A pregnant protester was hit by a car while crossing Lincoln Highway during a march Saturday, but the protesters returned Sunday to continue their efforts to fight racism.

The man who was responsible for hitting the woman was charged with one count of reckless driving and was cited for failing to yield to a pedestrian in a crosswalk, said DeKalb Police Cmdr. John Petragallo. The protesters were crossing the street during a march to show black lives matter.

The man “honked a couple of times while the protesters were still in the intersection. He moved up slightly and hit a pedestrian that was in the crosswalk,” Petragallo said. He said the incident wasn’t a hate crime and the motivation behind it was impatience and frustration.

Petragallo said the victim was transported to Kishwaukee Hospital and treated for minor injuries and has now been released from the hospital. With the exception of that one incident, the protest was peaceful, Petragallo said.

Protest

Eighty-five black students took to Lincoln Highway to protest the deaths of Michael Brown and Eric Garner Saturday. The protest started on started Friday in front of the DeKalb Police Department, 700 W. Lincoln Highway, and it continued throughout the weekend.

Students stood in front of the police department holding signs that said “I can’t breathe” and “Hands up, don’t shoot.” Garner said “I can’t breathe” when he was in a chokehold. “Hands up, don’t move” is a movement that began after Brown’s death.

The students also shouted “Black lives matter” and “No justice no peace” during the march.

Racism

Antonio Ticer, graduate adult and higher education student, was in charge of organizing the march and protest.

“I started this march on Friday simply because I had a student that was ignorant to the racism and the injustice that is going on in this country today and I feel like it needed to be implemented through our students since we are the mass body of the black students at the university,” Ticer said.

Ticer said the protesters faced racial remarks from people walking and driving by during Saturday’s protest.

“We heard a couple of racial slurs, people beating on their car windows, [people sticking up their] middle fingers toward us. We were called the N word multiple times,” Ticer said.

Kandace Miggins, senior music education major, said her role was organizing the Pan-African flag ceremony Saturday. Miggins said she was present when the racial tensions rose to a heated point Saturday during the march.

“Basically while we were marching people yelled out racial slurs, said negative things about the protest as they were driving by. We had two car incidents where the fist car pulled up to us and stopped and proceeded to yell out racial slurs …,” Miggins said.

Later that day a car pulled up while protesters were in the street when it was a red light. The man stopped his car, but he then drove into the protesters, hitting about four of them, Miggins said. One of the protesters who was hit is pregnant, Miggins said.

Miggins said DeKalb needed the march to happen because “it is a town that has a lot of people who feel negatively toward people who aren’t of European descent and that needs to change.”

Going forward

Ticer said the next step for the protesters is to march around Greek Row and other neighborhoods around campus.

“… What we have found out in the past couple days was that there are a lot of racist people in DeKalb and they took off their masks and are showing their true colors in the past couple days,” Ticer said.