Erica Garner, Activist and Daughter of Eric Garner, Dies at 27 - The New York Times
▻https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/30/nyregion/erica-garner-dead.html
Black Lives Matter vient de perdre une figure de proue. La fille de Eric Garner, assassiné par la police newyorkaise, vient de décéder suite à une crise d’asthme sévère.
Erica Garner, the daughter of Eric Garner who became an outspoken activist against police brutality after her father’s death at the hands of a New York police officer, died on Saturday, according to her mother. She was 27.
Ms. Garner became a central figure in the charged conversation about race and the use of force by the police after a New York Police Department officer placed her father into an unauthorized chokehold on Staten Island in 2014 while responding to complaints he was selling untaxed cigarettes.
As Mr. Garner, who also suffered from asthma, was being choked by the officer, Daniel Pantaleo, he repeated the words “I can’t breathe” 11 times — a phrase that became a rallying cry for the Black Lives Matter movement and other activists.
“Erica took the truth with her everywhere she went, even if that truth made people uncomfortable,” he said, recalling her willingness to confront President Barack Obama and demand that he take a stand against racially charged policing tactics.
Civil rights activists and celebrities flooded social media with tributes to Ms. Garner.
Even as Ms. Garner pressed politicians and law enforcement officials to hold the police accountable for her father’s death, she was emphatic that her personal tragedy was also a public one.
“Even with my own heartbreak, when I demand justice, it’s never just for Eric Garner,” she wrote in The Washington Post in 2016. “It’s for my daughter; it’s for the next generation of African-Americans.”
