It has been 10 years since Eric Garner died at the hands of an NYPD officer who put him in a banned chokehold. Community members on Staten Island, where Garner lived, are still organizing to keep his memory alive.

On Wednesday, more than a dozen people marched from the Staten Island Ferry to a block party in Tompkinsville Park, across the street from the Staten Island sidewalk where Garner died.

“I have to keep it relevant. I have to have people remember what we're doing, what we've done and what we will do,” Garner’s mother Gwen Carr said.

Carr led the march, knowing her son's final words, "I can't breathe," have become a rallying cry for activists fighting police brutality.

"It was like a continuation after George Floyd was murdered,” she said. “It continued with the 'I can’t breathe.'”

“But it wasn't just Eric Garner and George Floyd,” she added. "It were plenty of other Eric Garners and George Floyds."

Garner died on July 17, 2014, when police tried to arrest him for allegedly selling loose, untaxed cigarettes. Then-NYPD officer Daniel Pantaleo put him in a chokehold and held on, despite Garner’s pleas for help.

Pantaleo was fired five years later, but was never charged with Garner’s death. Carr still wants to see Pantaleo jailed, but says she’s also focused on keeping her son’s memory alive, in part for her granddaughter and Garner’s youngest child, Legacy, who was 3 months old at the time of his death.

“Because he’s my father, I want to keep his memory alive, because he means a lot to me,” Legacy Garner said.

Among community members joining Carr at the block party were other mothers who have lost children at the hands of police. Marion Gray-Hopkins’ son, Gary, was shot and killed by a police officer at a dance in Maryland in 1999 following a confrontation among partygoers she said did not involve him.

“Gary was a 19-year-old full-time college student working a part-time job, and Gary attended a dance at a local fire station near our home,” she said.

Asked whether they’ve seen progress in their efforts in the years since Garner’s death, activists say there has been some.

“It’s out there now,” said Sylvester Powell of the Garner Way Foundation. “The police brutality is out there now. So people are aware of what’s been going on.

Pantaleo’s firing followed a departmental trial that determined he used an unauthorized chokehold, but did not intentionally strangle Garner. A Staten Island jury also declined to indict Pantaleo in Garner's death, and the Justice Department did not take action.

The city reached a $5.9 million settlement with Garner's family nearly a year after his death.