It was the weekend after the death of George Floyd in Minneapolis and protesters were gathering all over the country – including in Pensacola. And it was the day after a mural of George at the Graffiti Bridge downtown was defaced, arousing local protestors even more than before. And it was then that UUCP member Denise Gunn became a protestor too.

“My neighbor and people from her church went to the bridge and repainted the picture of Floyd, and she told me there would be a candlelight vigil the following evening. I asked my neighbor ‘What can I do?’  She said, ‘We need white faith leaders.’

“Before I got involved, I saw the story about the murder of Ahmaud Arbrey in Georgia, killed while jogging in a white neighborhood; that really troubled me. Then when it happened with George I was just decimated. I decided I was not going to be silent.”

Denise joined the vigil, standing at the top of the bridge for 1.5 hours, holding the sign, Black Lives Matter. Enough is enough. “I was just proud to be there.”

Other UUCP members joined too. Among them: Bill Caplinger and Paula Montgomery, Scott Satterwhite and Lauren Anzaldo and their children, Madailein and Desmond.

Scott Satterwhite also wrote of local protests of the George Floyd death for the Independent News, and again for The Light, putting the Graffiti Bridge outbursts in perspective. After the George Floyd mural was defaced, “people gathered in large numbers, occasionally using civil disobedience to help push demands of the City of Pensacola for its recent history with police killings.

“Not surprisingly, several members of the Unitarian Universalist Church of Pensacola were in attendance at nearly all of the protests,” says Scott. “As the UUCP has remained active in social justice issues in Pensacola, the tradition continues at the Graffiti Bridge protests.”

—By Charlotte Crane and Scott Satterwhite