Symbols of detest, and their racial implications, at the Capitol Hill riot

Bryan Stevenson:

Nicely, I think it is particularly upsetting to African-People in america who have witnessed really different responses to protests during our lives. I grew up observing Civil Rights leaders who had been fully commited to nonviolence, peacefully gathering and still get battered and crushed by law enforcement.

There was a presumption of dangerousness assigned to Black and Brown people today that would manifest itself for the duration of Civil Rights demonstrations. Black people would put on their Sunday very best. They would attempt every little thing they could to present themselves as nonviolent, non-threatening, just trying to get simple rights. And still they would get battered and crushed and bloodied. So it is really really difficult to then watch folks who are armed, who are conversing about violence, who are coming with weapons, who are coming with nooses, be trustworthy in the way that these protesters were being.

There was a presumption of innocence assigned to the men and women in Washington past week, which manufactured that that so tough for us. I recall observing Amelia Boynton Robinson, a center-aged Black woman beaten unconscious on the Edmund Pettus Bridge. I grew up viewing individuals like John Lewis get beaten and bloodied and battered, and it was by legislation enforcement. And that variety of the problem of that memory with what we saw is definitely part of it. And it does mirror the problem that quite a few of us deal with in this country and communities of shade, which is what it truly is like to are living in a nation the place you are presumed perilous, where by your coloration, your race produces this presumption of guilt.