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Thursday night’s protest passed off without major incident or intervention by the police in the absence of federal officersJoin us for a live digital event with former attorney general Eric Holder to discuss voter suppression in 2020, Thursday at 5pm ET. Register nowThe withdrawal of federal agents from frontline policing of demonstrations in downtown Portland significantly reduced tensions in the city overnight.Protesters in support of Black Lives Matter once again rallied near the federal courthouse that became a flashpoint, and the scene of nightly battles amid the swirl of teargas, after Donald Trump dispatched agents to end what he called anarchy in the city after weeks of demonstrations. Continue reading… More
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Donald Trump has cited Black Lives Matter protests against the police killing of George Floyd as among the likely causes of the recent surge in coronavirus cases.The US president did not blame the anti-racism demonstrations directly but suggested that they “presumably” led Americans to lower their guard against the pandemic.“There are likely a number of causes for the spike in infections cases,” Trump told reporters at his second briefing on the virus in two days following a three-month impasse. “Cases started to rise among young Americans shortly after demonstrations, which you know very well about, which presumably triggered a broader relaxation of mitigation efforts nationwide.”Public health experts say there is little evidence that the protests spread Covid-19 in New York, Chicago, Minneapolis, Washington or other cities. They took place outdoors, where the virus spreads less easily, and most participants wore face masks, which Trump has conceded is an effective preventive measure.Dhaval Dave, the lead author of a study at Bentley University in Waltham, Massachusetts, told the Associated Press that in many cities, the protests actually seemed to lead to a net increase in physical distancing, as more people who did not protest decided to stay off the streets.Trump, who has sought to conflate the protests with looting and violence, did not say they were the sole reason for the virus resurgence. Speaking at the White House, he went on: “A substantial increase in travel also was a cause, increased gathering on holidays such as Memorial Day as well as young people closely congregating at bars, and probably other places. Maybe beaches.“Four or five different listed places – we have 12 that are listed on the guide – likely also contributed.”But he then made a surprise segue to a favourite talking point, claiming that his wall on the US-Mexico border had helped prevent further infection.“We’re also sharing a 2,000-mile border with Mexico, as we know very well, and cases are surging in Mexico, unfortunately,” Trump said. “I was with the [Mexican] president and it’s a big problem for Mexico, but cases are surging very sharply and all across the rest of the western hemisphere.”He added: “Two hundred and fifty miles of newly constructed wall along the southern border has had a great positive impact on people coming in, and we have record low numbers of people coming in illegally that’s helped greatly. It was really meant for a different purpose but it worked out very well for what we’re doing right now and for the pandemic.”Critics have pointed out that the uptick in coronavirus cases, now killing more than 1,000 people a day, coincided with states reopening bars, restaurants and other businesses at Trump’s urging and against guidance from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.Trump appeared solo again at Wednesday’s briefing, without public health experts, and claimed the pandemic response “is all going to work out – it is working out”.Afterwards Joe Biden, the presumptive Democratic nominee for president, said: “Instead of confronting this crisis head-on, Donald Trump has waved the white flag of defeat, with top advisers saying that Trump’s ‘not really working this any more’ and that he ‘doesn’t want to be distracted by it’.“Trump’s failure to lead is so complete that even top Republicans are speaking up, with a key aide to Texas governor Greg Abbott describing Trump as ‘bored’ of dealing with Covid-19.” More
Donald Trump has equated the Black Lives Matter movement with displays of the Confederate flag, saying: “I’m not offended either by Black Lives Matter, that’s freedom of speech. You know the whole thing with cancel culture – we can’t cancel our whole history. We can’t forget that the north and the south fought.”Repeating his threat to veto moves to rename US military bases named for Confederate generals, he added: “When people proudly have their Confederate flags, they’re not talking about racism. They love their flag, it represents the south.”Trump made the potentially inflammatory comments in an interview with Fox News Sunday, broadcast a day after a Black Lives Matter mural on the street in front of Trump Tower in New York was defaced for the third time in less than a week.Asked about moves to rename US bases under the National Defense Authorization Act which are supported by senior military leaders, Trump said: “I don’t care what the military says. I’m supposed to make the decision. Fort Bragg is a big deal … Go to the community, say, ‘How do you like the idea of renaming Fort Bragg,’ and then what are we going to name it? We going to name it after the Reverend Al Sharpton?”Sharpton is a New York-based civil rights leader who was among national figures paying tribute this weekend to John Lewis, the civil rights campaigner and Democratic congressman who died on Friday, aged 80.Fort Bragg in North Carolina is named for Braxton Bragg, a Confederate general during the civil war. Numerous other bases are named for leaders on the losing side who fought to maintain slavery.Calls to rename bases and bring down statues to Confederate leaders have surged, amid protests demanding justice and reform after the police killings of George Floyd and other black people. Many statues and monuments have been removed.This week, the Department of Defense followed in the footsteps of Nascar by effectively banning the Confederate flag from display at its properties. Seeking to avoid angering Trump, who has made support for Confederate symbols a central plank of his re-election campaign, defense secretary Mark Esper simply left the flag off a list of flags which can be displayed at bases.On Sunday Colin Powell, an African American retired general, former chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and secretary of state under George W Bush, told CBS’s Face the Nation bases should be renamed and flags banned.“It was the Confederate States of America,” said Powell, who has endorsed Joe Biden for president. “They were not part of us and this is not the time to keep demonstrating who they were and what they were back then. This is time to move on. Let’s get going. We have one flag and only one flag only.”Across the US, the words “Black Lives Matter” have been painted on prominent streets, including in Washington on the road leading to the White House. New York mayor Bill de Blasio helped paint the mural on Fifth Avenue, in front of Trump’s Manhattan residence. Trump said in a tweet that the project would denigrate “this luxury avenue”.In similar fashion to Confederate and other monuments defaced with paint and graffiti, the Trump Tower mural has been attacked repeatedly. In the latest incident, two women were arrested around 3pm on Saturday after police said they poured black paint on the block-long mural.Bystander video showed officers surrounding one woman as she rubbed paint on the bright yellow letters, shouting “They don’t care about black lives” and “Refund the police”. More
Civil rights movement
Winfrey releases footage of recent interview
View from Washington: the legacy of John Lewis
Obituary: John Lewis, 1940-2020
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John Lewis remembers ‘Bloody Sunday’ in Selma – video report
Barack Obama and Oprah Winfrey have led tributes from across US society to the civil rights leader and Georgia congressman John Lewis, who died on Friday evening at the age of 80.
Lewis, who had been suffering from pancreatic cancer, dedicated his life to the fight for racial equality and justice and worked closely with Dr Martin Luther King Jr in the 1960s, the high water mark of the civil rights movement in the US. He became a congressman in 1987.
“He loved this country so much that he risked his life and his blood so that it might live up to its promise,” Obama wrote in a Medium post. “And through the decades, he not only gave all of himself to the cause of freedom and justice, but inspired generations that followed to try to live up to his example.”
Winfrey released footage of Lewis speaking during a recorded conversation between the two last week. Posting the footage, Winfrey wrote: “He sounded weak but was surprisingly more alert than we expected. I had a final chance to tell him what I’ve said every time I’ve been in his presence: ‘Thank you for your courage leading the fight for freedom. My life as it is would not have been possible without you.’
“I know for sure he heard me. I felt good about that. He understood and was so gracious.”
In the interview, shot to mark a CNN documentary entitled John Lewis: Good Trouble, the congressman said: “I tried to do what was right, fair and just. When I was growing up in rural Alabama, my mother always said, ‘Boy, don’t get in trouble … but I saw those signs that said ‘white’, ‘colored’, and I would say, ‘Why?’
“And she would say again, ‘Don’t get in trouble. You will be beaten. You will go to jail. You may not live. But … the words of Dr King and the actions of Rosa Parks inspired me to get in trouble. And I’ve been getting in trouble ever since. Good trouble. Necessary trouble.”
Oprah Winfrey
(@Oprah)
Last week when there were false rumors of Congressman John Lewis’ passing, Gayle and I called and were able to speak with him. He sounded weak but was surprisingly more alert than we expected. pic.twitter.com/8kRRDMTvFm
July 18, 2020
Lewis was a prominent figure in many key events of the civil rights era, prominent among them the March on Washington in 1963 and a voting rights march across the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama, in 1965 on what would come to be known as Bloody Sunday.
State troopers attacked peaceful protesters with clubs and tear gas. A police officer knocked Lewis to the ground and hit him in the head with a nightstick, then struck him again as he tried to get up, he would later testify in court.
Images of Lewis being beaten are some of the most enduring of the era. Film of events in Selma was shown on national television, galvanizing support for the Voting Rights Act.
Pettus, for whom the bridge is named, was a slaveholding member of the Confederate army, a leader in the Klu Klux Klan and a man “bent on preserving slavery and segregation”, Smithsonian Magazine wrote.
A petition to change the name of the bridge to memorialize Lewis now has more than 400,000 signatures.
Lewis was the son of sharecroppers in Alabama but represented a Georgia district for 33 years in the US House of Representatives. In one of his last public appearances, he walked a street in front of the White House in Washington painted with a Black Lives Matter mural, a tribute to a movement he saw as a continuation of his fight for racial equality.
Politicians paid tribute on Saturday, among them former presidents Bill Clinton, Jimmy Carter and George W Bush, House speaker Nancy Pelosi, Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell and, with a tweet and an order for flags to fly at half-staff, Donald Trump.
Ava DuVernay, the academy award-nominated director of the historical drama film Selma, a retelling of the 1965 march, wrote that she would “never forget what you taught me and what you challenged me to be”.
“Better. Stronger. Bolder. Braver. God bless you, Ancestor John Robert Lewis of Troy, Alabama. Run into His arms.”
Viola Davis, the first black actress to win a Tony, an Emmy and an Oscar, thanked Lewis for his “commitment to change” and “courage”. In one of Davis’s most famous roles, in the 2011 film The Help, she portrayed a maid in the Jim Crow south, a role she has since said catered to a white audience not “ready for the truth” about the black experience.
Stacey Abrams, who lost a race to become Georgia’s first black female governor after voting rolls were purged by her Republican opponent, called Lewis “a griot of this modern age”. Abrams’ organization Fair Fight continues to work to secure voting rights, a central demand of marchers in Selma.
Minister Bernice A King, the youngest daughter of Martin Luther King Jr and Coretta Scott King, said Lewis “did, indeed, fight the good fight and get into a lot of good trouble”, thereby ensuring he “served God and humanity well”.
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Opinion
Civil rights movement
To John Lewis, with love
Kevin Powell
From the March on Washington to Selma, from the halls of Congress to Black Lives Matter Plaza, you gave yourself to us
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John Lewis remembers ‘Bloody Sunday’ in Selma – video report
Dear Mr Lewis,
I gasped when I learned of your death, after your courageous battle against cancer. I think of your December statement, when you said: “I have been in some kind of fight – for freedom, equality, basic human rights – for nearly my entire life. I have never faced a fight quite like the one I have now.”
I shed tears then and I shed tears now, at what your passing represents to America and to the world. You do not know this, but the very first time I heard of you, in 1986, I was a Rutgers University student, asked by the Commission for Racial Justice to be part of a group of young people recreating the Freedom Rides you led during the civil rights movement.
We stopped in Atlanta, where you were running for Congress. You encouraged us, you gave us an on-the-spot civil rights history, you told us not to be afraid. You seemed to know that some of us, including me, were absolutely terrified.
Our bus went on to Alabama, to help African Americans protect their voting rights, just as you had done a generation before. When we heard troubling rumors of white supremacists “coming to get us” for repeating and continuing your work, I held tightly to your words in Atlanta, urging us to never give up – never.
That was 34 long years ago. I watched you become a congressman, an elder statesman, the humble and unassuming moral voice of America. I sat on panels with you at the Congressional Black Caucus Annual Legislative Conference. I saw you publicly saddened by attacks on the civil rights for which leaders like you were savagely beaten. That is why you were forever committed to making “Good Trouble” on behalf of democracy.
I myself have walked across the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama, many times. But my memories there are of you: of the bloodthirsty hatred of the police cracking your skull, how you could have died there on that ground, in your white trench coat, in 1965, just because you believed that Black people, all people, had the right to vote. I vote, Mr Lewis, because of you, because of people like you. I exist because of you, because of people like you.
And I have wondered, as you witnessed president after president, one racial murder after another, from your childhood until your death, how you could still possess such a massive capacity to love people, every kind of people, in spite of what you experienced in your 80 years on this planet, in this country. You did not merely preach love, you embodied it, and were clear that love was forever the answer.
Is that who you were, Mr Lewis, when you were a boy practicing your sermons to your chickens in your hometown of Troy, Alabama?
Is that who you were in 2017, when you led 1,000 people through Comic-Con, a march to celebrate the trilogy of comic books you had written, based on your life?
What a life it was, Mr Lewis. To be able to say you spoke at the same majestic March On Washington in 1963, where Dr King gave his “I Have A Dream” address, and to be the last living speaker from that sweltering August day. To be able to say you were there in Indianapolis, Indiana, on the day Bobby Kennedy announced to a mostly Black crowd that Martin Luther King Jr had been killed, Kennedy’s words rivaling King’s as one of the greatest speeches ever. To also say you were there, just two months later in Los Angeles, when Bobby himself was assassinated.
To be able to say that your cracked skull and many arrests in the 1960s led to Barack Obama becoming our first Black president, and to also be able to say you lived long enough to witness #MeToo and Black Lives Matter and protests unlike anything we have had since you yourself led nonviolent demonstrations those many years ago.
You never stopped protesting, Mr Lewis. In the final months of your life, there you were in Selma, honoring the 55th anniversary of that march. There you were in a virtual town hall meeting with Barack Obama. And there you were, in June, a mere month before your death, admiring the Black Lives Matter mural on the street leading to the White House.
You never gave up, Mr Lewis, and neither will I, and neither will we who believe in freedom, justice and equality for everyone. You, sir, were a living, breathing history book of America, a living, breathing example of the best of the human race.
The greatest thing you gave us, besides your entire life, was your entire love. The greatest salute to you we can give, is to love ourselves and each other as fiercely as you did us, to the very end.
Kevin Powell is a poet, journalist, civil and human rights activist, public speaker, and the author of 14 books, including his newest title, When We Free The World, a collection of essays about the present and future of America available exclusively on Apple Books.
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Civil rights movement
Opinion
Race
Protest
Activism
Barack Obama
Martin Luther King
US politics
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