Black community leaders are urging local protesters to shift the focus of demonstrations back to the Black Lives Matter movement and away from what has become a largely “white spectacle.”
Standing in front of a large banner bearing an image of Rep. John Lewis, the Black civil rights icon who died last week, the Rev. E.D. Mondainé, president of the Portland branch of the NAACP, told protesters “the focus has been moved from where it is supposed to be and made to be a spectacle, a debacle.”
“This is no new thing we’re experiencing. We have seen this from the beginning of time,” Mondainé said. “Four hundred years we have struggled as Black people in this nation … We have been made to be the last that were informed but the first that were affected.”
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