Washington, Jun 17 (AP) They are nurses and doctors, artists, students, construction workers, government employees; black, brown and white; young and old.

Hundreds of thousands of demonstrators have taken to the streets in big cities and tiny towns in every US state - and even around the world - to protest the killing of George Floyd, who died after a police officer pressed his knee into his neck as he pleaded for air.

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They say they are protesting police brutality, but also the systematic racism non-white Americans have experienced since the country's birth. Many say they marched so that one day, when their children asked what they did at this historic moment, they will be able to say they stood up for justice despite all risks.

Most say they do not support the violence, fires and burglaries that consumed some of the demonstrations, but some understand it: these are desperate acts by desperate people who have been screaming for change for generations into a world unwilling to hear them.

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Yet suddenly, for a moment at least, everyone seems to be paying attention.

A Washington Post-Schar School poll shows roughly three-quarters of Americans support the protests, and a wide majority, 69%, say they see the killing of Floyd as a sign of broader problems in policing. That is up dramatically from a poll six years ago, that showed just 43% found the killings of unarmed black men as signs of larger problems.

Some demonstrators describe losing friends and family to police bullets, and what it feels like to fear the very people sworn to protect you. Their white counterparts say they could no longer let their black neighbors carry this burden alone.

Some describe institutional racism as a pandemic as cruel and deadly as the coronavirus. One white nurse from Oregon who traveled to New York City to work in a COVID unit saw up close how minorities are dying disproportionately from the disease because of underlying health conditions wrought by generational poverty and lack of health care. So after four days working in the ICU, she spent her day off with protesters in the streets of Brooklyn.

The stories of these protesters, several of them told here, are thundering across the country, forcing a reckoning with racism.ccuse her of being a traitor and of unfairly painting Chinese in a negative light.

“I've also just gotten very sweet (messages) from people saying, 'My grandmother read this, my Chinese-can't-speak-English grandmother read this, and she was really touched by it and now she's supporting Black Lives Matter,'” she says. (AP)

(The above story is verified and authored by Press Trust of India (PTI) staff. PTI, India’s premier news agency, employs more than 400 journalists and 500 stringers to cover almost every district and small town in India.. The views appearing in the above post do not reflect the opinions of LatestLY)