School shuts down amid the fallout over viral D.C. videos
COVINGTON, Ky. — A Kentucky boys’ school shut down its campus Tuesday as a precaution and a small protest was held outside their diocese as fallout continued over an encounter involving white teenagers, Native American marchers and a black religious sect outside the Lincoln Memorial last week.
President Donald Trump tweeted early Tuesday that the students at Covington Catholic High School “have become symbols of Fake News and how evil it can be” but says he hopes the teens will use the attention for good, and “maybe even to bring people together.”
The recorded images that initially generated outrage on social media were tightly focused on the students wearing “Make America Great Again” hats, who seemed to laugh derisively as they surrounded an elderly Native American beating a drum.
Longer videos from wider perspectives emerged later over the Martin Luther King holiday weekend. They revealed the drummer — Omaha Nation elder Nathan Phillips — had intervened between the boys and the religious sect. That came when the teens seemed to be getting rowdier, and the black street preacher who had been shouting racist statements against both groups was escalating his rhetoric.
Soon, all sides were pointing fingers, giving their own accounts about feeling victimized and misunderstood.
“We just don’t know what the volatility of the situation is with these people that react and they don’t know the full story. And it’s very scary,” Jill Hamlin of Cincinnati, who was a chaperone as the boys attended an antiabortion rally, told FOX News Tuesday morning.
The American Indian Movement Chapter of Indiana and Kentucky held a small protest outside the Roman Catholic Diocese of Covington, with activists outnumbered by the media.
Albert Running Wolf, a Native American from Fort Thomas, Kentucky, referred to Nathan Phillips during the event as “an honorable man” who was trying to be a peacemaker, but ended up being verbally attacked. He said Phillips deserves an apology for what he endured.
“It doesn’t matter what color they were, what political factions they were. It was disrespect— straightforward.”
Protesters ended the rally on a street corner near the diocese by singing a song from the American Indian Movement while two Native Americans beat on drums.