Proud Boys Go MAGA Kristallnacht on DC black churches

"you misunderstand those shirts are clearly yellow not brown, you overreach again"

- @basso

 

https://slate.com/human-interest/2020/12/proud-boys-dc-church-attacks-video.html

Aymann Ismail: Tell me about the history of the church, and about the Black Lives Matter banner going up.

Cornell William Brooks: I’ve been a part of the AME church since I was a child. The AME church is a historic church. Many American presidents have spoken from that pulpit. Many distinguished African Americans have spoken from that pulpit. It really is a cathedral of Black Methodists, so to hang a banner that reads Black Lives Matter is more than a statement of solidarity in respect to the present. It’s an affirmation with respect to the past. In other words, our church has long believed that Black Lives Matter. The banner on the outside of the church simply mirrors values, the convictions, on the inside of the church. The United Methodist church is the church from which the AME church was born back in 1787. That is the same year that gave birth to the American Constitution. At least two signers of the American Declaration of Independence started the AME church. The AME Church was essentially born as a protest movement, a civil rights movement. So fast forward to 2020, we have one church, which emerged from another church as a consequence of segregation—to have both been targeted as an act of vandalism and desecration is more than ironic. It’s tragically poignant.


How did you learn that the banner was ripped down?

Yesterday was my wedding anniversary, so I wasn’t paying as much attention to the media as I normally would. I got up Sunday morning in anticipation of listening to the service online. And I look at my phone and I see the video of Asbury United Methodist Church with its banner being burned, and the Metropolitan AME Church with its banner being torn down.

Could you walk us through what happens in the video and your thoughts?

So the first video of Asbury United Methodist Church depicts a Black Lives Matter banner on the ground, taken from the church, being burned, surrounded by people shouting and acting in ways that you would never act in a mosque, temple, synagogue, or church. Just acting like human obscenities. In the second video, you see people snatch a banner from a church that has a little rod iron fence. To get to the banner, you got to jump a fence. So they apparently took a banner that’s a part of a church that’s literally within walking distance of the White House, from literally what’s known as the cathedral of African Methodists. And you have people not acting like vandals or looters—they’re really acting like walking obscenities profaning God’s house. So let’s be clear about this. Some people might say, “Well, he didn’t enter the church.” Well, in my church and in many religious houses, when you step on church grounds, we say you’re standing on sacred ground. So to have these people behaving the way they did, having almost like a racist frenzy—when people in Atlanta were burning Wendy’s and throwing objects at CNN, it was considered violence. Taking what doesn’t belong to you, where other people pray and preach, and destroying it is sacrilege. It’s desecration, not vandalism.​

Where does it come from?

@basso
@tinman

 

u hate to see it:

Police in Washington, D.C., arrested the leader of the far-right extremist group the Proud Boys Monday afternoon in connection with last month’s burning of a Black Lives Matter banner taken from a historic black church in the city. Authorities apprehended Enrique Tarrio, who lives in Miami, when he entered the city ahead of Wednesday’s scheduled rally among fellow far-right advocates of overturning the 2020 election in an effort to keep President Donald Trump in office. While the charge of destruction of property is a misdemeanor, prosecutors are also investigating whether actions of the 36-year-old Tarrio and the Proud Boys—a white nationalist, male-chauvinist organization—constitute a hate crime, which would carry additional penalties.

https://slate.com/news-and-politics...burning-church-black-lives-matter-banner.html​