A photo of 28-year-old Ieshia Evans being arrested on the streets of Baton Rouge quickly spread across the world last week. Evans who is a nurse and mother embodied stillness in the photo taken by Jonathan Bachman.
She sat down with Gayle King to discuss the photo and what she was going through her mind while it was taken.
"I have a responsibility to do something," she said.
Evans' posture has been the subject of much talk. That, too, was a statement, she says, meant to convey that "we don't have to beg to matter."
Evans told King that she could no longer be a spectator while others were protesting. "All of the justice before, I felt like I was just a bystander," she explained. "You have a choice as a human being to do something or not do something."
Photo by Mark Wallheiser/Getty Images
As protests for the police killing of Alton Sterling continue in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, the city's police department continues to disregard the rights of protestors and property owners.
Heavily armed riot police came into residential neighborhoods with armored trucks on Saturday, and Lisa Batiste invited protestors to gather on her lawn and porch so that they could clear the street.
Police stormed the yard and entered her home to round up and arrest protestors.
The Daily Beast
reports that the protestors demonstrated non-violently for 90 minutes before the police moved in.
Video from the incident posted on Twitter shows the swarm.
Batiste says she was "appalled" by their behavior.
"I was stunned," she told David Begnaud of
CBS News. "I just couldn't believe what they were doing."
She alerted the police that they were coming on to private property, but this did nothing. "I said 'This is my home. I don't want you here. Please get out of my home.'"
A lieutenant with the BRPD said that the protestors on Batiste's porch had already broken the law. "The crime was blocking the roadways."
Other sources say the protestors were detained preemptively because BRPD thought they would create a blockade on the highway.
