After the Charleston shooting in 2015, Emily Raboteau takes her children to see the recently reopened High Bridge in New York City. The bridge connects the Bronx with Harlem and was closed for over forty years. The events of that summer, which also saw the death of Michael Brown, make Raboteau wonder how she should talk about the police with her young children. 

The family walks to The High Bridge in the heat. The Charleston shooting and the shooting of Michael Brown by the police are fresh in Raboteau’s mind, as are the deaths of Freddy Gray, Eric Garner, Trayvon Martin, and Tamir Rice, exacerbating her outrage. These events provoked citizen protests, demonstrations of civil disobedience, and the Black Lives Matter movement. Vintage and new slogans resounded throughout this resistance. 

Raboteau’s four-year-old son complains about the heat and the long walk to The High Bridge. A Ben Sargent cartoon called “Still Two Americas” depicts a black and a white boy leaving home. The white boy’s mother urges him to wear his jacket, and the black boy’s mother lists how he should behave to avoid suspicion related to

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