At Rayshard Brooks' Funeral, Mourning A Life That Mattered

ATLANTA, GA — On Tuesday, for the first time since March, the church where Martin Luther King Jr. once preached opened its sanctuary to an in-person congregation; the group gathered to mourn Rayshard Brooks, the 27-year-old Black man whose death has sparked protests and criminal charges against two white Atlanta police officers.

Wearing masks and clad in white, the mourners filled the pews of the Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta. It was there, in February 1968, that Martin Luther King Jr. stood at the pulpit and delivered a chillingly prophetic sermon, conjuring the scene of his own funeral and imagining the mourners there speaking of him as a "drum major” for justice and peace.

More than 50 years after the civil right leader's assassination, his youngest daughter, Bernice King, took the pulpit to eulogize Brooks, a man she’d never met in person, but whose death, she explained to the congregation, “feels like an all too familiar moment.”

King began her eulogy with an acknowledgment: “We really should not be here today.”

“A single garment of destiny”

On the night of June 12, a complaint about a man sleeping in a vehicle in a Wendy’s drive-through summoned Atlanta officers Garrett Rolfe and Devin Brosnan to the restaurant, where they found Brooks drunk and passed out in his car. Over the next 41 minutes, their interactions were captured on body cams and surveillance cameras — including the moment when Brooks muscled his way out of Brosnan’s attempt to handcuff him, grabbed the officer’s Taser and ran away.

“There are so many ways that Friday, June 12, could have ended,” King continued, “and a police killing did not have to be one of them.”

But that’s exactly what happened. As Brooks ran, he turned and fired the Taser in the direction of the officers. Behind him, Rolfe shot at the fleeing man three times, striking him twice in the back.

The death unleashed demonstrations in Atlanta. Already, protesters had taken to the streets in outcry over the death of George Floyd in Minneapolis. One day after Brooks' death, protesters shut down an interstate; later that night, the Wendy’s where Brooks had spent his final moments went up in flames.

Brooks' death, along with that of Floyd's and others, has become part of a nationwide movement, and example, King said, of one of her father's ideals:

“My father so often reminded us that we are tied in an inescapable network of mutuality,” King told the gathered crowd. Invoking the symbolism her father had jotted down in a Birmingham jail, she spoke of a "single garment of destiny" that asserts that each person, in some way, is connected to the actions of others.

"What affects one," she pointed out, "affects all indirectly."

"Rayshard Brooks' life matters," King continued. "He should have been able to live to enjoy his family and watch his kids grow up into adulthood, and the officers should have gone home that night without blood on their hands. This is the great tragedy in our nation that must cease."

The funeral itself was a product of connections. After Brooks' death, a network of supporters moved to action: Media mogul Tyler Perry volunteered to pay for the funeral, and several sources, including Perry and Clark Atlanta University, have offered to fund college tuition for Brooks’ children.

The effect of Brooks' death was apparent outside the church, where organizers had set up a projection screen for members of the public; like King, they may not have met Brooks in life, but, from their places on the garment of destiny, they had felt something, and had been moved.

“He looked out for everyone”

In eulogies from friends and relatives, Brooks’ existence before June 12 was described as one finally settling into something resembling stability. He had spent years trying to move on from a 2014 conviction on domestic violence-related charges, and while on probation he had found a job with a construction company in Toledo, Ohio. Ambrea Mikolajczyk, who runs the company, hired him in the spring of 2019.

In her eulogy on Tuesday, Mikolajczyk said Brooks was known for wearing steel-toed cowboy boots to work and cracking up his coworkers with dance moves to “Old Town Road.” Brooks was “always the first to arrive," she said, despite the fact that he rode a bike to the job site every day.

“There was an instance,” she said, “where one of our guy’s car broke down and didn't have a ride." As the employee trudged home by foot, Brooks had pedaled by on his bike.

"When Ray seen Josh walking home he got off his bike, he pushed it and walked right alongside Josh so he wasn't alone for a full two hours," she said. "That was the type of man Ray was. He looked out for everyone.”

Mikolajczyk said she could tell how hard Brooks was trying to right his life. He had served a year in prison, but was later sent back for another 12 months after violating the conditions of his probation. He had overcome his circumstances, and yet, she said, “Well after he paid his debt, the system kept drawing him in, grabbing hold of him like quicksand.”

It was that dragging force, that system, which arrived at Brooks’ car window on Friday night, suggested the service’s final eulogizer, Rev. Raphael G. Warnock, the senior pastor at Ebenezer Baptist Church.

Warnock posed a question he'd heard asked about Brooks' case: Why did he run from the police?

“Life is complicated," Warnock said, answering the question. "People find themselves in desperate circumstances, and sometimes you have to sit where other folks sit in order to feel what they feel, and know what they know.”

No one but Brooks knew what was in his head before he ran — but Warnock in his eulogy noted the existence of a video interview with Brooks filmed just four months before his death, which revealed more about the person whose death had turned his name into a hashtag. The interview revealed a young man trying his best to rebuild his life.

“He had been digging his way back," Warnock said, "And he knew that night that he could lose his liberty. I’m not excusing it, I’m explaining it. He was afraid of losing it all over again.”

The interview, which came to light after Brooks' death, had originally been conducted by a company that supplies monitoring technology for court supervised release systems. The footage showed Brooks as he ticked through the challenges facing him in that moment; he described the feeling of returning to a world where employers casually reject job applications with criminal records. He complained that the system that imprisoned him — and could again — had cut away his resources, and now expected him to rebuild his life on its terms.

He was in debt, he said, and desperate to make a living while reconnecting with his family after years of struggle. He could feel the pressure weighing on his shoulders.

“I just feel like some of the system could look at us as individuals, we do have lives, it's just a mistake that we made,” Brooks told the interviewer. "And not just do us as if we are animals.”

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