VIDEO: Tennis star Coco Gauff rallies the crowd in Delray: 'You need to not be silent’

DELRAY BEACH — After her grandmother, Yvonne Odom, spoke to hundreds of peaceful protesters Wednesday in Delray Beach, 16-year-old tennis phenom Coco Gauff did the same.

“I think it’s sad that I’m here protesting the same thing that she did, 50-plus years ago,” Gauff said. “You need to not be silent, ‘cause if you are choosing silence, you are choosing the side of the oppressor.”

To cheers from the audience, Gauff continued, “We have to understand that this has been going on for years … I was eight years old when Trayvon Martin was killed. So why am I here at 16 still demanding change?”

The peaceful protest where Gauff, Odom, Police Chief Javaro Sims and others would talk drew hundreds of people from a Delray park to City Hall.

On the way, their posters flapped and they chanted together: “What do we want, Delray?” a woman called out.

“Justice!” the group responded.

For a few moments, most dropped to their knees and some to their stomachs.

And when they arrived at City Hall, Reverend Prince Arafat asked them for a few more moments to close their eyes, to imagine their own child had been in the place of George Floyd, who died May 25 at the hands of police.

“Open your eyes,” Arafat said. “You feel it yet?”

The energy among the group held strong as more people approached the mic to tell their stories, to urge justice, action and change.

“I beg to you, I suggest to you, I request to you, that you support black lives when nobody tells you to,” said Winzie Wilson, a Tuskegee University student.

“Don’t tell me that the system is broken, when the system was built for this,” said Zainab Asad, a University of Florida student. “The system was built to demonize and target people of color, specifically black people, for the simple act of existing.”

Jamael Stewart urged, as others would, that people focus on local elections, and “find something to fight for … find out who you are. Make it happen.”

When TK Carstarphen addressed the group, she emphasized that “this is not the time to play devil’s advocate. It’s not.”

She repeated it.

“I experience injustice here in America because I’m black,” she said.

In addition to people’s names that had previously been stated, including Floyd, Martin, Eric Garner and Breonna Taylor, she added those of Emmett Till, Martin Luther King Jr. and Rodney King.

Cori Walls also said that “there are so many other names you will never know, because cameras were not rolling,” as she told the story of 13-year-old Jeffrey Herrington, who she once interviewed in Kentucky.

A half hour later, she said, someone had driven his mom’s car off the road.

Walls said she stood there Wednesday to protect her own son, who is mixed.

“I consider my name white privilege,” she said. “Racism, specifically systematic racism, is a white issue. White people created it. White people cannot ignore it … it’s up to us to get rid of it.”

This article originally appeared on Palm Beach Post: VIDEO: Tennis star Coco Gauff rallies the crowd in Delray: 'You need to not be silent'