President to meet with #BlackLivesMatter’s DeRay Mckesson
For many, the hashtag #BlackLivesMatter brings up images of protesters, both black and white, blocking highways and major intersections, playing dead in shopping centers and train stations, hijacking candidates’ rallies, demanding racially segregated safe spaces on college campuses, and hurling bricks and bottles at police every now and then.
DeRay Mckesson, one of the founders of the #BlackLivesMatter movement, will reportedly meet with President Obama tomorrow, which really isn’ta surprise. Mckesson, who recently filed to run for mayor of Baltimore, has been trying to hammer out a politically acceptable version of the #BlackLivesMatter agenda by the name of Campaign Zero, and in January tweeted aboutattending a White House briefing onthe administration’s criminal justice platform for the final year of Obama’s presidency.
The president made it clear that he’d make criminal justice reform a priority when he visitedEl Reno Federal Correctional Institution in Oklahoma last summer, and in September said that #BlackLivesMatter must be taken seriously.
Also attending the meeting will beAttorney General Loretta E. Lynch,Al Sharpton, NAACP president Cornell Brooks, and Democratic Rep. John Lewis of Georgia.
The Baltimore Sun says the meeting will be “a first-of-its-kind gathering of leaders who represent different generations of the civil rights movement, and said the discussion will focus on criminal justice reform and building trust between police and neighborhoods.”
No word from the White House or the Baltimore Sun who will be representing the police and their concerns at this trust-building exercise.
Comments are closed.