Weekend Argus (Saturday Edition)
‘American Spring a seismic moment’
George Floyd’s death ‘a symbol of universal racial brutality’
US CIVIL rights activist the Reverend Al Sharpton told mourners that George Floyd’s death in police custody and the nationwide protests it ignited marked a reckoning for America over race and justice, demanding, “Get your knee off our necks”.
Memorial tributes to Floyd in Minneapolis, where he was killed on May 25, and in the New York borough of Brooklyn, a major flashpoint for demonstrations, came as protesters returned to the streets of several cities for a second week.
The protests waned to peaceful memorials yesterday morning and emergency curfews in many cities including Los Angeles were lifted.
Delivering the eulogy at a memorial service at a university chapel in Minneapolis on Thursday, Sharpton said Floyd’s death at the hands of police, pinned to the ground under the knee of a white officer, symbolised a universal experience of police brutality for African Americans.
Sharpton, a renowned civil rights leader, said it was “not a normal funeral”. The body of Floyd, 46, was in a closed coffin on the stage at the event, which was taking place amid a pandemic, with organisers trying to ensure Covid-19 social distancing rules.
“He (Floyd) died of a common American criminal justice malfunction,” Sharpton said. “It’s time for us to stand up in George’s name and say, ‘Get your knee off our necks’.”
Sharpton led mourners in eight minutes and 46 seconds of silence, the amount of time Floyd lay on a Minneapolis street with the officer’s knee pressed into his neck.
Memorial services are expected to stretch across six days and three states.
The nationwide protests were for the most part orderly in contrast to several previous ones punctuated by sporadic arson, looting and clashes between protesters and police and the mobilisation of the National Guard in several states.
New York City insisted that residents stay home after 8pm and was facing calls from frustrated residents to end the restrictions.
Video on social media showed police in different cities using batons and flash grenades and firing tear gas without warning.
In Buffalo, New York, two police officers were suspended after a video showed them shoving a 75-year-old man to the ground as he approached police lines. The man, who appeared to bleed from his head, was taken to hospital where he was in a stable but serious condition.
The change in mood to more peaceful protests reflected a determination voiced by many protesters and organisers in recent days to transform outrage over Floyd’s death into a renewed civil rights movement, seeking reforms to America’s criminal justice system.
“This is a very seismic moment, and someday I’m going to have a kid, and he or she or they are going to ask me what I did during the uprising of 2020, during the American Spring,” said Nana Mensah, a writer in her thirties from Brooklyn.
On Thursday, the three newly arrested officers made their first appearance in court and were ordered to remain held, with bail set at $750000 (R13 million) each. The principal co-defendant, Derek Chauvin, 44, is due to appear for his bail hearing on Monday. Chauvin is the officer seen in video footage kneeling on Floyd’s neck as Floyd gasped for air and groaned “I can’t breathe” before passing out. The four defendants, all dismissed from the Minneapolis police the day after Floyd died, each faces a maximum sentence of 40 years in prison if convicted on the most serious charges. Floyd was unarmed when taken into custody outside a corner market where an employee had reported that a man matching his description tried to pay for cigarettes with a counterfeit bill.
Meanwhile, outside the White House demonstrators sat in the street in protest, as law enforcement intensified security measures in the adjacent Lafayette Square, where President Donald Trump forcefully cleared largely peaceful protesters days earlier.
The ACLU, a civil rights group, on Thursday announced a lawsuit against Trump and other US officials over the incident in Lafayette Square, calling it a “criminal attack on protesters”.
The lawsuit says the Trump administration officials violated the constitution when they dispersed the crowd using tear gas and charged the crowd.
“We won’t be silenced by tear gas and rubber bullets. Now is our time to be heard,” said April Goggans, an organiser of Black Lives Matter and the lead plaintiff in the case. |