2020-2021
As part of the master’s program at The University of Texas at Austin, my graduate cohorts and I covered protests, voting and the presidential election in 2020 and the effects of George Floyd’s death among Black Austinites going into the year of 2021. Along with reporting on my own stories, I documented and collaborated with our student reporters for two semesters from long features to deadline driven news events.
Shivering in a long coat with a plastic bag of sliced cold pizza in one hand, George Davis walks from his encampment on Willow Street to the Downtown Austin Community Court. It’s February and cold, and Davis wants to talk to his case manager about housing, job applications and even possibly getting a pair of gloves.
“I haven’t eaten in two days, and this is the coldest I’ve ever been,” Davis said.
Davis is among the luckier of people experiencing homelessness. About 200 unsheltered people are on a waiting list for the kind of intensive case management that Davis gets through the downtown court, which is temporarily located in the Terrazas Library at 1106 E. Cesar Chavez St. The court attempts to divert people charged with petty crime from the criminal justice system and to provide them with help getting their lives in order.
The killing of George Floyd in May 2020 inspired Texans of all colors to take to the streets to speak up against systemic racism. Protests occurred around the state, and the words “Black Austin Matters” appeared in giant yellow letters in several Texas cities, including along Austin’s Congress Avenue leading to the state Capitol.
At the same time, a pandemic that has disproportionately affected black Americans continued to ravage the country — COVID-19 has killed almost 40,000 Texans to date.
Eight months later, during the inauguration of President Joe Biden, Amanda Gorman, a 22-year-old African-American poet, acknowledged the country’s difficulties and exhorted all Americans to work for a more just union.
“So let us leave behind a country better than the one we were left with,” Gorman said. “We will rebuild, reconcile and recover and every known nook of our nation and every corner called our country, our people diverse and beautiful will emerge, battered and beautiful.”
As Marcey Gonzalez, who is visually impaired, was navigating websites in March to schedule a COVID-19 vaccine, she grew increasingly frustrated.
Gonzalez can see, she said, “but I cannot do it quickly, and before I could finish [registering on the website] it would time out,” Gonzalez said.
Gonzalez’s visually impaired friends have also struggled to schedule vaccines and have faced other COVID-19-related challenges that might not occur to sighted people, Gonzalez added.
About 700,000 people in Texas are visually impaired, according to the most recent numbers from the National Federation of the Blind. In a series of interviews with Reporting Texas, visually impaired Austinites and their advocates in Central Texas discussed the difficulty of getting vaccinated for COVID-19 and the challenge of avoiding the illness during the pandemic.
On Sept. 24, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott suggested legislation that would require jail time for anyone damaging property or causing injury during a protest. His proposals included a minimum six-month jail sentence for striking a police officer during what Abbott called a “riot” and fines for organizations that assist or fund events that turn violent.
“Texas will always defend the First Amendment right to peacefully protest, but Texas is not going to tolerate violence, vandalism and rioting,” Abbott said during a news conference in Dallas.
Amid national protests over police brutality and systemic racism, Tennessee, North Dakota, South Dakota and Oklahoma have passed laws that take aim at protestors — part of a law and order focus in more than dozen, mostly GOP-controlled, states.