On March 13, 2020, Louisville Metro Police Department entered the home of sleeping 26-year-old Breonna Taylor with a no-knock warrant. Following an altercation with Breonna’s boyfriend, she was shot 8 times. Although Brett Hankinson has been removed from the department, the three officers involved, Brett Hankinson, Myles Cosgrove, and Jonathan Mattingly, have yet to be charged.
On August 24, 2019, 23-year-old Elijah McClain was walking home when he was reported for suspicious activity. Elijah, who had anemia and often became cold, was wearing a ski mask at the time he was reported. Three officers, Nathan Woodyard, Jason Rosenblatt, and Randy Roedema, restrained Elijah and performed a fatal chokehold, and he was injected with a high dosage of ketamine. He later went into cardiac arrest and died in the hospital. Though the case was reopened on June 24, 2020, the officers are on administrative leave and have not been charged.
On July 12, 2020, in Mckinney, Texas, 20-year-old Gloria Bambo was found hanging in her garage of the house that she shared with her 20-year-old white male roommate. Though Mckinney Police Department claims the case is still open, and the autopsy report has not been released, her death has been classified a suicide without further investigation.
In June 1987, Pervis Payne, an intellectually disabled individual, found his neighbor and her children attacked and wounded in their home. Pervis went into a panicked state due to the triggering scene, and was subsequently arrested, charged, and sentenced to death. He remains on death row, despite having maintained his innocence for 30 years. Though there is DNA evidence that could be tested and possibly exonerate Pervis, District Attorney Amy Weirich has stated that the evidence will not be tested, and continues to oppose the testing.
The injustice captured in these stories represent only a fraction of the deeply embedded corruption plaguing the American system and the victims who suffer because of it. We have a role to play in that system, and so we wanted to find a way to voice our desire for change in the most impactful way possible.
We started small, sending emails to the government officials and district attorneys involved in the cases. We soon realized, though, that it was going to be all too easy for our emails to be filtered and sent directly to spam, silencing our voices and our calls to action. That’s when we decided to take a stronger approach, one that public officials couldn’t silence so easily.
Over the course of three days, we wrote over 150 letters to the public officials that we had been emailing to demand justice. With every letter added to the stack, our goal became more clear: to be as disruptive, inconvenient, and annoying as possible in the fight for justice. We wanted to overflow the mailboxes every day and ensure that our demands could not be ignored.
We soon realized that we had found an accessible way to fight for racial justice for those who were unable to donate or protest, and thus the Write Thing Project was born. We began to create and digitize the card designs we had been mailing and made them available to purchase through our Instagram, Twitter, and Redbubble pages. Anyone can contact us through our social media pages and place an order to have us send a card for them, or they can purchase a card on our Redbubble shop to send. All of our proceeds go directly to supporting the Black Lives Matter movement, and the fight for racial justice.
Every additional letter that we send helps us magnify our voice and be an even more inconvenient presence to the officials who have the power to serve justice for the many victims we are fighting for. More information on purchasing and other ways to get involved is available on our social media pages.
