Pleas for calm as protests rage
ACROSS THE NATION: Calls for change compete with chaos in dozens of cities
MINNEAPOLIS — The nation was rocked again Saturday as demonstrators clashed with police from outside the White House gates to the streets of more than three dozen besieged cities, as outrage over the death of George Floyd in Minneapolis traversed a razor’s edge between protest and civic meltdown.
Gov. Tim Walz of Minnesota said on Saturday that he was activating thousands of National Guard troops — up to 13,200 — to control protesters in Minneapolis who turned out in droves for the fourth consecutive night Friday, burning buildings to the ground, firing guns near police and overwhelming officers. But he declined the Army’s offer to deploy military police units.
Rallies, looting and unrest expanded far beyond Minneapolis, with protesters destroying police vehicles in Atlanta and New York and blocking major streets in Detroit and in San Jose, Calif. Crowds in Milwaukee
chanted, “I can’t breathe”; and demonstrators in Portland, Ore., lit a fire inside the Multnomah County Justice Center.
On Saturday, demonstrators amassed outside City Hall in San Francisco, shut down highway traffic in Miami and attempted to topple a statue in Philadelphia. Curfews were imposed in some of the largest U.S. cities, including Los Angeles, Atlanta and Philadelphia.
The chaos and rage on such a broad scale evoked the Black Lives Matter demonstrations of recent years; the Los Angeles riots that followed the 1992 acquittal of four police officers charged in connection with the beating of Rodney King the year before; and even the racial strife of the 1960s, when the fury and despair of inner-city African Americans over racism and poverty erupted in scores of cities, reaching a climax in 1967 and 1968, two years that saw more than 150 riots.
This moment has not produced anything close to the violence of that era. But it is playing out under dystopian circumstances, with a pandemic that has kept much of the nation at home for months, Depression-era job losses and the public bitterly divided on politics and culture.
As governors and mayors urged restraint, President Donald Trump on Saturday urged officials in Minnesota to “get tougher” on the protesters and offered greater military support.
There was a sense of a nation on the brink. “What are you changing by tearing up a city?” Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms of Atlanta asked protesters there. “You’ve lost all credibility now. This is not how we change America. This is not how we change the world.”
The protests continued with new ferocity even after Derek Chauvin, the former Minneapolis police officer who was shown on a cellphone video kneeling on Floyd’s neck as he lost consciousness, was charged with third-degree murder Friday.
Walz said that the state was bracing for more protests and that the authorities had been overwhelmed by the demonstrations, which he said had devolved into “absolute chaos.” He did not rule out accepting the help of the federal military, although he called it an extreme step.
The escalating violence and destruction felt like a warning that this moment could be spinning out of control both because of the limitations of a largely spontaneous, leaderless movement and because, protesters and officials warned, there were indications it was also being undermined by agitators trying to sabotage it.
“I need those legitimate folks who are grieving to take this back,” Walz said at an early morning news conference as a bank, a gas station and several other buildings burned. “Why are we talking about anarchists who are burning down damn buildings?”
Mike Griffin, an organizer in Minneapolis, said these are mostly decentralized protests: “That happens without the black pastor coming in and telling us to do it. That’s organic. These are organic protests.”
But the result from the start has drawn wildly diverse participants. Organizers have been trying to keep the focus on police accountability and social justice issues through chanting and marching. Others have taken to the streets to revel in the energy of the moment. Some have come to loot and set fires.
Underlying it at the start was a moment of witness, part anger, part despair, part hope, defined by the seemingly endless drumbeat of deaths as senseless as that of Floyd’s.
“May 27, 2020, changed my life forever,” said Kayla JuNaye Johnson, 21, a student majoring in criminal justice at Grambling State University, a historically black public university in Louisiana. “I would always go out and support protests but never took full action like I did yesterday. I stood on the front line shouting, ‘Hands up, don’t shoot.’ Now I finally know how us African Americans felt during the civil rights movement. I am a part of history.”
Local controversies
In many communities, the protests reflected both Floyd’s death and simmering local controversies.
One hot spot was Louisville, Ky. Gunfire broke out in the late hours of a demonstration Thursday that was protesting the shooting death of Breonna Taylor, a 26-year-old emergency medical technician who was killed by Louisville police officers executing a search warrant. Seven demonstrators were injured. It is still unclear who fired the shots, although the authorities said they came from within the crowd.
“We have to be careful to control our message, and violence changes that message,” said Keisha Dorsey, a Louisville city councilwoman who supports police reform. With the endless barrage of news and spin on of social media, she said, it can become easy for a protest to lose all focus. “At that point, that centralized voice, if it’s not cohesive, can get lost,” she said.
In Minneapolis, some local activist groups have led rallies on the South Side, where Floyd was killed. They have set up tables with flyers as well as handed out water and other things to keep the people at rallies comfortable.
But young residents, unaffiliated with particular organizations, have led a more spontaneous uprising, said Griffin, a senior organizer with Community Change, a national activist group.
Even the Black Lives Matter network had public meetings and agendas and a decision-making structure, he said. Now there is “an army of young people who are more fired up, more pissed off, more ready to be in your face to fix this system than we were five years ago,” he added.
Carol Becker, a longtime Minneapolis resident, took her 13-yearold to witness some of the demonstrations earlier in the week while there was still light out and things were under control. She supported the protests because she believed that the officers were “absolutely wrong,” she said.
But by nightfall, with unrest giving way to tear gas, rubber bullets, and burned and looted businesses, she found herself standing in front of her father’s apartment building, fending off people trying to set it on fire, she said.
“There were protesters at the police precinct,” she said. “When you got even a block away, there weren’t protesters anymore. These people weren’t protesting. They were breaking into things and taking things.”
Anarchists, Umbrella Man
Minneapolis has a core group of anarchists, residents say, describing them as white activists challenging the moneyed elite in a city with a high concentration of Fortune 500 companies. Attorney General William Barr blamed “farleft extremist groups” for hijacking the protests. Minnesota officials said they were investigating whether white supremacists from out of state were involved.
One man in particular has become a focus of those who believe that outsiders could be trying to discredit the protest movement and its goals. Dressed in all black, with a black gas mask and carrying a black umbrella, the man, who is known as Umbrella Man and who appears to be white if otherwise unidentifiable, was filmed breaking windows at an AutoZone store.
Jeremiah Ellison, a Minneapolis city councilman, tweeted that community members told him that “three suspicious white men” started a fire at a well-known barbershop on the city’s predominantly black North Side. The shop was an institution, Ellison wrote.
“I have a hard time believing ANYONE who lives here would set it ablaze,” he wrote.
Not all protesters were unhappy with some of the destruction. “We’ve tried being peaceful,” said Rashaad Dinkins, an 18-year-old college student from Minneapolis. “We’ve tried doing the kneeling and the silence for so long, and we get criticized for even doing that.”
Still, in city after city, people turned out, most of them hoping for the best.
“I’m here for peace,” said Kenny Washington, 39, of northeast Minneapolis who came out with her newly minted college freshman son, Trenton Washington, 19, after some rest from the exhausting first night of protest. “Destruction is only going to bring chaos. People want to bring change, and we came back to give peace another chance.”