Have we been here before?

The civil unrest seen across the United States since a Minneapolis police officer killed George Floyd may be rivaled only by the chaotic summers of the late 1960s, when racial tensions, the civil rights movement, and the Vietnam War fueled widespread protests and rioting.

Houston – and the Third Ward, the historically black neighborhood where Mr. Floyd grew up – experienced that late ’60s unrest, including a violent encounter in 1967 on the campus of Texas Southern University (TSU), a historically black college in the Third Ward, that saw police arrest almost 500 students and shoot up a dormitory.

Race riots broke out in cities around the country in those months – a period now known as the “long, hot summer of 1967.” In a report analyzing the cause of the unrest, the Kerner Commission concluded that white Americans were largely to blame for maintaining systemic inequality between black and white Americans.

President Lyndon Johnson didn’t act on those conclusions, and a year later protests again erupted across the country – again, including Houston – after the assassination of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.

“Because before it was only one community, [authorities could] ignore it,” says Ronald Goodwin, a history professor at Prairie View A&M University, of earlier protests by the black community. “Now you can’t ignore it.”

Houston, which hosted a memorial service for Mr. Floyd Monday, has seen daily protests demanding justice for his death. Yet the civil unrest of this moment is different, locals and experts say, in ways that represent not just social progress, but a broader disillusionment with American institutions that could be an even tougher problem to tackle than what the country faced 50 years ago.

“While we should be focused on police brutality in black communities, what this has brought out is a broad discontent in society. And that’s something we need to be concerned about and take seriously,” says Marcus Casey, an economist at the University of Illinois, Chicago, and the Brookings Institution.

Adding to the urgency of today’s response, over the past five years police have killed about 1,000 Americans every year. That number has not changed despite promises of reform after the massive riots and protests resulting from high-profile deaths of African Americans including Michael Brown, Eric Garner, Sandra Bland, Philando Castile, and Freddie Gray.

In the Third Ward, Brother Deloyd T. Parker Jr., who runs a local community center and knew Mr. Floyd, has been protesting police brutality for decades. But this time, he acknowledges, is different.

“I’m very hurt about what happened to George,” he says, “but I’m hurt every time. There’s a George every day.”

“What happened to George was the straw that broke the camel’s back. What that uncovered and unveiled is a lot of injustices that have taken place all over the country, and all over the world,” he adds. “He’s pretty much a symbol now.”

“Everybody is here”

When 60,000 people demonstrated here last week, one thing stood out to many Houstonians in the crowd: the diversity of the people around them.

“You see Asians, you see whites, you see Latinos, you see Indians, Native Americans. Everybody is here,” said Ephesian Fields, a black woman, during the protest.

“Things may change,” she added, but “at the end of the day, all we need is hope. All we have is hope. And the protests show hope.”

The need for the protests was bluntly apparent to many protesters.

“Anybody with the skin color that ain’t white, we get treated [expletive],” said Eduardo Reyes, sporting a Mexican flag bandana around his neck.

His girlfriend, Kazaree Barnett, was wearing an S.U.C. pullover, the name of the rap group Mr. Floyd belonged to. Through tears she said the objective was to march in peace.

“It could be my dad, it could my brother, it could be a loved one, or it could be me,” she added. “At the end of the day none of us are safe. We just want to be safe.”

Camilo Smith

Kazaree Barnett protests the death of George Floyd in Houston, where he grew up. “It could be my dad, it could my brother, it could be a loved one, or it could be me,” she said of Mr. Floyd’s death. “We just want to be safe.”

That diversity is perhaps not surprising for Houston, a majority-minority city. But the nationwide protests over Mr. Floyd’s killing have been diverse in another way: geography.

In Texas, major cities have seen protests, but so have small towns with small black populations. Demonstrators have gathered in downtown New York City, Chicago, and Los Angeles, but also in those cities’ suburbs. Protesters have turned out in majority-white cities like Salt Lake City, Utah, and Des Moines, Iowa.

The cellphone video that captured Mr. Floyd’s last moments – Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin kneeling on his neck for nearly nine minutes while he begged for breath – is visceral and horrifying, even compared to other videos of police killings. (Mr. Chauvin has been charged with second-degree murder; the three other officers who participated in detaining Mr. Floyd face charges of aiding and abetting his killing.)

And to be sure, racism, police brutality, and the Black Lives Matter movement are the banner issues for protesters. But in this moment of heightened disillusionment there are a host of other issues driving people onto the streets.

The financial and psychological shock of the COVID-19 pandemic is certainly a factor, whether it be for Gen Zers entering the job market or Millennials still recovering from the Great Recession. (The pandemic has hit Houston’s large oil and gas industry especially hard.) 

But more than half the country also disapproves of President Donald Trump’s performance. Half of Americans believe that Supreme Court justices don’t set aside personal or political views when they make rulings, and have “very little” confidence in Congress. Even more Americans are increasingly concerned that issues like the threat of white nationalism and climate change aren’t getting enough attention.

“There’s a growing pessimism about the institutions in the United States, the elites,” says Professor Casey. “That’s what’s driving broader participation.”

People of all races “feel this growing inequality in society, the idea that institutions aren’t very responsive to the rank and file,” he adds. “They see those things as linked to the police brutality.”

The Tre

For decades, police brutality has rarely not been top of mind in the Third Ward.

In 1967, protests broke out in Houston after a child drowned in the Holmes Road dump, a landfill in a black community. As protests continued and tensions climbed, Houston police raided the TSU campus on the early morning of May 17, firing around 3,000 rounds into Lanier Dormitory and arresting 488 students. Only five students were eventually charged, and they were all exonerated.

While much of the late ’60s unrest was racially diverse – the civil rights movement in particular – the riots of the “long, hot summer” were characterized by events like that at TSU: unrest sparked by local grievances in black communities over issues like police brutality and poor living conditions.

This moment is different, and in many ways the Third Ward is different too. When Mr. Floyd was growing up there, Mr. Parker says, the neighborhood – known as “the Tre” – had just begun to change.

“It was blacker,” he adds. “You wouldn’t see many people of European extraction walking their dogs down the street.”

Mr. Floyd spent time at S.H.A.P.E. Community Center, which Mr. Parker co-founded in 1969. He attended Jack Yates High School – named after one of the area’s early Baptist pastors – and, having shot up to 6 feet 6 inches tall, stood out in football and basketball, helping the school get to the state championship in 1992.

After dropping out of college, he returned to the Third Ward and helped establish the city’s renowned hip-hop scene. After getting into trouble with the law and spending four years in prison, he returned to the Third Ward with a new dedication to improving his community. He would often stop by the S.H.A.P.E. Center and talk to kids.

“He’d always come with a positive attitude, a positive disposition,” Mr. Parker recalls. “He wasn’t content with who he was, he wanted to be better.”

“He was on the move to doing that,” he adds, “but he was robbed of doing that.”

Henry Gass/The Christian Science Monitor

Tony, who only wanted his first name used, rides his horse Casey at a protest in Houston over the death of George Floyd, whom Tony knew in high school. Houston, where Mr. Floyd was from, has held protests daily since Mr. Floyd's death on Memorial Day.

Diversity and solidarity?

Last week, as the march was finishing a few miles away, the finishing touches were being put on a mural tucked onto a side street in one of the Third Ward’s most neglected housing projects. It’s become a landmark for those who want to pay their respects to Mr. Floyd, and a beacon for people who live there.

“He woke the world up,” said Leonard McGowen, a resident of the Cuney Homes projects and a close friend of Mr. Floyd.

Mr. Floyd left Houston for Minneapolis around 2014, seeking a fresh start. The Third Ward, meanwhile, had been rapidly gentrifying. With black residents moving to suburbs and whites and Latinos moving in, the neighborhood’s black population dropped from 79% in 2000 to 67% in 2015. The worry is that it could follow the same path as the Fourth Ward, a historic neighborhood created by freed slaves.

“Fourth Ward is oldest black community in Houston. It’s not there no more. It’s nothing but town homes,” says John “Bunchy” Crear, a former Black Panther Party member who has lived in the Third Ward for decades.

For some black Houstonians marching in protests, they feel just as threatened by gentrification as they do the police – and by the pandemic, which has disproportionately harmed African Americans. One thing that hasn’t changed since the ’60s: the wealth gap between black families and white families. The average white household in 2016 had the same median wealth as 11.5 black households combined.

“They’re pushing us blacks out so they can gentrify Third Ward and pretty much erase our history,” Ms. Fields said during last week’s protest. “That’s just one more way of them trying to enslave us and not let us have anything.”

Not everyone in the Third Ward believes this change is wholly negative. Many admit that it is, to a degree, inevitable – the neighborhood used to be mostly Jewish, until after World War II – and community groups have been working to prevent “unchecked” gentrification in favor of something more equitable.

“We can’t stop people moving in, that’s a lost battle, but we want to make sure we’re as much in control of this community as we need to be,” says Mr. Parker. “Change is imminent, we know that. But let that change be positive change.”

More integration in American society seems to have bred solidarity in the George Floyd protests, says Professor Casey. With more diversity in schools and neighborhoods, and with social media, African American worldviews are more broadly understood than in the 1960s.

“There’s more overlapping spheres. So something that affected a black man in Minnesota might matter to a white person in Arizona,” he says. “Along with seeing the institutional issues, it feels much more personal across the country.”

Looking at protests over Mr. Floyd’s death around the world, Mr. Parker thinks it’s even bigger than that.

“This is a global movement,” he says.

And how would Mr. Floyd feel if he could see this now?

“He’d be excited that black people and people of conscience, and people who love freedom are standing up,” says Mr. Parker. “I can see him smiling right now.”

The explosion of protests across the country may feel sudden to some, but for many black Americans it is a reckoning for which they have waited their entire lives. For Jabari Butler, an Atlanta father, husband, and minister, this moment feels very familiar. But he is “cautiously optimistic” this time will be different and ignite true change. This is his story, as told to Chandra Thomas Whitfield.

The racial unrest unfolding on American streets may be surprising for many, but for me as an African American man, it almost feels like too little, too late.

I may be a media technology entrepreneur, husband, minister, and father to a precious 8-year-old daughter today, but in 1991, I was an 18-year-old young black man in Oakland, California, already well acquainted with police brutality.

Courtesy of Rev. Jabari Butler

Jabari Butler poses as a freshman at Morehouse College in Atlanta in 1991, months after his violent run-in with police officers in his hometown of Oakland, California.

Watching that video of George Floyd sprawled on the ground, his face pressed into the pavement as he suffocated under the weight of a Minneapolis police officer’s knee atop his neck, always brings me back to a place that, to this day, crushes the very depths of my soul. See, if it were not for the grace of God, I might have faced a similar fate.

One summer evening, my two friends and I were driving through downtown Oakland, when we came upon a commotion. There had been a shootout and pandemonium had broken out in the streets. People were running in every direction and sounds of gunfire, glass breaking, and screaming echoed loudly in our ears.

We began circling the area frantically searching for my then-girlfriend, who’d been partying nearby. Suddenly, about seven Oakland police officers descended upon my burgundy ’80s-era T-top Monte Carlo with guns drawn. They ordered us to stop and one reached inside my driver’s side window. For as long as I live, I will never forget the sight of the steel glistening off his gun aimed at my temple, so close I could only make out the cop’s milky white knuckles. His finger was on the trigger without the safety engaged. I remember thinking: If I move one inch, my life will likely end right here.

One cop yelled out: “Don’t move or I’ll shoot.” Another threatened to shoot if I didn’t turn off my car. I froze, overwhelmed by the conflicting directions. My buddy Bakari broke me out of my shocked state: “Just think, don’t react,” he shrieked, as one officer beat him with a nightstick in the back seat. I slowly lifted my hands and rested them atop the steering wheel. The officer who’d pointed his weapon handcuffed me while I was still seated, my car still in drive.

All three of us were yanked from the car and our faces shoved into the pavement, much like Mr. Floyd’s had been, while they searched the car for a nonexistent weapon. Nothing was found, but we were still loaded into a squad car. I believe one or all of us might have ended up shot that night, if it weren’t for a former classmate, a black girl, who’d begun crying loudly nearby. She had witnessed everything and they knew it.

We were released that night and nothing became of the complaints that our parents later filed with police. My church, Allen Temple, shared our story with the congregation and even hosted a community forum. I later found out that the late rapper Tupac Shakur had sued and won following a similar encounter with Oakland police officers. That would have to be my vindication.

So for me, this moment is about George Floyd, but at the same time it’s not. It’s also about the thousands, dare I say millions, of nameless and faceless black men and women, American citizens, who do not have a video to “prove” to the world the abusive and violent treatment we regularly endure at the hands of police sworn to “protect and serve” us. 

The parallels of these historic times don’t end there for me. Less than an hour after wrapping up business meetings in downtown Atlanta just over a week ago, I turned on the television at home to learn that protesters, angry over Mr. Floyd’s murder, had begun storming the same streets I had just left. A horde of demonstrators began aggressively pushing on the glass entrance to CNN, until it shattered. Cars were burning, people were shouting, and the smoky remnants of tear gas hung heavy in the air. Those raw images immediately transported me back to a similar scene in the area more than 20 years earlier. 

It was 1992, not even a full year after my run-in with Oakland Police, and I was a freshman at Atlanta’s Morehouse College. This time our outrage was over the not-guilty verdicts handed down to the Los Angeles police officers who’d beaten a handcuffed Rodney King within an inch of his life. A video, rare for that time, had captured the entire incident. Naively, many of us thought video evidence would make a difference. Their acquittals felt like yet another slap in the face, and we were furious. 

Instead of studying for our final exams as planned, we Morehouse students, along with students from the other nearby historically black schools – Spelman College, Clark Atlanta University, Morris Brown College, and Interdenominational Theological Center – planned and carried out a peaceful protest. Marching across all of our campuses belting out “We Shall Overcome” alongside some civil rights-era Freedom Riders felt empowering and comforting.

Courtesy of Rev. Jabari Butler

The Rev. Jabari Butler poses with his sister Ayana Butler at his 2009 master of divinity graduation from Interdenominational Theological Center in Atlanta.

Once we reached nearby downtown Atlanta, though, the tone changed dramatically. As others joined in, the demonstration turned violent. Looting, fires, overturned cars – total chaos – ensued.

I didn’t – and still don’t – agree with such tumultuous responses, but I understand. Like Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. (an alum of Morehouse) said in a television interview three years after his famed “I Have a Dream” speech: A “riot is the language of the unheard.”

You see, what happened to Mr. Floyd is not new to me or America for that matter – having a video recording displaying it in such graphic detail is. What we’re witnessing in this moment, people of all races, ethnicities, and backgrounds speaking in support of the humanity of black people, is new, too.

I am cautiously optimistic that this will be the much-needed turning point that America so desperately needs to begin reaching her full potential. As Dr. King also put it: “Injustice anywhere threatens justice everywhere.” Police brutality and the violence that American citizens regularly impose upon black citizens with little or no consequence is an injustice that must stop. Look no further than the Ahmaud Arbery case in Georgia as an example.

What happened to me in Oakland was traumatic, and watching videos of the modern-day lynchings of Mr. Floyd and others like Tamir Rice, Walter Scott, Eric Garner, Michael Brown, and Philando Castile are often triggering. But the real trauma is that nearly 30 years later, such treatment persists. Only justice and substantive change can provide me and the black community with some much-deserved relief.

What many Americans are seeing now, mostly on television screens from the cushy comforts of their homes, is the result of black Americans being fed up and tired of being told directly and indirectly that our humanity does not equal that of a white person. When exactly do we deserve to enjoy the benefits – the full benefits – the United States Constitution purportedly guarantees all Americans?

It’s time for our national and local leaders and regular American citizens to step up and lead the change that so many around the globe are now demanding in the streets. Policing in America needs to be reformed, and so do any and all laws and public policies that don’t reflect, illuminate, or affirm that black lives matter too.

Chandra Thomas Whitfield is an award-winning multimedia journalist and a 2019-20 fellow with the Leonard C. Goodman Institute for Investigative Reporting. She is the host and producer of “In the Gap,” a forthcoming podcast for In These Times Magazine about how the gender pay gap adversely impacts the lives of black women in the American workforce. You may follow her work at Chandra Writes on Facebook.

John Bazemore/AP

Arnashia McCain uses her phone to copy phone numbers posted on the locked doors of a Georgia Department of Labor office on May 7, 2020, in Norcross, Georgia. Ms. McCain, who says she drives for Lyft and has had her hours cut in her job in retail, had been unable to check on the status of her unemployment claim.

Until about 10 years ago, Cat Thomson owned a flower shop in Boston’s perennially up-and-coming Jamaica Plain neighborhood, before it succumbed to the economic distress of the Great Recession. 

Today, Ms. Thomson is still her own boss, in a sense. She drives a Lyft, or at least she did until the pandemic struck. 

Now, even as the economy begins a spasmodic reopening from coronavirus restrictions, Ms. Thomson worries that her livelihood will be undercut again, as hard times produce a shortage of riders and a glut of drivers.

“People will be financially strapped in general and will be taking fewer Lyfts,” she says. “Wages will probably go down because when there are more drivers, there is more competition for the work.”

Stuck at home since March, Ms. Thomson is surviving on unemployment plus an extra weekly $600 offered by the CARES Act, the federal government’s largest response so far to the coronavirus. Those payments are set to stop on July 25, after which, she says, “all bets are off.”

Editor’s note: As a public service, all our coronavirus coverage is free. No paywall.

It’s a challenge faced by throngs of U.S. workers, and one hitting especially hard in the arena of gig or “contingent” work, which lacks the steady paychecks and benefits of traditional full-time jobs.

Thanks to the CARES Act, for the first time unemployment assistance is available for the self-employed and gig workers like Ms. Thomson. As of May, a stunning 11 million workers were receiving or awaiting these special Pandemic Unemployment Assistance benefits.  

On Friday, the Labor Department reported that the official U.S. unemployment rate declined in May, as steps toward economic reopening allowed many businesses to rehire. But the jobless rate remains at a level not seen since the Great Depression: 13.3%, or actually 16.4% if people “employed but not working” are properly counted among those unemployed.

The magnitude of the problem, for gig workers alone, is a sign of how precarious these jobs are. Yet to some observers, the upheaval also represents an opportunity to carve a path toward a more humane gig economy.

“This is one of those moments where we have this very dramatic fork in the road,” says Bama Athreya, an economic inequality fellow with Open Society Foundations and the host of “The Gig,” a new podcast about gig workers. “We need to redefine work in a way that gives people decent lives. And the money is there to do that.” 

Courtesy of Cat Thomson

Cat Thomson saw her work as a Lyft driver around Boston dry up during the pandemic. Her gig employment has also included painting and DJ work.

While unique in its particulars, the arc of Ms. Thomson’s working life so far – from an English degree at Macalester College in Minnesota to small-business owner to salaried employee to gig worker – mirrors the trajectory of much of the American labor experience since 2008. During the Great Recession and the fitful recovery that followed, some workers prospered while others saw only slow gains in pay and others found little job security at all. By 2016, the Federal Reserve Board reported that nearly half of Americans said they had less than $400 on hand for an emergency.

If the recovery from the past economic crash is any sign, it’s likely that many of the jobs, when they return, will at least initially be more precarious than the ones they replace. 

Gigs and gigabytes

Gig work, of course, is nothing new. Capitalist economies have long fielded a reserve army of laborers, from performing artists to office temps to housecleaners to adjunct professors, who can come and go as demand waxes and wanes. Moreover, the flexibility of nonstandard hours has always held an attraction for some workers. 

What is relatively new, however, is the smartphone, and the companies that connect service workers with consumers via apps like Uber, Lyft, Fiverr, and Instacart. Setting the prices and wages on these apps are complex algorithms that parse every tap and swipe and relentlessly seek to optimize worker productivity and customer revenue. 

It’s an arrangement that has attracted many Americans, and not always out of financial desperation. In 2018, according to Gallup, 36% percent of U.S. workers had some kind of arrangement in the gig economy. Separate surveys have found that about 10% to 13% of workers, like Ms. Thomson, rely on gig work for their primary income. 

“To me, it’s been well worth what I’m doing for the pay that I’ve been getting,” says Ms. Thomson, who also paints and DJs. “It’s fun for me. I actually weirdly enjoy driving in Boston.”

Two gig economies

Some describe it as “a tale of two gig economies.” Gallup polling has revealed a sharp divide between “independent” gig workers who experience high levels of autonomy and job satisfaction and “contingent” workers, the temps and on-call workers who are forced into unpredictable hours, receive little feedback, and are afforded scant opportunities for creative expression.

Mike Della Penna, a San Francisco-area children’s entertainer who performs as Mike the Magician, falls decidedly into the former category. A full-time elementary school teacher, Mr. Della Penna relies on magic shows, which he performs in preschools, libraries, and other venues, for about a quarter of his family’s income. 

This translates into a significant financial hit from the pandemic for Mr. Della Penna, his wife, and their 10-year-old son. He says that he was able to convert only about a fifth of his magic shows into virtual ones.

“That’s the negative, losing all that work,” says Mr. Della Penna. But the positives, he says, are manifold. For one thing, he picked up a 10-episode virtual performance with the city of Novato, California. 

“I now have a YouTube channel,” he says. “I now know how to use iMovie.”

More important, like many Americans afforded with the ability to stay home during the pandemic, Mr. Della Penna has used the time to deepen his skills.

“It’s made me come up with new routines and new material,” he says. “It’s made me go into my closet and read my magic books. I feel like I’m going to come out the other side of this knowing my craft.” 

Rich Pedroncelli/AP/File

Assemblywoman Lorena Gonzalez, a San Diego Democrat, speaks at rally calling for passage of her measure to limit when companies can label workers as independent contractors, in Sacramento, California, on Aug. 28, 2019. After passing the pioneering bill AB5 into law, California recently sued Uber and Lyft, saying the law requires them to treat their drivers as employees.

Ms. Thomson, for her part, has been spending more time painting, which she now says she can do without feeling guilty that she’s not out driving.

Meet the new boss

Those experiences reflect a wider trend. For many white-collar workers, the pandemic has offered a glimpse of the kind of flexibility and autonomy that gig work has long offered. No longer physically tethered to their workplaces, workers are getting a taste of the “be your own boss” mentality that first dazzled observers when apps like Uber emerged following the 2008 crash.

But much of this flexibility is illusory, says Dr. Athreya, and it represents part of a larger historical trend in the United States. “This is not new,” she says. “There have been a variety of technologies over the past few decades to fragment work and make it ever more short-term.” 

Dr. Athreya agrees that flexible labor has its role in the economy. “There’s nothing wrong with nonstandard employment,” she says. “The problem is not that everyone needs to be a full-time, formal employee. The problem is with precarious work.” 

Ms. Thomson understands that Lyft’s oft-touted flexibility for its drivers has its limits, because Lyft’s pricing changes according to supply and demand. “You’d be foolish not to drive at certain times of day or certain days of the week, because [if you didn't] you’d be paid only half as much. But that’s no different than any other business.”

These algorithms have the effect of squeezing drivers, as tech platforms compete for riders. For instance, a JPMorgan Chase Institute study found that, as the supply of Uber and Lyft drivers has expanded, their average monthly earnings dropped from $1,469 in 2013 to just $783 in 2017.

“They don’t have control over when they drive, over who they drive, and how much they get for that drive,” says Dr. Athreya.

Now, for Ms. Thomson and many other gig workers, the bigger question is whether job opportunities will revive before unemployment benefits run out.

Editor’s note: As a public service, all our coronavirus coverage is free. No paywall.

Courtesy of Zinaida Korneva

Zinaida Korneva, a decorated World War II veteran turned COVID-19 relief fundraiser, sits with her great-grandson in her dacha outside St. Petersburg, Russia. Ms. Korneva decided to raise money for medical workers by telling her tales of the war on YouTube.

Nearly 80 years ago, Zinaida Korneva marched 1,400 miles from Stalingrad to Berlin as an anti-aircraft gunner in the Soviet Army, fighting all the way.

Today, almost a centenarian, she is one of the few remaining combat veterans of World War II – and feels called to arms again.

Ms. Korneva’s daughter and granddaughter, both doctors in St. Petersburg, informed her about the immense challenges they were facing in the fight against the coronavirus pandemic. That included exhausting hours, shortages of critical equipment and protective gear, and the constant danger of getting infected themselves.

So, with help from the youthful portion of her extended family, Ms. Korneva set up a YouTube channel and began offering her reminiscences of the war in order to raise money to help the families of about 10 local medical workers, whom she describes as “being on the front line this time.” She says a British friend, World War II veteran Capt. Tom Moore, inspired her by raising almost $40 million for Britain’s National Health Service by walking laps in his backyard.

Editor’s note: As a public service, all our coronavirus coverage is free. No paywall.

Her YouTube channel has since garnered about 14,000 subscribers, while over 4 million rubles [about $60,000] has poured into her donation page. That’s enough to help more than 100 families, by her estimates.

“We are all in this together, just as we were during the war,” she says. “Back then we could see our enemy, and knew how to deal with him. Now it’s an invisible enemy, and there is no vaccine. Scientists all over the world are racing to find it, while our doctors fight to preserve lives. What each of us must do is find ways to help them, to stop people from dying.”

Ms. Korneva is not alone among Russians in taking the coronavirus pandemic as a clarion call. Hundreds of private initiatives have sprung up in the past couple of months, some of them quite innovative. They range from filling holes in the existing public health system, to circumventing bureaucratic bottlenecks, to just helping ease the plight of vulnerable people trapped in quarantine. Many existing charities quickly repurposed their activities to help beleaguered state medical services speed and improve their response to the crisis.

“This aspect of social life in Russia, the charitable sector, is relatively new and generally overlooked,” says Masha Lipman, editor of Counterpoint, a journal of Russian affairs published by George Washington University. “When this disaster struck, it caught Russia unprepared, as it did most countries, and it created many new challenges that private initiatives stepped in to meet.”

Making a difference

One of those was the Zhivoy (Living) Foundation, which normally helps hospitals and patients with severe medical problems with logistical and other forms of assistance. The group’s director, Viktoria Agadzhanova, says that when the pandemic struck many hospitals began to adjust to treat COVID-19, suspending their other regular operations.

“We realized that in order to resume our usual work we needed first to help defeat this pandemic threat,” she says.

One of the biggest problems in the early stages, she says, was that doctors and hospitals were unable to directly order supplies of personal protective equipment (PPE) and other critical gear. They were required to submit a request to the Department of Health, which would stage a tender, and eventually purchase and deliver the supplies. It wasn’t until April 17 that the State Duma adopted a law on simplifying the procurement process.

“The delays meant that lots of doctors and medical workers were in danger of getting infected,” Ms. Agadzhanova says. “Hospital managers were left to either pretend there was no problem, or risk their jobs by publicly calling for help.”

Groups like the Zhivoy Foundation, and the private citizens’ rescue service Sozidaniye (Creation), slashed through the red tape by locating supplies of PPE sitting in warehouses or shops, buying it, and delivering it straight to the hospitals that needed it.

“The authorities neither helped us nor hampered us,” says Yelena Smirnova, head of Sozidaniye. “But we had dozens of requests from medical workers, and we knew what we had to do.”

One organization that did briefly get into trouble with authorities in early April was the Doctors’ Alliance, a medical workers’ group associated with opposition leader Alexei Navalny. While delivering PPE to a remote hospital in western Russia, the group’s leader Anastasia Vasilyeva was detained by police and reportedly abused for allegedly disobeying a local ordinance. She was released the next day. The case made global headlines, and may have persuaded Russian authorities to change their approach.

“We were accused of spreading fake information, of using charity for political PR purposes, of staging provocations and what not,” says Ivan Konovalov, press spokesman for the Doctors’ Alliance. “But with the passing of time the authorities have realized that this is not the best way to struggle against us. We haven’t had these difficulties since then. The authorities themselves realized that problems do exist, especially after Putin recognized this fact in one of his addresses.”

Finding an understanding with government

The case underlined the tensions that exist between the new charity sector, whose assistance is genuinely welcomed by the public, and authorities who can become irate at activities that highlight the deficiencies of state services.

“The government doesn’t mind established charity groups stepping in to help,” says Ms. Lipman. “They do mind what they see as alarmist and critical comments that emphasize how bad things are. Ideally, I think the authorities would prefer that charities act, but do so quietly.”

Russia’s government has actually promoted the creation of an official volunteer movement, #MyVmeste (Us Together), which organizes companies and individuals to help out with things like coronavirus hotlines, free legal consultations, and facilities for remote work and distance learning. One of its most successful services has been to organize armies of mostly youthful volunteers to assist elderly people in self-isolation by buying and delivering groceries and medicines, and helping out with other necessary chores.

Angelina Fitoz, a prominent Moscow lawyer, is offering her services pro bono to doctors who can’t keep up with payments when they get sick, or are having trouble receiving promised hazard bonuses and overtime pay. “I just want to help doctors, one professional to another, and not make a big deal out of it,” she says.

Aliona Doletskaya, former editor of Vogue-Russia and a prolific author and TV personality, is one of many Russian celebrities who’ve come up with their own ways to help. She has put aside and sold 500 signed and boxed copies of her latest book, and raised about $35,000. “I am the daughter of two doctors. They raised me, and I learned to see the world through their eyes,” she says. “I know everyone is suffering in this crisis, but doctors have special concerns.”

Experts say there are innumerable individual and group initiatives like this springing up around the country, the government is learning to welcome them, and it might well leave permanent changes in Russia’s social landscape after the crisis has passed. And maybe some of those changes will be universal.

“I hope the world will become a different place after this,” says Ms. Korneva. “I want countries to realize that working together to solve problems is the only way. I hope no one ever thinks about war again.”

Editor’s note: As a public service, all our coronavirus coverage is free. No paywall.

Reuters

Demonstrators in Hong Kong march on the first anniversary of a mass protest against the now-withdrawn extradition bill June 9.

Just days after mass protests for racial equality began in the United States, Hong Kong marked the one-year anniversary of its million-person march for democratic equality. On June 9, hundreds of people used the anniversary to again rally against attempts by China to impinge on the freedoms still existing in the semi-autonomous city.

Tuesday’s protest was smaller than past ones in large part because pro-democracy leaders have realized the limits of street demonstrations. Trying to shame the Communist Party in Beijing has only played to its fears of losing power, forcing it into more brutal crackdowns and mass arrests. In late May, the party decided to impose new laws on Hong Kong that would allow its security agencies to directly suppress critics.

A far better tactic to keep Hong Kong’s liberties, say protest organizers, might be to openly exercise the kind of equality they wish to preserve.

They have only begun to look for examples. Yet the idea is to treat the Communist Party as an equal, even if its leaders treat Chinese citizens as unequal by ruling without open and democratic elections. In other words, equality means not acting with self-righteous superiority but treating others as you would like to be treated.

Last November, pro-democracy voters won most of the seats in local elections for district councils – one of the few examples of democracy left in Hong Kong. This not only shocked Beijing but also showed the city’s voters that equality has power. Now student groups and 23 unions have joined forces to hold a referendum on June 14. It calls for a boycott of classes and workplaces as a “collective dissent” against Beijing’s proposed new law.

If at least 60,000 people vote at informal polling stations or online, and 60% of them endorse the action, workers and students will leave their work or classrooms over three days. Not only the vote itself but also the organized strike will be an exercise in equality.

The universal ideal of equality is not an empty value. Nor is it given by others. As Tocqueville wrote in “Democracy in America,” “One has to understand that equality [first developed in society] ends up by infiltrating the world of politics as it does everywhere else. It would be impossible to imagine men forever unequal in one respect, yet equal in others; they must, in the end, come to be equal in all.”

The protests in the U.S. and Hong Kong differ in many aspects. Yet they both focus on improving people’s understanding of equality – whether in the voting booth, in a courtroom, or in a confrontation with police. After a year of street protests, Hong Kongers may be venturing to act boldly with equality, not merely demanding it.