Mourners Gather in Minneapolis to Remember George Floyd; Attorney General Sees Protest ‘Agitators’
Mourners gathered in Minneapolis on Thursday for a service to remember George Floyd, the black man whose death in police custody set off a wave of protests that have roiled America in the midst of the coronavirus…
Mourners gathered in Minneapolis on Thursday for a service to remember George Floyd, the black man whose death in police custody set off a wave of protests that have roiled America in the midst of the coronavirus pandemic and a divisive presidential election campaign.
The Reverend Al Sharpton, a television political commentator and civil rights activist who will give a eulogy at the service, struck an optimistic tone on Thursday morning, praising the unity of marchers protesting at police brutality.
“I’ve seen more Americans of different races and of different ages, standing up together, marching together, raising their voices together,” he told MSNBC. “We are at a turning point here,” Sharpton said ahead of the event, which was due to start at 1 p.m. Central Time (1800 GMT).
Huge crowds have defied curfews and taken to the streets of cities across the country for nine nights in sometimes violent protests that prompted President Donald Trump to threaten to send in the military.
The protests dwindled overnight into Thursday after prosecutors leveled new charges against four former Minneapolis policemen implicated in the killing. Several major cities scaled back or lifted curfews imposed for the past few days. But not all was calm.
In New York City’s Brooklyn borough, police in riot gear charged into a crowd of about 1,000 protesters defying a curfew, and U.S. Attorney General William Barr said on Thursday that foreign interests and “extremist agitators” were taking over the protests.
In another racially charged case that has gained national attention, a court heard on Thursday that one of the white men charged in the murder of unarmed black man Ahmaud Arbery in Georgia used a racial slur after shooting the man and before police arrived at the scene.
Special Agent Richard Dial, an investigator for the prosecution, quoted William Bryan as saying fellow defendant Travis McMichael uttered the slur after shooting Arbery in February.