Darrin Williams was already out sick for a few days — not Coronavirus-related — when Minneapolis police officers killed George Floyd.
“I overdosed on news around George Floyd,” says Williams. “That was not helping at all for me.”
Williams, who is Black, has a 21-year-old son and a 20-year-old daughter. “Every Black parent has to have that conversation about the police with their kids,” he says.
He is also the CEO of Southern Bancorp, a bank with $1.5 billion in assets, serving small cities and rural areas of Arkansas and the Mississippi Delta region.
“I knew we needed to make an internal statement to our team,” says Williams. “But with my roller coaster of emotions from fear, frustration, anger, even optimism because of the demonstrations, I could not draft an appropriate statement.”
Williams went through revision after revision. The statement he finally sent out to his team, on June 17, was version 13.
Continue reading here at City Lab, courtesy of Oscar Perry Abello.