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Part of a Justice for Jacob event, organized by the family of Jacob Blake, in September 2020. (Photo by Milwaukee Teachers' Education Association (MTEA) / CC BY-NC 2.0)
Kenosha, Wisconsin, is a mid-size city on the southwest shore of Lake Michigan, halfway between Chicago and Milwaukee. Previously little known outside of the Midwest, Kenosha burst into the national consciousness in August 2020, when Jacob Blake, a 29-year-old Black man, was shot in the back seven times by a police officer. Yet Kenosha was a tinderbox ready to blow. Many small municipalities are just like it. Last August, Blake’s shooting, coming several weeks after the killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis, also at the hands of the police, sparked days of protests and unrest. It was a cycle that had already occurred in the streets of many cities, as the Black Lives Matter movement mobilized public protest of several high-profile killings of unarmed Black Americans by police officers in 2020. The Kenosha protests took a dramatic turn on the third night of protests when a 17-year-old white vigilante crossed the state line from Illinois and murdered two protestors and wounded another.

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