Demitrius Pickens was wearing his Jeff Gordon T-shirt and sipping a can of beer. It was warm out. He was feeling good.
This was in 2015, when Pickens and his friends took a road trip from Durham, North Carolina, to Alabama see their first NASCAR race at Talladega Superspeedway, one of the most spectacular tracks in the country.
They were walking near the venue, buzzing about the event, when something stopped them short: a large, inflatable monkey next to another attendee’s camper van and a hand-drawn sign that read, “Monkeys Lives Matter.” This was the year after protesters in Ferguson, Missouri, decried the shooting death of an unarmed Black teenager, Michael Brown, by a white police officer.