The Washington Post touted the president’s meeting on “building community trust” with the headline “Inside Obama’s radical experiment in national reconciliation.” Reporters Juliet Eilperin and Wesley Lowery noted that when the meeting met a level of comfort, people spoke their minds.
St. Paul Mayor Chris Coleman – a Democrat – denounced violent protesters, and somehow Al Sharpton lectured the mayor that no one should be distracting the conversation by being “upset with protesters.” That’s some Leaning Forward, considering President Obama himself denounced violent protesters, but then, Sharpton has a record of encouraging rioters.
St. Paul, Minn., Mayor Chris Coleman, whose city has experienced some contentious rallies since a police officer shot and killed Philando Castile earlier this month in nearby Falcon Heights, called the actions of some protesters “disgraceful.” Mica Grimm, an activist with Black Lives Matter Minneapolis who was also in the room, took issue with the phrase; Coleman countered that some protesters had dropped concrete blocks on his city’s officers. [One officer had a broken vertebra.]
“I responded by telling him that the protests aren’t going to stop until we see actual change,” Grimm recalled later. “And that begins with seeing an officer held accountable for killing somebody.”
As Coleman and Grimm went back and forth, one of the other police chiefs in the room slipped a note of support to Grimm, and then the Rev. Al Sharpton interjected.
“We really need to be talking about why people are protesting instead of being upset with protesters,” said Sharpton, the longtime, and at times controversial, civil rights activist, redirecting the conversation.
While Obama gets credit from liberal papers for "radical" reconciliation, one might argue that you don't create a spirit of unity by inviting Al Sharpton, and the same can be said for NAACP president Cornell Brooks -- not as long as NAACP officials like Curtis Gatewood in North Carolina openly sympathize with the cop-killer in Dallas.
