THE GOOD TROUBLEMAKERS
ALM 92, August 2026
SHORT STORIES
Leading the multiracial mix of protesters was a 22-year-old Black woman named Natasha Destiny Lee. She was shouting through a bullhorn that the authorities had two days from now to change the name of the Virginia highway that honored Confederate General Robert E. Lee.
The irony didn’t escape Natasha that she shared the slaveowner’s last name. Nobody disputed that Natasha carried herself well, and resembled in beautiful looks a younger version of the pop singer Beyoncé.
As far as she knew and hoped it wasn’t true, she and the Confederate General weren’t related. She did proudly maintain she was a descendent of William Lee, one of President George Washington’s slaves who had been forcibly brought in chains on a slave ship to America from West Africa.
“Two more days and that’s it,” announced Natasha. “Enough is enough. No more stalling.”
The group knew they were causing trouble. But in the words of the iconic civil rights leader, John Lewis, it was “good trouble, necessary trouble.” By this, he meant that changing for the better unjust parts of American society would require acts of non-violent disruption and confrontation.
About 50 college and high school student protestors, who called themselves SOS (Students of Society), stood in the middle of the road. They were chanting slogans and blocking traffic with enraged motorists honking horns and shouting curses at the demonstrators. SOS signified that the United States was in terrible distress regarding racism, discrimination, and racial inequality.
The SOS protesters held up signs for the TV cameras saying the Lee name represented a vestige of Black enslavement and had to be changed now. If the authorities wouldn’t do it, they would take matters into their own hands. Whatever that threat meant.
The police advanced with the protesters practicing Satyagraha. This was the philosophy of nonviolent resistance most famously employed by Mahatma Gandhi when he protested British rule of India.
Natasha raised her right arm in a protest salute and said, “I know you’re trying to divide us. No chance of that. We stay united.”
Watching Natasha on the sidelines with a combination of unadulterated awe, hero worship, and trepidation for her safety, was Rafe, her White boyfriend who she lived with after both had just graduated from the University of Virginia in Charlottesville, Virginia.
Natasha had a B.A. degree in pre-law. Meanwhile, Rafe had majored basically in sports, being a gifted athlete in basketball and especially track and field which seemed fitting since his parents had named him for the famous decathlon Olympic gold medal winner Rafer Johnson.
“We give you to the count of three and then you’ll be arrested,” warned the police officer.
No dice.
The officer said he had no choice but to load Natasha into the paddy wagon with her fellow protest revolutionaries. The wagon headed down the highway for the County adult detention center.
It was the fifth time Natasha had been arrested for leading protests. Natasha and her SOS allies aimed to rename the highway for the civil rights activist and icon of the 19th century, Frederick Douglass.
Rafe, Natasha, and Ben, the Black friend from her class in constitutional law, shared an upstairs apartment in a rowhouse near U-VA. The monthly rent was cheap since they could split it three ways, $95 apiece. Natasha was paying half of Rafe’s share for now until he could find a job and reimburse her. The place was cramped. Not to mention old and shabby. But since they were all young recent college graduates with little money it would have to do.
Ben was heading for law school at U-VA in the Fall aiming to become a corporate attorney. People found it remarkable that Ben and Natasha found common cause, since they had completely different approaches on how to achieve racial equality.
Ben, with his thick reading spectacles and receding hairline making him look older than 22, was an intense, upright, and serious guy. He spoke in a refined British-sounding accent, relating to how he was an honor exchange student from the Caribbean nation of Trinidad & Tobago. Perhaps his accent stemmed from the fact the country had been a British colony until 1962 and the British influence was still felt in some parts of Trinidad & Tobago.
With Ben pleading on their behalf, Natasha and her group received a lesser charge of unlawful assembly.
Natasha always teased the perpetually well-dressed Ben with his well-trimmed Afro and little bow tie that he was a dork, the epitome of going along to get along. But she admired Ben’s work ethic and determination to make something of himself after being raised in childhood poverty by a single mother in Port of Spain, the capital of Trinidad & Tobago.
That night, the three of them sat outside a local bar and grill in Charlottesville to strategize with Natasha’s compatriots in the protest movement on where to stage their next demonstration.
Ben, always the cautious and practical one, said perhaps they should cool it for a time. Constantly protesting on Virginia streets and highways, he explained, might start turning people off.
Natasha’s next target was to disrupt traffic at the Woodrow Wilson Bridge outside D.C. SOS would protest against how the bridge was named for the segregationist former President Woodrow Wilson. Rafe contended that was stretching it way too far. For one thing, massing on a superhighway with idiots driving 85 miles an hour across the bridge could get them all killed.
“You guys are such wimps,” Natasha scolded them. “We’re doing the Wilson Bridge. Comes down to just a matter of how and when’s the best time.”
Ben said he couldn’t be positive he could get them out of jail if they were arrested. He warned that the protesters could be charged with impeding interstate commerce as the Wilson Bridge connected the states of Virginia and Maryland. It would be a federal crime that could result in a prison sentence of up to 20 years.
Natasha’s parents back in Mississippi were from the college educated, law-abiding Black middle-class who were proud of their daughter for following through on her principles. But they worried she was getting in way too deep. Who knows where it would all end? In their own lives, they had experienced first-hand the hatred and contempt racists and “White power” supremacists felt for “uppity” Black people going about living their life. Even if it was for the simple act of playing golf on a municipal course, which is what both parents enjoyed doing on weekends and vacations.
Ben puffed on his pipe, then removed it. He repeated his warning that Natasha had to stay focused on changing the highway that honored Robert E. Lee before moving on to other targets.
Natasha said that Rafe needed to go find a job. Natasha and him were getting awfully low on money to pay next month’s rent. She wouldn’t ask her parents again for a loan, and neither should Rafe ask his parents. Otherwise, they would look like spoiled brats unable to care for themselves.
Rafe sighed. It was not the first time Natasha had gotten on his case for staying home all day and avoiding looking for a job. He promised tomorrow he would start sending out his resume. But with a B.A. Degree in history, what other job was there other than teaching at a high school or to elementary school kids? That was something which definitely uninterested him. The only other realistic possibility was doing something in sports. Or he could go to graduate school at U-VA with financial support from his parents and maybe tuition aid from the federal government.
Anything to put off searching for a job.
After a few beers, the three of them headed back to the row house. Natasha had to rise early tomorrow morning for her part-time job working three days a week in a sporting goods store. The pay was miserable, with non-existent fringe benefits. But it kept her self-sufficient, barely, so she wouldn’t always have to rely on her parents to survive.
That next morning after Natasha left for work, Ben, already dressed in his business suit and tie which his friends joked he probably even wore in the shower, headed to the kitchen table. He started writing on yellow legal sized sheets an argument that the Nation’s Capital needed a new name.
Ben was doing this as a favor to Natasha even if he had no doubt that this idea wouldn’t work. In fact, it could be counterproductive. Nevertheless, he would submit the brief to a select number of law firms in Charlottesville hoping they would take up the case. Maybe the firm that believed seriously in corporate social responsibility would hire him as a part-time legal assistant working pro-bono for the underclass while he pursued earning a law degree. If nobody wanted his brief, as he fully expected and maybe even desired, he’d dumb down the language. He'd get rid of the legalese and submit it as an op-ed column to newspapers.
Ben wrote that it was a tragedy that Washington, D.C., was named for the first president. Washington was a slave owner, he said factually, who had used the sweat and muscle of slave laborers and carpenters to build and maintain his Virginia estate at Mt. Vernon, not to mention the White House and the U.S. Capitol building.
Even more vicious, Ben continued, George Washington had used bounty hunters and slave catchers to try to track down (unsuccessfully) one of his wife’s runaway slaves named Ona Judge who had escaped for her freedom. Ben, citing an article he had read in the newspaper, noted that one of the reasons the Nation’s Capital was moved from Philadelphia to Washington was that it was closer to Virginia, where slavery was practiced and protected under law. Surely that dastardly history was just one of the many sundry reasons the Nation’s Capital shouldn't be named in honor of George Washington.
What to rename D.C., Natasha had said, would be a matter of discussion among her Black and White brothers and sisters. Personally, Natasha favored calling it Crispus Attucks. He was an African American killed by a British soldier in the Boston Massacre of 1770 and was considered the first American killed in the Revolutionary War.
Natasha knew about Crispus Attucks as it was the name of the all-Black high school where Hall of Fame basketball superstar Oscar Robertson had played in Indianapolis, Indiana. She was also familiar with the ongoing grassroots movement in Boston to have the city’s famed Faneuil Hall, named for a wealthy 18th-century slave owner, be renamed for Crispus Attucks.
Ben realized that it was highly unlikely that a majority of Washingtonians would vote in favor of their city being called Crispus Attucks, since many people had never heard of him, forgetting that it also meant radical change. No doubt the move to make Washington, D.C. a new state might take forever. That meant George Washington’s name would stay affixed to the Nation’s Capital.
Ben also had heard about another idea, unlikely to happen, but that sounded like a plausible solution to settle the argument. Why not just abolish having highways, statues, and monuments named for noted individuals in history and give them all generic titles that didn’t offend anybody? Ben smiled at the thought. That would probably end Natasha’s cause for renaming everything. Knowing Natasha’s rebellious spirit against the injustices in the world, she’d find something else to protest against.
While Ben toiled in the kitchen, Rafe sat before a laptop in the bedroom rethinking a resume that showed no real work experience other than serving as a lifeguard in Virginia Beach, Virginia, during summer vacations from college. Putting that aside, he played college basketball and was a star track and field athlete who had finished high up in both the D.C. and New York City marathons. But that probably wouldn’t get any potential employers to hire him, unless they ran marathons too. Maybe Ben had ideas about what should go in his resume.
“Sorry to interrupt,” Rafe said, “got a minute?”
Ben put down his pen, removed his glasses, and smiled. “For you, boss, anything.”
Rafe made it quick. What could he say about himself that didn’t sound dumb? His resume was a joke.
Ben said forget the resume. The first thing Rafe needed to do was decide what he wanted to do--something in sports sounded right. If so, maybe Natasha could help him get a job where she worked in the sporting goods store.
Rafe shrugged. That sounded like a last resort. He didn’t want to depend on Natasha. That would make him further feel like a bum. He needed a worthwhile job that would make her admire him. Like Natasha, he could lead a protest movement against something.
Ben laughed at the idea. “What you going to protest, hoss?” said Ben, using the Trinidadian slang word for friend.
Rafe knew it sounded ridiculous coming from him, a semi-privileged White boy. “Forget what I said. You got any other ideas?”
Ben put his glasses back on. “Why don’t you go back to school? Take up pre-med and become a doctor or whatever.”
“I thought of that. Except I cringe at the sight of blood.”
“How about music? You like listening to all those tapes you got. You could work in a record store.”
Rafe shrugged again. “Or I could teach.”
“Why don’t you, bro,” Ben said, getting impatient. He had work to do.
“I’ll think of something,” Rafe said, not really believing that himself.
Later that afternoon, the three of them went across town to join the ongoing protest rally against police brutality being held near the U-VA campus. Rafe said he wanted to become one of the demonstrators. Forget about worrying that getting arrested would hurt his job prospects in that momentarily he didn’t have any.
Natasha said she was disappointed in him. He had promised last night to start looking for a job. If he didn’t want to work in her sports store for the time being, as if they would even hire him, she had nothing else to say. She sounded disgusted to the point she might break up with him. He felt angry at her for expecting so much out of him so soon. But even worse was his feeling she was disrespecting him.
“Tomorrow, for sure, I promise, I’ll look for a job,” Rafe said.
Natasha rolled her eyes.
“You’ll see,” Rafe said. Natasha’s belittling him served as motivation to finally get off his posterior and find meaningful work.
That next day Natasha and her protest movement were back to protesting the name of Lee Jackson Memorial Highway in Virginia’s Fauquier County.
More dangerous this time, a mob of counter-protesters had gathered on the highway’s west side held back by a police line rope. They were screaming epithets at Natasha who could be seen as the protest leader by the fact she was shouting into a bullhorn that the deadline for changing the name was coming soon and “we won’t take no for an answer.”
The protesters were chanting “No Justice, No Peace.”
Meanwhile, the counter-protesters screamed “USA, USA, go back to where you came from,” and other more choicy epithets. People in the protest movement, they yelled, were traitors and deserved to be infected with some fatal illness.
Suddenly, a burly White man in camouflage fatigues, his pistol drawn, broke through the police line and charged at Natasha, whose back was turned on him as she exhorted her supporters to not let the counter-protesters and police intimate them.
“Turn around, you witch,” he yelled. The police, apparently preoccupied with dragging the protesters away, did nothing to stop him from closing in on Natasha.
Momentarily, she looked confused. Then as she turned around, the White man unleashed spittle in her face and pointed the gun right at her head.
From their vantage point by the highway, Rafe and Ben didn’t hesitate. They jumped on the man’s backside which allowed Ben, disregarding his own safety, to wrestle the gun from the man’s hand while Rafe put him in a chokehold.
The man offered a muffled moan, “I can’t breathe.” How ironic. The same last words uttered by George Floyd before he died from a Minneapolis police officer kneeling on his neck for almost 10 minutes.
A cop saw what was happening and ordered Rafe to release him or he’d be shackled in handcuffs and arrested for disobeying police orders.
“What about him?” Rafe said, pointing at the assaulter.
“He’s in our custody, don’t worry about it,” the cop said. Two other cops led the man, still yelling profanities, to a patrol car.
“You okay, Natasha?” Ben asked.
Natasha was clearly stunned by what had just happened. She had to sit down for a minute to compose herself.
Little did they know that a bystander had videotaped the whole incident and within minutes it was all over social media.
The protest petered out.
By then, a local television crew had arrived to interview both the police for their version of the events, and also Natasha, Ben, and Rafe.
Ben’s right hand was bleeding from a sizable cut he suffered while wrestling the gun away from the racist man.
One of the police officers, an EMT volunteer in his spare time, carried medical supplies in his cruiser. He used sterile gauze to clean Ben’s wound and then wrapped it in an ace bandage. The officer suggested Ben see a doctor in case the wound needed stitches. Ben wore the bandage as a badge of honor for his role in fighting injustice.
You had to hope that Natasha, a victim of the counter-protester’s deliberate spitting on her, did not develop Covid 19 or something similarly horrible. The same held true for Rafe and Ben from being in too close contact.
Suddenly, all three of them had their 15 minutes of fame. Natasha was interviewed on one of the early morning talk shows, and then became a guest panelist on the TV show “The View”
filling in for one of the regulars who had gone on maternity leave. Within a few days, with her face now a recognized commodity, she was offered a temporary non-tenured job to teach Black Studies at a historically Black college in Mississippi, her home state. If the funding became available, it could become a permanent gig.
Despite that fortuitous turn of events, Natasha vowed to never give up protesting for equal justice in America, never would give up the cause, even if it meant risking her life, to change such names of oppression as Lee Jackson Highway.
Natasha’s efforts turned out to not be totally in vain. In a true fact, Virginia’s Arlington County Board voted to rename Lee Highway as Langston Boulevard, in honor of John Langston who was the first person of color to be elected to Congress from Virginia.
Meanwhile, Rafe and Ben together had profiles of them published in the local newspaper. That led to Ben being called by one of the Charlottesville law firms who had received his CV to hire him to work on some of their pro bono cases while he pursued a law degree at U-VA. His ultimate goal was to return home to Trinidad & Tobago after receiving his degree to work as a legal advisor in the underserved sections of Port of Spain.
Then there was Rafe. A university in the Virginia suburbs of D.C. had shown great interest in his resume, that with Ben’s help didn’t exaggerate too much. Rafe was taken on as a paid graduate assistant for that school’s track team, which would help finance his tuition in pursuing a Masters Degree in sports management.
Luckily, for the whole trio, they all tested negative for the coronavirus. The man who assaulted Natasha was fined $5,000 and sentenced to 45 days in jail.
These three young people in the Commonwealth of Virginia ended their story here, as they headed for separate paths. Who knows what state of affairs would ever bring them back together again?
Eric Green is a former newspaper reporter, press aide to a U.S. Senator on Capitol Hill in Washington, D.C., and ESL teacher. His news stories, essays, and short stories have been published widely, including in the Washington Post and Baltimore Sun. One of his latest short stories, "The Comic Who Stopped Joking Around," was published by the HudsonValley Writers Guild.
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