It’s a stifling Saturday in July, and Gwen Carr has just arrived at Heckscher State Park, on the south shore of Long Island, to gather with more than 100 of her family and friends. It’s a reunion, the kind that required two charter buses—the first time the extended Garner-Samuels clan has come together since the death of Eric Garner, Carr’s son, seven years earlier.
Exclamations greet her: “Hey, auntie!” “You look so good!” “I haven’t seen you in so long!” Children weave around her as she moves from circle to circle, gracious, meting out her soft laugh here and there. “Look at you!” she says, head hanging down toward one of her 15 grandbabies wrapped around her tummy. “I miss you too!” she tells another in joyous tones. Here, Gwen Carr—the sought-after powerhouse and activist—is just auntie, grandma, and mommy. “You don’t move no mountains over here!” Uncle Larry shouts, jokingly, to Carr. Larry Adams is a retired NYPD officer and the ex-husband of Carr’s late sister, Sharon, who died from cancer in 1998. “Get on line like everyone else!” He isn’t about to condone auntie’s special treatment.
But Larry’s pseudo protests go ignored. On arriving, Carr is almost instantly handed a plate piled with crab, batter-fried shrimp, and mac ’n’ cheese, bypassing the buffet line with its steaming foil platters. While going in on her spread, Carr says, “I want something sweet to drink” to no one in particular. Seconds later, she has a can of Sprite in her hand.
Carr is late to the picnic. While others arrived early to set up, including her daughter, Ellisha Garner-Samuels, she spent the morning in Harlem, where she and Reverend Al Sharpton planned a motorcade event to mark the anniversary of her son’s death. She was dropped at the park by a black SUV—an arrangement Sharpton established to bring her to and from weekly Saturday rallies at his National Action Network, the civil rights organization he runs out of New York City. She never asked. He says he does it to lessen the load of the notoriety thrust upon her. “We’ve become like family,” Sharpton says of their close relationship. “I really believe in Gwen.”
That’s where Carr’s political baptism began: with the reverend. When Garner was killed by a white NYPD police officer who used a chokehold on July 17, 2014 (a method finally deemed criminal in New York last year under the Eric Garner Anti-Chokehold Act), it was Sharpton who helped Carr navigate the web of media hits, press conferences, speaking engagements, and travel as she turned her son’s final plea into a national crusade. I can’t breathe became the anthem of Black Americans fed up with dying at the hands of police. Then came Hands up, don’t shoot when Michael Brown was killed in Ferguson, Missouri, just three weeks later by another white officer. Garner’s and Brown’s killings propelled Black Lives Matter—an organization started following the death of Trayvon Martin two years earlier—into a seismic global campaign.
Carr, fighting through grief for her son, landed center stage, publicly criticizing New York City mayor Bill de Blasio for mishandling the case, helping get the anti-chokehold legislation passed (“I fought for these bills for a long, long time,” Carr says. “And even though they are passed, there are still police officers trying to get them overturned”), influencing federal legislation like the Eric Garner Excessive Use of Force Prevention Act introduced by Representative Hakeem Jeffries and Senator Kirsten Gillibrand, appearing on national TV, and speaking at the Democratic National Convention.
“She’s become a symbol of a movement that represents this time,” Sharpton says. “People can feel her authenticity. They understand that she’s not trying to be a celebrity or power broker. She represents a cause, which gives her celebrity, it gives her some power. But that is not her goal, therefore people trust her.”
Sharpton first met Carr over the phone the day her son was killed. Cynthia Davis, who heads the Staten Island National Action Network, called Sharpton and told him what happened to Eric Garner. Sharpton told Davis to manage the situation, that he would board a red-eye and join her team as soon as he landed. But Carr asked to speak with Sharpton directly. “She moved me so,” he says. “She reminded me of my mother—she kept saying, ‘All I want is justice for my son. I want you to do this.’” Sharpton, who was in Las Vegas at a labor conference at the time, landed the following day and spent it organizing. “We ended up bringing 1,000 people out there that Saturday,” he says. “And she and I have been connected at the hip ever since.”
After the national unrest following George Floyd’s murder and the tense trial of Derek Chauvin—when Daunte Wright was killed in the same state by another white police officer in the middle of that, and Andrew Brown in North Carolina after that—Sharpton introduced Carr to Benjamin Crump, the civil rights lawyer who frequently represents Black families whose relations have been killed by police. “I felt that he ought to know her,” Sharpton says. “He’s become the face of the legal fight [for] police reform, and they clicked right away.” At Crump’s request, Carr was thrust in front of even more cameras, standing next to him at press conferences for the Brown case, attending Wright’s funeral with him, meeting with lawmakers in D.C. to discuss the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act that Senator Chuck Schumer assured would be put up for a vote in the Senate. (As of this writing, it has yet to be voted on.)
Carr was mingled in it all, her voice and presence essential as she supported the Floyds, Wrights, and Browns—something she’s done for surviving families since her son’s death when she found comfort in Valerie Bell and Kadiatou Diallo, mothers who came face-to-face with police violence before her. She’s not fond of being labeled the mother of the movement; she thinks the title is ascribed to her simply because she’s the oldest of the group (she’ll be 72 on September 23). But “I try to help other mothers,” she says. “I have gatherings sometimes where we talk. But we don’t talk about the tragic loss of our children; we talk about what it was that made us laugh, or how silly they were, or about a happy time. It makes me happy that I [can] help someone else.”
As her profile rose, Carr’s political blessing became increasingly valuable. “It’s a business deal,” she says of her approach to endorsements. “I decide on my own…I don’t let people decide for me. I listen and I read and I endorse who I think will be the best candidate for the job.” She chooses those candidates with surgical precision, with a goal of seating people in elected offices who will change an oppressive system from the inside. “We need to tear down the system and build it back up,” she says. “That’s the only way we’re going to get a just system—we gotta rethink it, reimagine it, and then rebuild it.” When she’s not feeling a candidate who’s asked for her endorsement, she tells them, “I’m not endorsing anyone right now.”
That wasn’t the case with Alvin Bragg, New York’s former chief deputy attorney general, whom Carr endorsed for Manhattan D.A. in February. Bragg, who stressed police accountability throughout his campaign, won his primary race; if he wins against his Republican opponent in November (an overwhelmingly likely outcome in deep blue New York City), he’ll be the first Black man to hold the position, joining other prominent Black leaders in the city like Attorney General Letitia James and state Senate Majority Leader Andrea Stewart-Cousins.
Bragg met Carr through Sharpton, and he has helped her navigate the legal muddle surrounding her son’s case. Over the years he has filed for case discovery on Carr’s behalf; was vocal regarding the Civilian Complaint Review Board’s investigation into and recommendation of departmental charges against Daniel Pantaleo, the former NYPD officer who put Garner in a chokehold; and serves as one of the attorneys in the ongoing judicial inquiry into New York City and de Blasio for alleged neglect and violations. (De Blasio and New York City tried to get the inquiry dismissed in July, but they were denied.)
Some of Carr’s endorsements present a more complicated picture. She tapped Ray McGuire in the crowded field of New York City’s mayoral race, despite the fact that McGuire ran as a centrist who promoted “better” policing, not fewer officers, and was sometimes seen as out of touch with average New Yorkers, one time grossly underestimating the cost of homes in Brooklyn.
McGuire—a donor to and champion of the National Action Network—met Carr at one of Sharpton’s weekly Saturday rallies. Sharpton, who introduced them, said Carr liked Eric Adams and Maya Wiley too (though he says, “Maya was on the Civilian Complaint Review Board [during Garner’s case when she was under de Blasio] and [Carr] didn’t think she had done enough.”). But she clicked with McGuire most. “I introduced him but I didn’t broker a deal, and I never endorsed Ray,” Sharpton says. “It was her choice.” (Sharpton himself didn’t endorse anyone—a first since 1989.)
“Ray wasn’t a politician and hadn’t been tainted yet,” Carr explains of her decision.
Although McGuire didn’t win—he finished seventh—Carr has no gripes with the presumptive incoming mayor. In fact, Carr and Adams are friendly. Just that morning, they’d sat side by side at the National Action Network’s weekly rally. Adams hugged her when they first saw each other and, at one point, warmly grabbed her hands. Once Adams gets through the November election—data shows it’s in the bag against Republican nominee Curtis Sliwa; registered Dem voters outweigh Republicans in NYC 6 to 1—and becomes the second Black person ever to hold that office behind the late David Dinkins, Carr plans to meet with him to discuss his policies, to understand how exactly they’re going to “affect us in the Black community.”
“You can’t be mad because your candidate didn’t win,” she says. “You got to talk to whoever is in charge and voice your concerns.”
Carr adamantly doesn’t want Adams to bring back stop and frisk, for example, a policy that led to the death of her son and that was found in 2013 to be unconstitutional due to its disproportionate targeting of Black and Latino people. In defending the program that grew under his watch, former mayor Mike Bloomberg once said in a leaked recording, “Ninety-five percent of your murders—murderers and murder victims—fit one M.O. You can just take the description, Xerox it, and pass it out to all the cops. They are male, minorities, 16 to 25.”
Adams has said he wants to institute a policy of stop, question, and frisk. “If you have a police department where you’re saying you can’t stop and question, that is not a responsible form of policing,” he said at one point. Without proper investigation and justifiable cause, Carr’s not on board. “If you got a real heads-up on, ‘There’s people over there in that apartment that got an arsenal of guns,’ sure go after them. Now you got a reason,” she says. “But don’t just see somebody walking down the street and stop and frisk them. I’m not with that. Ninety-five percent of the people they stopped weren’t the people that should have been stopped.”
There’s a peculiar geniality to Carr that’s immediate. Magnetic, even. As if she wants to empty all her tenderness on you—on all of yous. When she gets going, though (just mention police reform, de Blasio, stop and frisk), you’re met with fervency. It’s hard to picture her losing her steady temperament, but Garner-Samuels says Carr did not play that back in the day. “She was so strict,” when they were growing up, at one point juggling two jobs after losing her first husband, Elliot Garner, to a heart attack in 1976, and keeping the home in order. “Mommy had a chart we all had to follow,” Garner-Samuels remembers. “This one do the dishes this day, this one do dishes that day, this one sweep the floor, this one do the garbage.” When she got on them about something, “Mommy would always use these big words…I used to call her big college lady.” One time, she overheard Carr say degenerate. Garner-Samuels, then a fourth grader, asked what it meant, then, “Why would you call somebody that?” Carr told her, “I’m speaking the truth.”
Carr is a Brooklynite born and raised. Her parents, Joseph and Lula Mae Flagg, used to haul her and her four younger siblings—twin sisters and two brothers—to their Seventh-Day Adventist church in Staten Island every Saturday. Those were special family times, especially when her minister father briefly became the sole breadwinner, working longer hours, “fussing that we were wasting electricity or on the telephone too long,” but still making sure his family never wanted for anything. “We didn’t have any extravagance,” Carr remembers. “We had what we needed.”
While other kids were wide-eyed about becoming secretaries and doctors and teachers and lawyers, Carr went with the flow. In the late ’60s, she worked as a long-distance operator after completing high school. After graduating from New York City Technical College in 1979 with an accounting degree, she worked as a bookkeeper for community development firm Fifth Avenue Committee, then for the New York Stock Exchange and the post office, before becoming a train conductor for the New York City Transit Authority in 1993. “My father used to say, ‘You best find someplace to settle down, you gon’ need someplace to retire,’” Carr remembers. She remained a motor woman until her retirement in 2015, a year after Eric’s death.
Carr met Benjamin Carr in 1978, two years after Elliot Garner died, while he was working and she was living at the Gowanus Houses. Before that, it was just Carr and her three kids—Eric, Emery, and Garner-Samuels—living in “the bougie projects,” Garner-Samuels says of their Brooklyn apartment because it had better amenities, like a washer and dryer, and was always well-kept. Ben and Gwen married on Independence Day in 1997.
Garner-Samuels says her stepfather was the one who called to tell her Eric was dead. Like her mommy before her, she had just started at New York City Transit. She quickly left her B11 route and headed to Carr’s in Staten Island.
“I went and kept my arms around her for a long time. Just like, Mommy. I couldn’t believe it,” she remembers. “I’m like, Am I really the only child left? Am I by myself now, I have no siblings?” Carr’s second-born, Emery, was killed in Troy, New York, in 1996, when he was 24. He was visiting a friend and was robbed and shot in the head. “The police said that his pocket was emptied out, it was sticking out like rabbit ears,” Garner-Samuels remembers. Afterward, Carr was inconsolable. Her family sometimes had to cuddle her to sleep.
Tragedy struck the family again in 2019, when Ben died of a stroke the day before he was supposed to walk Garner-Samuels down the aisle in Jamaica. Garner-Samuels says she intentionally opted for a destination wedding to whisk her mother away from growing political demands and speaking engagements across America and overseas at places like Oxford University. After Ben’s death, “Mommy was in another state of surprise and numbness,” Garner-Samuels says. “Cause she’s like, Why? Why does this keep happening?”
The night of Eric’s death, as she comforted Carr, Garner-Samuels cycled through one thought: “It’s just me and mommy. It’s just us now.” Except this time, through her grief and shell shock, a switch in Carr seemed to flip. “She just exploded…have you ever seen that Jay Z and Beyoncé video with the fire?” Garner-Samuels asks. “She went in the car, the car exploded, she came out the other side, and she was Sasha Fierce? That was my mommy…she just came out on fire. Sometimes I look at her and I’ll be like, Mommy is that you?”
Sharpton saw a similar transformation as Carr journeyed through a calling not of her own accord. “It’s like having a computer, and you don’t know the password,” he says. “And when this movement hit her, the password went on, and the whole computer lit up. And she hasn’t been able to turn it off. That’s why I told her, ‘I don’t want you to have to be concerned about things. If you need some move-around money, we’ll give you that. If you need this rent money, we’ll give you that…. The movement owes that to you because of the symbol you’ve become.’”
As sunlight sinks past the park, there’s still laughter, mouth smacking, and a bit of sass talking. Mary Crosson, Carr’s cousin from Seattle, gets on her about how she ain’t even have her driver’s license before she got her train conductor’s license. They cackle, and Carr defends herself: “Yeah, I wasn’t driving a car but I could drive a train.” There was nothing to it.
There’s a quiet beat between the women as they overlook the field, as though they’re occupying the same headspace. “This came just in time,” Crosson says.
They nod, Yeah.
Carr’s face is relaxed, far from the stern expression many have seen and memorized. She’s happy here, surveying her grandbabies, celebrating them for surviving a pandemic year from hell, including the oldest, who just earned her second college degree. Next Saturday, she’ll face the day Eric died—the anniversary she wishes could forever be in abeyance. The weekend will kick off with some comfort time with her girlfriends from the movement—mothers who’ve supported each other through their losses. They’ll do lunch or dinner, something low-key to reconnect and share in sisterhood.
Before that, Carr’s week will be just as unpredictable and packed as the last, and the one before that, and the week before that. She’ll take care of her siblings’ bills and groceries. (Her only living sister and brother are disabled, with her brother in a nursing home for rehabilitation.) Maybe go to the nail salon to retouch her black-and-silver acrylics. Or the beauty parlor to tighten the distinctive front curly ’do she gets because “it fits my face. I never like wearing my hair back.” Do a little shopping at the supermarket. Finalize Eric’s event, which is also a commemoration of late Congressman John Lewis. The motorcade begins in Harlem, at NAN’s headquarters, and ends in Staten Island, where Eric was killed.
The list is endless. “It doesn’t take much for a day to go by,” Carr says.
She used to have an assistant but discovered they slowed her down. “I don’t need confirmation from other people to make a move if I feel like it’s a good move for me,” she says. Now, she does her own scheduling. Garner-Samuels says Carr’s calendar can be so jammed, she has to make an appointment just so they can hang, like she did for this picnic.
Carr says she tries to make time for rest and restoration, even in tiny doses. That morning, after waking up at 6:30, she decompressed for a bit with Monk, the dramedy procedural about Adrian Monk, a brilliant, quirky detective with OCD who leaves the police force after the tragic, unsolved murder of his wife. “He’s afraid of everything, but he tackles everything,” Carr says of the titular character, played by Tony Shalhoub. An unwilling hero propelled by unexpected tragedy and heartache.
As Carr chills out, huddled next to Crosson, her celebrity status is made plain, even in this sacred space. A guest approaches her, steps up, then back, then up again, each time adjusting a cell phone aimed at Carr’s face. “You see her?” the woman shouts, addressing her phone screen. “That’s her right there,” she points, smiles. “Yeah. Yeah. Right there.” Carr remains poised, as any politician would. She’d never run for office though. “I don’t want to be obligated to be in the public eye,” she says. “I don’t want to be obligated to do this work.” She turns and smiles at the phone.
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