The little boy, wearing flip-flips and a bright blue T-shirt illustrated with insects, is bashful but undeterred by the line of police officers wearing riot gear on the Stone Mountain street.
He steps toward them, propping up his right elbow with his left arm and extending his palm for the briefest of waves before turning back toward his mother.
“Get away, baby,” Jazmine Williams shouts toward her 6-year-old son, James Armour, over the hum of nearby helicopters.
But it’s too late. James is turned back around, waving again to the dozen officers standing with their police shields.
“What’s up, bud?” one of the cops asks.
Eventually, an officer peeks around his shield, extending his fist. James runs to him for a fist bump before skipping back to his mom and embracing her in a big hug.
On a day filled with tension and bitterness over race, politics and Confederate monuments, one of the most memorable images from Saturday’s Stone Mountain standoff between right-wing militias and counterprotesters may be that sweet moment between James, who is Black, and the white police officer.
It comes after a violent summer that’s prompted a national discussion over the treatment of African Americans at the hands of the police and broader racial inequalities in American society.
When freelance journalist Je’ Wesley, who captured the viral moment on his phone, asked James what made him want to say hi to the police, the Stone Mountain first-grader put his pointer finger to his lips.
“(It’s a) secret,” James said, nodding when Wesley asked whether he wanted to be a police officer when he grows up.
In an interview Sunday as he snacked on a Kit Kat, James said he wanted to be an officer or vet “because of God.”
Williams said she and her son were detoured through the neighborhood as they drove to their Stone Mountain home and stopped to see what was happening, unaware of the severity of the day’s events. She said she was scared for her son as he approached the officers but that the cop who fist-bumped Armour “handled the situation very well.”
James, she said, is a talkative, friendly child who is “living a fearless life.”
If he becomes a police officer, she said, “I would definitely say he’d be a good officer because he’d be able to lead his peers to do the right thing and treat people the right way.”
She added, “Not always operating out of hate and fear. Just giving love and life to the people they’re supposed to be protecting.”
