A Black Lives Matter activist exposed the role two local police officers played in the Capitol insur
Source: Washington Post
A Black Lives Matter activist exposed the role two local police officers played in the Capitol insurrection. Their small town rapidly took sides.
By Kimberly Kindy
MARCH 29, 2021
ROCKY MOUNT, Va. A photograph of two local police officers popped up on Bridgette Craigheads cellphone after a long day at her beauty shop. The two men peering out at her from the selfie image had befriended her while on duty at a Black Lives Matter protest she led months before. They stood beside her and held her homemade signs that read Silence is Violence and No Justice. No Peace.
Now, there they were, proudly posing inside the nations Capitol during the Jan. 6 insurrection amid a mob of people, many bearing symbols of white supremacy as they sought to overturn the presidential election to keep Donald Trump in power.
What happened next is inflaming a culture war in this southwest Virginia town of 5,000 people, a microcosm of the schisms across America as explosive disagreements over the election, race and the role of police are fracturing relationships between relatives, friends and neighbors.
People are quarreling over who was treated with kid gloves Black Lives Matter protesters or the largely White throng that stormed the U.S. Capitol. They are arguing over the fairness of the presidential election and whether the former president should still be in office. And theres a simmering standoff between activists such as Craighead who see this as the moment to redress injustices, and those who believe the activists are fomenting racial tensions by pushing too hard and too fast. Some see no need for change, no problem to be solved.
Minutes after receiving the photo of the officers in a private Facebook message three days after the riot, Craighead, who is Black and the mother of a young son, made it public on her own page.
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Read more: https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2021/03/29/capitol-riot-fallout/
RVN VET71
(2,690 posts)I want to say something insulting about the pro-treason insurrectionist-loving people of Rocky Mount, but I cant think of a sad enough string of epithets to describe them. Oh, I think I already have!
gab13by13
(21,304 posts)at least the vast majority of them, are only being charged with trespass. IOKIYAT. It's OK if you're a Trumper.
RVN VET71
(2,690 posts)Same difference, as we used to say.