Heritier Lumumba Reclaimed His Name and Found Strength in African History
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Heritier Lumumba reclaimed his name and found strength in African history. Will it change Collingwood and the AFL? By Russell Jackson 5 Dccember 2020 Former Collingwood star Heritier Lumumba now lives in South Los Angeles, where he's surrounded by black culture and thought.(Supplied: Renae Wootson/Milan Wiley) On May 31, 2020, a sea of people filled the streets of the Fairfax District in Los Angeles. Five police helicopters circled above their heads. Two LAPD squad cars were set alight and burned. Days earlier, the world had watched George Floyd take his last breaths. Now emotions reached boiling point — anger expressed in a cacophony of dissent. Riot police arrived with rubber bullets, batons and tear gas. Played through car windows and chanted by the crowd was the anthem of the uprising, YG and Nipsey Hussle's 'FDT': "F*** Donald Trump!" Two hundred metres away, a 33-year-old man and his wife anxiously peered out their window, their one-year-old son playing with a toy truck. In the days that followed, they 2 would join the crowds on the streets of LA, demanding an end to the dehumanisation of black lives. In another time, the man achieved fame as a sporting champion in a foreign land — an All-Australian footballer, a premiership hero of the Collingwood Football Club. Now he marched upright, a bandana shielding his face from the pandemic sweeping the planet, a Congolese flag draped over his shoulders. "I read the words 'BLACK LIVES MATTER', surrounding me at every angle imaginable, and my mind turned to my family in the Democratic Republic of Congo," Heritier Lumumba says.
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