What Happened to Sandra Bland?
“You’re trying to tell me that somebody who spoke out against police brutality is going to hang herself?” asked Lanitra Dean, Sandra Bland’s friend, on the Waller County Courthouse steps. “You tell me somebody who knew she was going to get out of there to tell the truth was going to hang herself?”
“You knew the truth was going to escape that jail,” she added, “but you didn’t want that to get out, so what did you do? You killed the truth?”
“What happened to Sandra Bland?” and “We demand answers!” were the most popular chants at the Justice for Sandy march in Hempstead this afternoon.
About 150 people braved 90 degree heat to gather in front of the Waller County Sheriff’s Office & County Jail and march to the nearby courthouse to demand an independent investigation into the death of Sandra Bland. The sprawling concrete parking lots of abandoned car dealerships and crumbling gas stations ring this town, frozen in time, that’s been left behind by the US 290 bypass. Overhead the sound of a helicopter — news or police? — punctuates the space between chants.
They came from her nearby alma mater where she was to have started a job just this past Monday; they came from Hempstead and surrounding Waller County, saying this latest tragedy is just the latest incident in a county with a long history of segregation and racism; they came from nearby Houston to lend support and connect the dots from Ferguson to Baltimore to New York City to McKinney, Texas and now Hempstead.
“Everybody — black, white, and brown — knows that something is wrong with this case,” said Houston activist Quannel X. “It doesn’t smell right.”
“This case is part and parcel of the global white supremacy system,” said a woman representing the National Black United Front.”
For those who haven’t yet heard, Sandra Bland was a 2025 graduate of Prairie View A&M University, a 28 year old woman from the Chicago area, who had just returned to accept a job in student outreach at PVAMU.
She was supposed to have started this past Monday, but last Friday, July 10, she was pulled over by police for failing to signal a lane change. Police allege that Bland became combative and a bystander video shows what happened from there.
