverage from the nation’s most popular newsrooms, like the Associated Press, to see black protestors’ identities carelessly exposed. A photo of Crawford Jr. at the Ferguson protest was included in the coverage by a St. Louis newsroom that won them a Pulitzer Prize. While the St. Louis Post-Dispatch’s photography staff were awarded the highest honor of photojournalism, the Crawford family went through the unspeakable horror of losing a loved one to violence. If the press hopes to be the “Fourth Estate” that protects the civil liberties of the people, which people will they aim to protect? In the wake of such institutionalized, racialized, and televised violence, the press must examine what it means to report “with full transparency,” and its complicity in black death.