Their casual friendship shifted in early June of 2020, when Salau called Laurent to confide about the ongoing sexual violence she had been suffering at the hands of her then roommate, a Black man. “I had just met her, but she spoke all the way down to her heart.” “That was my first time calling her my friend,” Laurent says. As of this summer, the department remains under investigation.īut at the rally in 2020, Toyin spoke passionately about the erasure of violence against trans men and was met with cheers and teary eyes from the crowd. McDade’s death and the murder of Malik Jackson were part of a larger legacy of anti-Black policing practices that have since led the Tallahassee Police Department being put under federal long-term investigation for their own history of LGBTQ neglect. McDade and Salau lived within earshot of each other, and Salau had heard the gunshots the fatal night that Tallahassee police killed McDade. Living in a time when the cultural fight for abolition and community care networks remains infantile, all while gender-based violence surges, means that systems of harm fold into each other, with Black girls always falling through the cracks.
It finds you at your most vulnerable, it makes a bed of your worries, and it feeds them back to you. Patriarchal violence is insidious in that way. There are no easy answers, no one thing would have kept her alive. Salau, like many survivors of sexual violence, was ultimately left dependent on a system that did not guarantee justice or safety. The solutions that a system gave her still put her back in harm's way. The complicated details of Salau’s last days show a young woman who had to make use of a criminal justice system she knew could not serve her needs. Despite this support, they could not intervene in her kidnapping. When the abuse she suffered was at its peak, though, she was met with welcoming local community care networks. Salau lived a life much darker than originally reported. Oluwatoyin Ruth Salau's agency was taken from her before it was ever hers to begin with. Moved by her story, most did not know that she was recently estranged from her close-knit Orthodox Christian Nigerian family and had been living near FAMU in Tallahassee, when she began her short but impactful time as a local activist. It’s a now-infamous clip of Salau that lives on YouTube. … Y’all need to know who the fucking enemy is,” she proclaimed, as dozens of protestors recorded her speech.
#Black gay men fucking each other skin
“Can’t nobody silence me … at the end of the day, I cannot take this fucking skin off. She was sometimes nervous to speak up, but when she did, she spoke powerfully. Salau was 19 years old but already finding her voice as an organizer against police violence. Laurent remembers hearing Salau speak at a protest for Tony McDade, a Black trans man killed by Tallahassee Police Department shortly after Floyd’s murder. Aaron Glee Jr., who had a history of violence against women, later confessed to kidnapping and murdering both women. Attempts to speak to the Salau family and the Redeemed Christian Church of God, where Salau was a member all of her life along with her family, have been made, but they remain uninterested in speaking to the public, and attempts to contact Salau's relatives overseas have been met with tension.Ī week later, on June 13, Salau's body was found along with that of Victoria Sims, a local community elder and AARP volunteer. That same day, she was reported missing by her mother. Then, on June 6, 2020, Salau tweeted about being sexually assaulted in March of 2020. Laurent and Salau were both part of the crowds of those seeking justice, but they didn’t meet until May 29, 2020, and they quickly became good acquaintances, checking in on each other at rallies and passing out water to other activists in the dead of the Florida heat. This was the late spring of 2020 when, after the police murder of George Floyd on May 25, protests broke out nationwide in support of the Black Lives Matter movement and against police brutality. Laurent had seen Salau at protests against police brutality around Tallahassee.
But across town, other Black girls, the ones who had clothed her, housed her, and deep conditioned her hair just a few days before, were looking for her, desperately wanting to remind Toyin that she was somebody worth saving.Īshley Laurent, then a Florida A&M sophomore, knew Oluwatoyin Salau’s face before she knew her name. Her life in its darkest pockets had told her that she was not worth finding.
She was facing the end of her life, but she had met this kind of death before. From June 9, 2020, until her death four days later, Oluwatoyin Salau was most likely alone and terrified.