Ari Maybe planned to indulge in a few treats Sunday afternoon before starting a hunger strike Monday with three other protesters at an Airbnb in Louisville.
But eating too much the day before you start fasting is a bad idea, she said. She wasn't going to overdo it.
Maybe and three other demonstrators — Amira Bryant, Vincent Gonzalez and Tabin Ibershoff — say they plan to stop eating at noon Monday and will remain on a hunger strike until the three Louisville Metro Police officers who fired their weapons the night Breonna Taylor was killed are removed from their positions and stripped of their pensions.
The four were among several speakers Sunday at a Kentucky Alliance Against Political and Racial Repression news conference at the Carl Braden Memorial Center on Broadway. They made the decision Wednesday that they would abstain from all food, Maybe said, and organizers have been working to make it a reality since then.
"We've been prepping for a few days now," Gonzalez added. "The clock is ticking, as they say."
It's a project that's bigger than four people. Medical personnel will be involved to monitor the hunger strikers, and others have been working to secure an Airbnb to serve as the site of the protest.
And then there's the livestream team — the group that will broadcast the demonstration 24 hours a day on their Facebook page, Hunger Strikers for Breonna. Gonzalez joked that the next step of the protests "won't be televised, but it'll be livestreamed."
"It's four individuals that are abstaining from all caloric intake, but we have an army of other people helping us fundraise, helping on the back end and things like that," Maybe said. "I think all together we probably have about 35 people involved right now."
Those four won't eat anything but vitamin supplements and can only drink water, green tea and black coffee – no cream, no sugar.
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Taylor, a 26-year-old Black ER technician, was killed March 13 as Louisville police officers Brett Hankison, Myles Cosgrove and Jonathan Mattingly executed a "no-knock" search warrant over a drug case at her apartment. Hankison has since been fired, while Cosgrove and Mattingly remain on the force. No drugs were found at the residence.
Bryant characterized the hunger strike as another phase of the ongoing protests, which erupted on May 28 in the aftermath of the police killing of George Floyd and have continued daily since. Jefferson Square Park in downtown Louisville, the site of the demonstrations, has seen an increase in LMPD presence lately, she said, but there would be no interruptions on private property, where the hunger strike will take place.
"In this form, we can control it," Maybe added. "It's not like a sit-in, where we can be arrested. It's not like a protest, where there's a beginning and an end. We control the beginning, the end and the entire narrative."
The four who will stop eating will likely still be involved in the protests in the streets for the first four or five days of their hunger strike, Bryant said, but after that they'll be confined indoors as "a body for the cause."
Other calls for action against the officers haven't worked, Gonzalez said, and as protests march along into the heat of the summer, those involved will need to find ways to keep bringing the energy.
A "student of history," Gonzalez said he's seen hunger strikes work before. And with the protests in Louisville taking an international spotlight, he said, Monday and the days beyond will show that audience that "we mean business."
"It feels like all the eyes of the nation and dare I say the world are on Louisville, Kentucky, right now," Gonzalez said. "This is such an egregious case that we have to keep the energy up. This is more of an opportunity to be provocative, and I hope they feel our sincerity."
Lucas Aulbach can be reached at laulbach@courier-journal.com, 502-582-4649 or on Twitter @LucasAulbach. Support strong local journalism and subscribe: courier-journal.com/lucasa.
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