"Don't Shoot," "Stop Police Murders," and "I Can't Breathe" were among the signs carried by protesters in front of the White House on Monday afternoon.
The crowd of about 1,000 — primarily young and multi-racial — were contained to the H Street side of Lafayette Park, roughly a block from the White House. To the line of police bearing plastic shields and truncheons, the protesters repeatedly chanted: "You are traitors!"
Listening to those gathered to protest the death of Minnesotan George Floyd, this reporter found two common threads running through their conversation: a strong defense of the violence and destruction of property experienced in cities nationwide and, more interestingly, a reinterpretation of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.'s signature message of nonviolence in the pursuit of civil rights.
"When is it enough?" Anthony Oakes, a black standup comedian from Washington, D.C., told us, adding "[blacks] have waited 400 years [to be accepted as equals by white society]. That's longer than the wait at the D.C. Department of Motor Vehicles!"
Asked how his view resonated with that of the nonviolent approach advocated by King, Oakes said, "Dr. King had a cornucopia of meanings."
Like other marchers, Oakes quoted King's 1967 statement that "a riot is the language of the unheard."
(Using the quote a year before his death in both an interview with CBS's "60 Minutes" and in an address at Stanford University, King never endorsed violence but did caution that "as long as America postpones justice, we stand in the position of having these recurrences of violence and riots over and over again. Social justice and progress are the absolute guarantors of riot prevention").
"And Dr. King is dead for his beliefs, and Malcolm X is dead," Oakes told us. Malcolm X was assassinated in 1965 as part of a power struggle in the Nation of Islam, and three members of the group were eventually convicted.
Kevin Sutton, also a Washington, D.C., resident who is black, told Newsmax that he and fellow protesters "were picking up where Dr. King left off … We're making people take notice."
As for the destruction of property of innocent citizens, Sutton said "they are being repaired already and covered completely by insurance. No insurance is going to bring George Floyd back."
"Martin Luther King was a great man but from a very different world," said Magnolia "Maggie" Guyu of Norris High School in Silver Spring, Maryland. Guyu, who is white, pointed out that social media and the internet, which didn't exist in King's day, make it possible for large crowds to gather on short notice.
Guyu's views on King were seconded by Norris classmate Isabele Edwards. Pointing out that "Dr. King said that riots were the language of the unheard," Edwards said of today's protests, "This is what [King] would have wanted."
John Gizzi is chief political columnist and White House correspondent for Newsmax. For more of his reports, Go Here Now.
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