Ferguson Mayor to Al Sharpton: Go Home and Stop Inciting Racial Hatred
[WATCH]
Many Americans have been watching the developments of protests, riots and some looting out of the small St. Louis suburb of Ferguson, Missouri, over the course of the week. It all started last weekend when an unarmed black teenager was shot and killed by a police officer. The town was incensed, and an impromptu memorial service turned into a protest and then a riot which led to some criminals taking advantage of the situation and looting.
The police response to the protests and rioting, while possibly justified by the looting, has been heavy-handed at best with heavily armed and armored police in riot gear arriving in armored vehicles, firing tear gas and rubber bullets into the crowd of mostly peaceful protestors while also harassing some journalists.
Tensions are high on all sides of the confrontation, and a calm voice of reason is desperately needed to settle the situation down in Ferguson.
Unfortunately, what Ferguson got was MSNBC host and professional race-baiter Al Sharpton, who once again is using a local tragedy to sow his seeds of racial division and animosity.
But Sharpton isn’t exactly being welcomed with open arms in Ferguson. He has been heckled more than once, with references to his corrupt past. The Ferguson Mayor, along with several other community leaders, really don’t want him there anymore, according to Newsmax.
“There’s a lot of concern among a lot of the African American leaders here,” Mayor James Knowles said on Wednesday.
Knowles continued, “I have the concern that we’ll lose sight of this young man and the tragedy and become clearly a national spectacle, instead of focusing on this young man and the issues at hand. Sometimes star power is not always a good thing.”
“We’re at a point now where we think we’ve achieved a level of safety in our community and restoring things back to a relative normalcy and we really have to do that so that we can sit down and talk about these things,” Knowles said, adding, “You’re not going to accomplish anything in the streets screaming. There’s a lot of serious issues that need to be discussed and those have to be discussed with people at a table talking to each other, not screaming at each other.”
“There’s been some comments made by some leaders who don’t want Sharpton’s protest … some African American leaders and some of the African American elected officials.”
Al Sharpton arrived in Ferguson on Tuesday, meeting with the victim’s family and lawyer, then giving a fiery speech to the crowd of protestors to rile them up, fanning the flames of an underlying, yet smoldering, racial tension in the town.
While Sharpton has a right to be wherever he wants to be, and to say whatever he wants to say, sometimes it is wise to pick and choose which battles to fight, and which tactics are suitable. Amping up the charges of racism and perpetuating an already underlying feeling of strife and division is not helpful to community leaders who are trying to let cooler heads prevail.
Hopefully, Sharpton will listen to the Mayor, and other community leaders, and leave the people of Ferguson to deal with their issues by themselves. Something tells me they will reach a peaceable conclusion on their own, without Sharpton’s help, sooner than if he sticks around and tries to inject himself further into the mix.
No comments:
Post a Comment