Tensions rise ahead of rally
SUPPORTERS and detractors of President Donald Trump continued to gather in Tulsa yesterday, where Trump is scheduled to take the stage for the first of his signature rallies during the coronavirus pandemic.
Verbal clashes sparked at times as hundreds of people converged amid a nationwide push for racial justice and tensions over the continued health and economic threats of Covid-19. And the gatherings happened on Juneteenth – a day celebrating the end of slavery in the United States – in a city with a long history of racial tension. Trump’s event will be held just blocks from the site of one of the worst racial massacres in US history, and Black leaders in Tulsa say they fear the president’s visit could lead to violence.
Oklahoma’s Supreme Court yesterday rejected a request to require everyone attending Trump’s rally in a 19,000-seat arena to wear a face mask and maintain social distancing inside the arena to guard against the spread of the coronavirus. The court ruled that the two local residents who asked that the thousands expected at the BOK Centre be required to take the precautions couldn’t establish that they had a clear legal right to the relief they sought. In a concurring opinion, two justices noted that the state’s plan to reopen its economy is ‘‘permissive, suggestive and discretionary.’’
The request was made by John Hope Franklin for Reconciliation, a nonprofit that promotes racial equality, and the Greenwood
Centre Ltd., which owns commercial real estate, on behalf of the two locals described as having compromised immune systems and being particularly vulnerable to Covid-19.
Meanwhile, Tulsa’s Republican mayor, G.T. Bynum, rescinded a day-old curfew he had imposed for the area around the BOK Centre where some had camped out for days already ahead of the rally. Trump tweeted yesterday that he had spoken to Bynum and that the mayor told him he would rescind it.
Bynum said he got rid of the curfew at the request of the US Secret Service. In his executive order establishing the curfew, Bynum said he was doing so at the request of law enforcement agencies who had intelligence that ‘‘individuals from organised groups who have been involved in destructive and violent behaviour in other states are planning to travel to the City of Tulsa for purposes of causing unrest in and around the rally’’.
The mayor didn’t elaborate as to which groups he meant, and police Captain Richard Meulenberg declined to identify any.
Although Trump has characterised those who have clashed with law enforcement after George Floyd’s death in Minneapolis as organised, radical-Left ‘‘thugs’’ engaging in domestic terrorism, an Associated Press analysis found that the vast majority of people arrested during recent protests were locals.
Trump yesterday tweeted: ‘‘Any protesters, anarchists, agitators, looters or lowlifes who are going to Oklahoma please understand, you will not be treated like you have been in New York, Seattle, or Minneapolis. It will be a much different scene!’’
White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany clarified later that Trump’s tweet did not refer to all protesters, rather only to those who are ‘‘violent’’.
The rally was originally scheduled for yesterday, but it was moved back a day following an uproar that it otherwise would have happened on Juneteenth, which marks the end of slavery in the US, and in a city where a 1921 white-on-black attack killed as many as 300 people.
The Rev. Al Sharpton, who eulogised Floyd, spoke in Tulsa as hundreds gathered to observe Juneteenth. He challenged Trump directly, using the president’s own words.
‘‘It’s lowlifes that shoot unarmed people, Mr President,’’ Sharpton said. ‘‘You couldn’t be talking about us. Because we fought for the country when it wouldn’t fight for us.’’
In Louisville, Kentucky, the mayor said yesterday that one of three police officers involved in the fatal shooting of medical worker Breonna Taylor in her home on March 13 will be fired.
Mayor Greg Fischer said interim Louisville police Chief Robert Schroeder has started termination proceedings for officer Brett Hankison. Meanwhile, FBI agents examined Taylor’s apartment yesterday as part of their independent investigation into her death.
AP
bus. Other pilgrims have stolen pieces of it and left it trashed.
But on his first visit to the bus in July 1993, Krakauer found a nearly untouched, accidental shrine. McCandless’s boots were inside. His books and toothbrush was still there, along with jeans left to dry on a stove. There was an eerie feeling, Krakauer said, that McCandless was still alive and out picking berries.
‘‘I wish the bus could have remained how it was,’’ Krakauer said. ‘‘But I wrote the book that ruined it.’’
Washington Post