A crowd of protesters attempted to overthrow the statue of a former US president near the White House Monday evening as police reacted with pepper spray to break up new protests that broke out in Washington.
A wave of national rallies calling for racial justice has swept across the United States since the May 25 death of George Floyd, a 46-year-old black man killed by a white police officer in Minneapolis, Minnesota.
Hundreds of protesters were repelled on Monday by at least 100 members of the security forces after throwing ropes around the statue of Andrew Jackson, the seventh president of the United States, at Lafayette Park.
The word “killer” had been spray painted on the stone base, according to an AFP journalist at the scene.
Jackson, in office from 1829 to 1837, owned more than 500 slaves during his lifetime and was a key figure in the forced relocation of at least 60,000 Native Americans, otherwise known as the Trail of Tears.
“We had ropes, chains, a pulley to pull, and we were going to tie it up and bring down the statue,” a 20-year-old protester told AFP on condition of anonymity.
“The police attacked us. They took over the law,” Raymond Spaine, a 52-year-old black man washing his eyes with saline, told AFP.
A helicopter flew over the gathering of hundreds of people at the recently renamed Black Lives Matter Plaza as police continued to use pepper spray to disperse the protesters.
Earlier this month, police interrupted a peaceful rally in Lafayette Park moments before President Donald Trump left the White House for a photo op in a historic church damaged by arson the previous night.
The clash around the Jackson statue is part of the latest movement in the protests: demolishing statues and monuments to individuals linked to the American racist past.
Protesters first focused on Confederate generals, such as the Robert E Lee statue in Richmond. Protesters in Washington on Friday demolished a statue of Albert Pike, the only statue of a general in the Southern Civil War in the nation’s capital.
But the spotlight has started to turn to figures in American history previously considered untouchable, including the founding fathers George Washington and Thomas Jefferson, both owners of slaves.
Another Jackson statue was vandalized with red paint earlier Monday in Jacksonville, Florida, named after the president.
Trump has given candid instructions to local leaders facing the protests, telling authorities to “dominate the streets,” and he has not apologized for the intensive deployment of forces.
He also threatened to invoke the rarely used Insurrection Act, which would mean the deployment of the armed forces on American soil.
(With the exception of the title, this story was not edited by GalacticGaming staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)
