Activists: Riot shows ‘two systems of justice’
WASHINGTON — When Chanelle Helm helped organized protests after the March 13 killing of Breonna Taylor, Louisville police responded with batons, flashbang grenades and tear gas. The 40year-old Black Lives Matter activist still bears scars fromrubber bullets fired at close range.
So Helm was startled and frustrated Wednesday to see a white, pro-trump mob storm the U.S. Capitol — breaking down barricades, smashing windows and striking police officers — mostly without obvious consequence.
“Our activists are still to this day met with hyper-police violence,” Helm said. “And today you see this full-on riot — literally a coup — with people toting guns, which the police knewwas coming and they just let it happen. I don’t understand where the ‘law and order’ is. This is what white supremacy looks like.”
Helm and other activists across the country who spent much of 2020 facing off with law enforcement officers while protesting police brutality and racial inequality watched with a mixture of outrage and validation as the president’s supporters stormed the Capitol building during sessions of the House and Senate.
For veteran social justice demonstrators, the images of men and women wearing red Trump 2020 hats and clutching American and Confederate flags walking through the Capitol building largely unmo
lested came as shocking yet predictable evidence of their longheld suspicions that conservative, white protesters intent on violence wouldn’t be met with any of the strong-arm tactics as anti-police brutality demonstrators.
Lezley Mcspadden, mother of Michael Brown, an 18-year-old who died in the 2014 police shooting in Ferguson, Mo., that launched the Black Lives Matter movement, said the lack of a police response was stunning.
“There was no shooting, no rubber bullets, no tear gas,” she said, though tear gas actually was deployed in the Capitol Rotunda. “It was nothing like what we have seen. Nothing like what we have seen.”
The image of Confederate flags being raised over the rooftops of government buildings and atop scaffolding in Washington deadened some of the jubilation among Democratic voters in Georgia who
saw the election of Georgia’s first Black senator Tuesday, with Democrat Rev. Raphael Warnock’s victory over Republican Kelly Loeffler.
Danny Stone, a 62-year-old retired Army colonel and Atlanta resident, said he woke up Wednesday having his faith restored in the system and feeling grateful to God. Then he watched television scenes of a nearly all-white mob storming the Capitol. For Stone, it was a reminder of the deeply rooted white grievance that helped elect Trump once and awarded him the secondmost votes ever four years later.
“Wheni first sawit, I was angry,” Stone said. “White america made a conscious decision. But the saving grace is there was another 81 million people that said ‘No.’ ”
Civil rights attorneys and activists said they believed if black protesters had stormed the U.S. Capitol, the consequences would have been immediate and deadly.
Deray Mckesson, a leading voice of the Black Lives Matter movement and co-founder of Campaign Zero, a police reform effort, said, “Black and brown people have been shot and arrested for far less.”
He pointed to Miriam Carey, a 34-year old unarmed Black dental hygienist from Connecticut who was shot and killed in 2013 when she drove through a barrier near the White House, hitting a Secret Service agent who tried to wave her away. She then sped toward capitol Hill, leading police on a high-speed pursuit that came to an end when her car got stuck on the median and police shot and killed her.
“These people broke into the Capitol and were sitting on the House speaker’s desk today,” Mckesson said. “Black people would not have even gotten into the building. They would have started shooting at them the minute they started to rush at the police.”
Civil Rights attorney Benjamin Crump, who represents the families of police killing victims George Floyd, Breonna Taylor and Jacob Blake, among others, said in a statement that the contrast in the law enforcement response was an example of “our two systems of justice.” Black Lives Matter protesters who marched in Washington never stormed the Capitol, he said.
“If Black people had done what these White domestic terrorists did today, can you imagine the reaction? They would have been teargassed, pepper-sprayed, arrested, and charged with felonies — or treason,” Crump wrote. “Another tragic display of our two systems of justice.”