There’s may be no real comparison between 1968 and 2016, but it doesn’t mean the two are disconnected in history or in the lessons we can learn.
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“Black Lives Matter doesn’t condone shooting law enforcement”.
“America is weeping”, said Rep. G.K. Butterfield, head of the Congressional Black Caucus, reflecting an entire nation’s mounting anger, tension and despair.
It ought not need to be said, that a single police officer being injured or killed, is one too many. “We could say the same things about white hate groups that inspire xenophobia or hatred against Muslims”.
Castile was shot Wednesday while in a vehicle with a woman and a child.
Leaders of the Black Lives Matter movement are condemning the slayings of police in Dallas during a protest over fatal police shootings of black men in Louisiana and Minnesota.
“If you see someone being shot while sitting in a auto with his family, and you don’t have some empathy, you’ve got some work to do”, he said in reference to Castile’s death.
“Even as I spoke yesterday about our need to be concerned about racial disparities in the criminal justice system, I also said that our police have an extra hard job, and the majority of them do their job in an outstanding fashion”. In Chicago, Archbishop Blase Cupich said, “Every corner of our land is in the grip of terror”. Have you noticed how many police-involved shooting we’ve had in the past couple of years? We are hurting. We are exhausted.
Over the course of the campaign, black activists have had mixed feelings about the response from whites commending those who have supported the effort yet decrying what they perceive as disinterest or hostility from a majority of whites. The presence of video documentation of the incidents calls attention to strife that had previously existed only in agonizing private memories.
“It makes the killings worse to know that your disapproval of them has spared your reputations and not our lives”, Michael Eric Dyson, a professor of sociology at Georgetown University, wrote in an op-ed in The New York Times after the deaths of Sterling and Castile.
At the National Law Enforcement Officers Memorial in Washington, D.C., Kim Hernandez welled with tears Friday as she took stock of the week. She said on Friday morning that officers were in Dallas were “doing their sacred duty” to protect demonstrators. For me, there’s not even a discussion about Blue Lives Matter -Nana, I need to ask you, though, you want to defund the police – how would you suggest we keep order in society without the police? I hope they understand that compassion for Sterling, Castile and others killed by police in no way mitigates the nation’s profound sorrow for the fearless officers killed in Dallas.
At Bible Way Temple in Raleigh, North Carolina, Darnell Dixon Sr., the chief pastor, wondered why more positive change hasn’t come.
“I personally always try to take a step back”, Mixon said.
The slain police officers were protecting a lawful, peaceful demonstration to protest those same deaths.
In Phoenix, confrontations broke out between protesters and police, CNN affiliate KPHO reported. The suspect stated he wanted to kill white people, especially white officers.
The protests came after a sniper killed five police officers during a demonstration in Dallas on Thursday.
If the gravity of it all seems clear, the road from here does not.
“Black Lives Matter in Cuyahoga County condemns the killing of innocent police officers by rouge citizens as much as we condemn the killing of innocent black men, women and children by rogue police officers”, the group posted on its Facebook page. In this particular case it does seem unusual that the police killed the attacker through a robot armed with a bomb. Is this a turning point or simply a continuation?
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A military lawyer says the man who fatally shot five officers in Dallas was accused of sexual harassment by a female solider when he served in the Army in Afghanistan in May 2014.
