Read TIme: 3 Minutes
Protest/Race Relations
- Two protesters were injured, one critically, in Seattle early on Saturday, when the women were hit by a speeding car that drove past other stopped vehicles into a crowd demonstrating on an interstate highway, police said.
UPDATE: One of the pedestrians has died. Summer Taylor was 24. A 27 year old suspect is in custody.
- A giant 20-by-30 foot Confederate flag was raised along a busy highway in North Carolina this weekend to mark the Fourth of July, but despite complaints local officials say there are no ordinances against it. The Sons of Confederate Veterans raised the flag, saying they did so to mark Independence Day and in response to the removal of Confederate statues in the state.
- Protesters yanked down the Christopher Columbus statue near Little Italy and tossed it into Baltimore’s Inner Harbor as fireworks went off around the city on the evening of the Fourth of July.
- Former NFL star and activist Colin Kaepernick marked July Fourth by sharing a video of actor James Earl Jones reciting Frederick Douglass’s historic speech, “What to the Slave is the Fourth of July” with Kaepernick calling the holiday a “celebration of white supremacy.”
“Black ppl have been dehumanized, brutalized, criminalized + terrorized by America for centuries, & are expected to join your commemoration of ‘independence’, while you enslaved our ancestors,” he wrote. “We reject your celebration of white supremacy & look forward to liberation for all.”
- “We have Americans that cannot breathe, except on ventilators. Who cannot breathe because of a knee on their neck, because of oppression and racism,” the former GOP California governor said in his message. “Slavery and racism are incompatible with freedom… on this July Fourth we celebrate the day America’s promise will be real for everyone.”
“We must fight every day to make sure that dream is as true for a black child born in Minneapolis as it was for a white bodybuilder born in Austria.”
- Protesters marched and gathered outside the Aurora Police Department precinct to demand the remaining two officers involved in the death of Elijah McClain to be terminated from their jobs.
One officer involved in McClain’s death already resigned after a recent image appeared depicting police reenacting the carotid hold near a memorial for McClain, the same chokehold used at the time of his death.
- In his Independence Day Speech, Trump compared his fight against the “radical left” to the US’s fight against Nazis in WW2. “American heroes defeated the Nazis, dethroned the fascists, toppled the communists, saved American values, upheld American principles and chased down the terrorists to the very ends of the earth,” Trump said. “We are now in the process of defeating the radical left, the Marxists, the anarchists, the agitators, the looters, and people who in many instances have absolutely no clue what they are doing.”
- “We will never allow an angry mob to tear down our statues, erase our history, indoctrinate our children or trample on our freedoms,” President Donald Trump said in a July 4 speech.
- In an Independence Day message, Joe Biden said, “Our country was founded on an idea: ‘We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.’ We’ve never lived up to it. Jefferson himself didn’t – he held slaves, women were excluded. But once proposed, it was an idea that couldn’t be restrained. Through it all, these words have gnawed at our conscience and pulled us towards justice. We have a chance to rip the roots of systemic racism out of this country. We have a chance to live up to the words that founded this nation.”
Administration News
- North Korea does not feel the need to have talks with the United States, which would be nothing more than “a political tool” for Washington, a senior North Korean diplomat said on Saturday, ahead of a U.S. envoy’s visit to South Korea.
- The United States is sending two aircraft carriers into the South China Sea at the same time as China is conducting military exercises in the contested waterway.
- President Trump took aggressive swipes at the “radical left” and news media during his wide-ranging Independence Day address.
In one part, Trump said when people, specifically the media, call his and allies’ actions racist: “You not only slander me, you not only slander American people, but you slander generations of heroes who gave their lives for America.”
Sources: ABC News, The Atlantic, Axios, Bloomberg, CBS News, CNN, Financial Times, Fox News,The Hill, NBC News, Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, NJ.com, NPR, NY Times, Politico, Reuters, Salon, Slate, Vanity Fair, Wall Street Journal, Washington Post
The Past 24 Hours Or So 