*A Black delivery driver is speaking out about the viral video showing him being blocked in a neighborhood during a confrontation with a white man who refuses to let him leave.
Travis Miller, and his co-worker were making a delivery to a home in Oklahoma City when a white man claiming to be the president of the neighborhood’s homeowners association blocked his truck for nearly an hour and demanded to know why they were there.
Miller captured the tense encounter Monday in a Facebook Live video.
The man, David Stewart, wanted to know how Miller gained access to the gated community. Miller explained to KOCO-TV that the person he was delivering furniture to had given him the gate code to enter the private road.
Miller said in the video that he was trying to make a U-turn and as he turned around, Stewart was blocking him in with a white Subaru.
“If I go around him, I’m going to have to drive on somebody’s property and I don’t want to make a bad situation worse,” Miller said in the video.
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The idea that Black people have to carry the equivalent of “freedom papers” or a note from our employer to justify our presence anywhere is straight from the annals of the Black Codes. I salute Mr. Miller for refusing to “explain himself” to these men. https://t.co/IPtQ9FvT1L
— Sherrilyn Ifill (@Sifill_LDF) May 14, 2020
He repeatedly asked the man to move the car, but Stewart refused.
“I’m not moving,” the man said. “All you have to do is tell me where you’re going.”
“And it’s none of your business,” Miller replied. He said Stewart “fagged me down and just began to throw out a barrage of questions. ‘What are you doing here? Why are you in here? Where are you coming from?’”
He declined to answer Stewart, instead choosing to sit in his truck and record the incident.
“I was gripping the steering wheel, and I made sure I kept my seat belt on,” he said. “I locked the doors, tried to keep the window up.”
Miller becomes emotional at one point in the video (see above), in part because he has lost three family members in a month.
“I knew if I get out this truck, no matter what happened, I would have been in the wrong,” he said. “I always say to myself, ‘I’m going to go home to my wife and my kids.’”
Stewart finally allowed Miller to leave after speaking with the homeowner who received the delivery.
He has since received an outpouring of support online.
“My intention was never to go viral,” he said in a phone interview Thursday. “My intention was to cover myself in case he called my employer and said I did something other than what I did.”
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