In a harrowing video shared to Instagram, Porsha Williams shows how she and her fiancé Dennis McKinley were tear-gassed at a peaceful protest in Atlanta Tuesday.
The video shows The Real Housewives of Atlanta star standing with protestors “at the capitol,” with a protective mask on before what appears to be gunshots rang out around her. Williams then runs and screams before she yells out, “It’s gas!” In the chilling video, another protestor pulls her aside to relief her of her symptoms with milk, instructing her not to wipe her face and to “tilt her head back.”
“I’m good. I’m good,” she eventually says in the more than eight-minute video. “Do y’all see this? We’re in Atlanta. It’s 7:45. The curfew isn’t until 9 o’clock. We’re out here peacefully protesting and they tear-gassed us for no reason at all.”
“I’m going live. Everybody will know what is going on…what is happening to us right now,” she continues.
In a later post on Instagram, Williams expressed her outrage on how the protestors were treated in her own city.
“We have the right to freedom of assembly, the right to freedom of association, and the right to freedom of speech,” she wrote in a caption of a photo of her and McKinley. “Although today here in Atlanta that was taken away from us.”
“A very peaceful group of us protesters had pepper spray bombs thrown at us! In the post right before this one you can hear the music & peaceful chanting right before we were had bombed!” she continued. “What a shame to try to silence the people once again. ✊🏾💔#Bloodline ‘Enough is enough’!”
The reality star later told People magazine that after Tuesday’s protest she has even more “strength” to go back on the front lines.
“It won’t stop. Anybody who is out there now and they feel like they can’t move forward because of the mistreatment [by] the police and what they’re doing to us…I would say to them, stay focused on the cause,” she told the magazine. “We are looking to get justice for George Floyd.”
Floyd, a 45-year-old Black man, was viciously murdered by a White Minneapolis police officer named Derek Chauvin. Initially charged with third degree murder and manslaughter, since the protests the charges have been upped to second degree murder. Also, the other three officers who stood by were also arrested and charged with crimes.
Williams, whose grandfather, Rev. Hosea Williams, marched alongside Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. during the Civil Rights Movement, added that “being on the frontline” was “a very beautiful thing.”
“The energy of the people is very much one mind, one mission and one goal, and that is to stand side by side, locked in arms, locked in heart, and to use every breath we have to demand justice for George Floyd and for the other victims of police brutality,” she concluded.