‘Not going anywhere.’ Macon man spends 100+ hours protesting for ‘Black Lives Matter’
Derian Wilson has learned to read people’s faces through their windshields as they zip past.
He can tell the ones — the few, it turns out, compared to the countless thumbs up that he gets — who don’t seem to care for the message on the yard-wide cardboard “Black Lives Matter!” sign he grips as he stands along a busy road in north Macon.
“They’ll wait till I look at them and then they’ll shake their heads” in disapproval, Wilson said the other day as he stood where he has every day for much of the past month.
“You can’t say that all lives matter if you look at my sign and look me in the face and shake your head ‘no,’ to say my black life doesn’t matter,” he said. “You can see in their faces the people that don’t like you.”
For four hours or so each day before work, Wilson has stood on the sidewalk in front of the Chick-fil-A where he is an evening-shift kitchen manager.
The spot he has staked out is in the middle of a fast-food forest at the Tom Hill Sr. Boulevard exit off Interstate 75.
Beneath a towering thicket of Chipotle, McDonald’s, Five Guys, Burger King and Hooters signs hoping to grab motorists’ eyes and stomachs, Wilson is making a one-man stand at the intersection of “Black Lives Matter” and “All Lives Matter.”
The latter phrase being what a handful of passersby who seem less than thrilled to encounter Wilson tend to shout out their windows when they cruise past.
For more than 26 straight days, Wilson, whose late father was Black and whose mother is white, has staged a one-man protest against racial injustice.
He has been told to “get a job!” and been on the receiving end of maybe a half dozen middle fingers. A couple of racial slurs have been hurled his way.
Mostly he gets car-horn honks of approval — 99 in an hour by a reporter’s count on a recent Tuesday morning. A city bus honked. A fire truck blasted its horn. A car full of white teenagers waved and cheered.
“I love the old-lady thumbs up,” Wilson, 20, said.
‘I’m not going anywhere’
On occasion, the lunch-hour line at the Chick-fil-A, which sits directly across four lanes of traffic from a Starbucks, backs up and stretches out into the roadway.
Wilson likes it because those waiting “get to sit here and look at me. I’m not going anywhere.”
Dressed in shorts, a T-shirt, and Vans sneakers, Wilson stood clutching the sign he fashioned from a box that gallon-size iced tea jugs are delivered in at the Chick-fil-A behind him.
Part of the reason he chose the sidewalk in front of the restaurant was that the people inside know him and “have my back.” Some days when he leaves to go home and wash up before heading to work, he will stick his head inside to, as he joked, “make sure they know I haven’t been snatched.”
Wilson, a Central High School graduate, attended Mississippi State University to study landscape management. He came home after about a year when he decided to attend cosmetology school instead.
Late last month, as racial discord in the wake of the death of George Floyd in Minnesota ignited protests across the country, Wilson said, “I got sick of sitting at home looking at everything going on, the injustices and the oppression, and I wanted to make my voice heard any way I could.”
As midday approached on a recent Tuesday, a couple of hours into Wilson’s four-hour protest that day, a postal worker named Tonya Porter happened by.
Porter had stopped at Starbucks across the street and seen Wilson with his “Black Live Matter!” placard.
Porter, who is Black, walked over and handed Wilson $20.
“I was wrongfully arrested once,” she said.
Porter wished she had time to protest alongside Wilson.
“For him to stand out here ... with nobody,” she said, “it’s power.”
‘I’ve learned patience’
A few minutes later, an older white woman in a tan sedan with a sheriff’s association bumper sticker cruised by with her window down.
“All lives matter!” the woman snarled.
Wilson looked at her and nodded.
“I’ve learned patience,” he said as she drove off.
He said he wants people to know that “your true colors will always show.”
“So shape up. Get educated,” Wilson said. “My dad was Black. My mom’s white, and I’m the fairest of their three kids. So I’ve always had a difficult time knowing exactly what I was. I don’t mind saying that I’m mixed, because I am. But I think the best way to say it is I am Black and I’m white. I am both. And that’s something that a lot of people don’t understand or may not like. But it’s the reality.”
He recalled as a child going to work with his father, Derrick, who was a manager at an area Kroger. His dad died of an aneurysm in 2012 at age 45, and one of Wilson’s earliest memories of racism came from being at the supermarket with his father one day when a white woman asked to talk to a manager.
“When my dad got there, she wanted a different manager,” said Wilson, who was 8 or 9 at the time. “And it was because he was Black.”
Most days, Wilson’s mother, Camille, who is 52 and works for a Methodist organization, rides by the sidewalk where Wilson stands to check on him and show her support.
She said she is proud of him and that when he began protesting she’d told him, “Remember that arguing, yelling with people, never convinces them of your side of the argument.”
“I want conversations,” he had said. “I want people to talk.”
Hoping for change
Three weeks into his effort, he said people for the most part seem to have accepted his presence.
“It’s a lot better than I imagined it might be,” Wilson said.
The honking horns and the thumbs ups, he said, “almost completely overshadow the negative responses. ... But you can’t forget about the negative responses, because that’s the problem we’re trying to address.”
It makes him feel good when a parent with young children in a car rides by and the parent honks.
Wilson said the children will no doubt ask their parents about the honking.
“I know that they’ll have it explained to them the right way,” he said, “how to love and support other people.”
At one point, a Toyota Camry with two white children in back seat eased by.
One of the kids inside, a girl, squealed, “Black lives matter!”
“Yes, ma’am!” Wilson boomed, his fist raised.
Then a white man in a lawn service truck pulled up and stopped. He leaned across the front seat and spoke out his passenger-side window.
“Thank you for peacefully protesting,” the man said. “That’s how you get things done.”
Wilson may continue demonstrating through the end of the year, or until he detects a climate of what he describes as “true change.”
“I’ll take that,” he said, “as my only Christmas gift.”