Activists push ahead after Dallas killings
DALLAS — “Black Lives Still Matter.”
The slogan appeared on a protest sign as hundreds of activists met at a church in Dallas three days after a gunman killed five police officers at a downtown protest against racially driven police violence.
The message was clear: The cause of the Black Lives Matter movement is just as valid now as it was last week. The killings, carried out by a black man targeting white officers, did not change that fact that across the country police violence is disproportionately directed at black men.
The activists have nonetheless been forced to defend the movement as they contemplate the best way to carry on the momentum that has been building for two years.
Since the Dallas killings, the El Paso police chief told reporters that Black Lives Matter was “a radical hate group.”
Former New York Mayor Rudolph Giuliani called the group “inherently racist” and said that it essentially put targets on the backs of police officers.
Worries that such criti- Marchers make their way across a street during a Black Lives Matter protest Monday in Tampa, Fla. cism would derail the cause were on display at the meeting Sunday night at Friendship-West Baptist Church in Dallas.
“It’s going to be very important for us to go ahead and acknowledge how angry, how painful and how confused this situation is,” the church’s leader, the Rev. Freddie Haynes, told the mostly black crowd gathered in the pews. “Black rage is founded on wounds in the soul,” he said. “There are wounds on our soul.”
The Black Lives Matter movement coalesced into a national political force after the 2014 police shooting of Michael Brown, 18, in Ferguson, Mo.
Organizers have met with President Barack Obama and other national leaders and confronted the two major presidential candidates, Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump.
One of the leaders, DeRay Mckesson, unsuccessfully ran for mayor of Baltimore after the death of Freddie Gray, a black man grievously injured in police custody.
The movement’s latest fuel came from the police killing last week of one black man in Baton Rouge, La., and another in suburban St. Paul Minn.
But after the Dallas shootings, the activists found themselves having to disassociate the movement from the shooter, Micah Johnson, 25, an Army reservist who was killed by a police robot carrying explosives.
“This man gets plastered all over TV and they say that’s our men,” the Rev. Isaac Steen told the crowd Sunday.
Before the shootings, Sharay Santora, 36, a hair stylist, was making progress in reaching out to conservative white Texans, recently winning over a Trump supporter, she told the other activists.
But now with tensions running high, she said she’s struggling to present Black Lives Matter in a way people can understand and support. She views the issue of racially directed police violence as the civil rights struggle of her time — one that cannot afford to pause, even briefly.
At the same time, she said, “just because we’re standing for our movement doesn’t mean we can’t go to the funerals” for the fallen police officers.
Cory Hughes, who had helped organize the Dallas protest last week, expressed a similar sentiment to the crowd: “Though you’re a Black Lives Matter activist, it doesn’t mean you hate white people.”
Others called for more militant and immediate action to confront discrimination and push for major reforms, such as banning the use of grand juries in fatal officer-involved shootings.
“When black people stand up, we can get victories,” shouted LaShadion Anthony, an activist with the Dallas Action Coalition and the Huey P. Newton Gun Club, named after one of the founders of the Black Panthers.
The crowd applauded, including Hughes. “I’ll go to war with you any day,” he said. “The last I checked, there’s not a voter registration card that will stop a cop from shooting me.”