Since George Floyd’s death in 2020, Republican-led states have expanded riot laws to suppress protesters. Trump has a track record of calling for militarized responses to demonstrations
The Knox county commission was questioning a property developer one evening in April three years ago when protesters quietly filed in to their auditorium and raised their fists in the air.
A week earlier, police had shot and killed 17-year-old Anthony Thompson Jr in a bathroom at his high school after they found him with a gun. Protests erupted in Knoxville, the county seat and largest city in eastern Tennessee, and one the loudest voices speaking out was Constance Every, who had organized demonstrations in the city during the national outrage that followed George Floyd’s death less than a year earlier. Now, she was in the county commission chamber with about two dozen others, intending to press them for the release of police body-camera footage that captured Thompson’s death.
