Raleigh starts to clean up, asks big questions. ‘Hopefully, the people who did this can find some peace.’
As the sun rose Sunday, Raleigh woke to find its main streets in shambles — their windows shattered, their shelves empty, their garbage cans dumped on the sidewalks.
But an hour past dawn, the volunteers turned up to push brooms and scrub paint off the walls, vowing to move ahead.
“I’m an optimistic person,” said Mike Mullins, sweeping up the broken storefront to Slice Pie Company, his Martin Street business, “and I choose not to see the damage. ... It’s nothing. You just pick yourself up and get going. Hopefully, the people who did this can find some peace in their lives.”
By 9 a.m., half a dozen people were scrubbing white paint off the walls of the Wake County office building on Fayetteville Street, and workers had set up a table saw on Wilmington Street to patch plywood over the broken windows at Tonbo Ramen.
The protest began Saturday as a show of support for George Floyd, who died after a violent arrest in Minneapolis last week andwhose death has spawned an outcry nationwide.
People living downtown described Raleigh’s protest as a peaceful affair at the beginning, with families and children attending, both black and white pleading for an end to police violence. But a few hours in, the tone changed as rocks got thrown and tear gas filled the street.
Hardly a business escaped damage from the protest. Looters broke into Dollar General on Davie Street, turned over the aisles and emptied shampoo bottles on the floor. Vandals broke through two doors to get inside Mechanics and Farmers Bank on Hargett Street.
The downtown CVS drug store had most of its inventory strewn across Fayetteville Street, where half-empty gallons of milk remained after protesters had poured it on their faces to fight the sting of tear gas. Park benches were littered with empty whiskey bottles, taken from downtown bars.
On Wilmington Street, Philip Horwitz surveyed the damage at Reliable Loan & Jewelry, the pawn shop his family has owned for three generations. He stepped through the hole in his front door and gestured to the showcases that had been smashed and emptied while he was still in the store at 2 a.m.
But Horwitz, too, remained stoic. Nothing to get frantic about.
“All the good stuff was in the vault,” he said.
Cleaning up the sidewalks, the shell-shocked city seemed less worried about what the damage would cost in dollars than the scars left on its soul. People with no financial stake came to see Sunday at what Raleigh had become.
“I’ve never seen a riot,” said Cepeda Womack, standing on Fayetteville Street. “This is history to me. A history not based on color, but based in hate.
“Two wrongs don’t make a right,” he said. “But when you have a lack of intelligence and a lack of understanding of a culture, what it’s going through ... Sooner or later, you’re going to take it from one neighborhood to another neighborhood.”
With the day still young and its wounds still raw, the city tried to slowly remake itself Sunday. At Slice, the pie company on Martin Street, Mullins praised a man he knew only as Jonathan from the Department of Revenue, who took up a broom to help him with smashed windows and then disappeared.
“I don’t know his last name,” Mullins said. “But I’m going to find out. He’s my latest best friend.”
This story was originally published May 31, 2020 at 11:25 AM with the headline "Raleigh starts to clean up, asks big questions. ‘Hopefully, the people who did this can find some peace.’."
