Walking through the King Soopers bakery, he approached the display where children were welcome to take a free cookie. Reaching in to select one, a hand suddenly closed on his wrist and the stranger asked what he thought he was doing, accusing him of stealing the complimentary sweet.
Ezekiel Quattlebaum was four years old, the intended consumer for the free treat. Something to munch on while his mom shopped for their family for the week. The white woman remained steadfast, insisting that the Black child she had touched without consent – and who had done nothing wrong – was guilty of a crime for something hundreds of kids across Colorado did every day. Something they were invited to do.
“I wasn’t putting the cookie into my mouth, I was grabbing it. In order to purchase the cookie, I still would have needed to grab it just like I did. This wasn’t just a misunderstanding,” Ezekiel reflected on the moment, twenty years later from his home in Denver…