DAVENPORT, Iowa — "If everyone looked the same, the world would be pretty boring,
says Chandra Kurylo.
Take one glance at Kurylo's shoes, and you'd know she's okay with standing out. A pair of white sneakers, hand painted by her daughter. They say things like "BLM", "No justice no peace", "Am I next?".
"It does catch peoples attention, sometimes the wrong attention," says Kurylo.
Negative or positive Kurylo uses the attention to venture down a path of understanding.
"It can strike up a conversation and get people to understand and realize because sometimes they'll look and get the wrong idea, but after you take a second to speak to me, you're like oh, okay, wait a minute, you're not so bad," says Kurylo.
Over the summer the Black Lives Matter movement was sometimes associated with unrest, even violence. But Kurylo says people who only focus on that are missing out on understanding the bigger picture.
"We all just want peace and equality, that's all."
As a descendent of slaves and Native Americans, Kurylo says it's equality that's well overdue.
"We're not all treated as equals. Even when it was written all men are created equal, there was still slavery. It wasn't written for everybody," says Kurylo.
She's standing out to foster understanding from within.
"If it strikes up a conversation, I hope it does. You might be willing to learn to open up your mind a little bit. All it takes is a seed to grow."