SOME Carhampton residents made a socially-distanced, peaceful stand on Saturday, holding up placards along the roadside forming the sentence ‘Because We Are Human-Kind, Black Lives Matter’.

The event was co-organised by Elizabeth Atkinson andEmily Feldberg who hoped to “open a conversation”, not to speak on behalf of all residents: “There’s a whole range of views here as in any community,” said Elizabeth.

She added: “There has been a lot of anger and some dreadful violence over the past weeks. We wanted to make a quiet statement of a simple truth. What we hoped was that this would open a conversation, and that’s just what this action seems to have done.

“There were many messages of support from people in the village, and also some voices of disagreement – and that’s why it’s so important to have a conversation about difficult subjects like this, so we can all understand one another better.”

One participant,Kristina Bayntun-Norman, who grew up in the village, said: “On Saturday, I stood with my placard near the Carhampton bus stop. If you had told me 40 years ago, when I was waiting at that bus stop to go to school, that I would even have to be saying or doing this 40 years later, I would have been deeply saddened that some places and some attitudes in the world had progressed so slowly. 

“That is why I wanted to speak up in a quiet reflective voice, in what has become a volatile situation. I hope, in the future, our children won’t be living in a world where it is necessary to remind ourselves that we are ‘human-kind, all equal’.”

More photos and a full report are in tomorrow’s Free Press.