For many, the hashtag #BlackLivesMatter brings up images of protesters, both black and white, blocking highways and major intersections, playing dead in shopping centers and train stations, hijacking candidates’ rallies, demanding racially segregated safe spaces on college campuses, and hurling bricks and bottles at police every now and then.
Black Lives Matter activist now running for Baltimore mayor @deray part of a group that will meet with President Obama tomorrow. *CORRECTED*
— Byron Tau (@ByronTau) February 17, 2016
Baltimore mayoral candidate @deray and other civil rights leaders to meet with @POTUS (by @jfritze) https://t.co/jg3A37MKr3
— Yvonne Wenger☀️ (@yvonnewenger) February 17, 2016
DeRay Mckesson, one of the founders of the #BlackLivesMatter movement, will reportedly meet with President Obama tomorrow, which really isn’t a surprise. Mckesson, who recently filed to run for mayor of Baltimore, has been trying to hammer out a politically acceptable version of the #BlackLivesMatter agenda by the name of Campaign Zero, and in January tweeted about attending a White House briefing on the administration’s criminal justice platform for the final year of Obama’s presidency.
The president made it clear that he’d make criminal justice reform a priority when he visited El Reno Federal Correctional Institution in Oklahoma last summer, and in September said that #BlackLivesMatter must be taken seriously.
"We as a society, particularly given our history, have to take this seriously." —@POTUS on #BlackLivesMatter https://t.co/yC1T1q9GYm
— White House Archived (@ObamaWhiteHouse) October 22, 2015
Also attending the meeting will be Attorney General Loretta E. Lynch, Al Sharpton, NAACP president Cornell Brooks, and Democratic Rep. John Lewis of Georgia.
The Baltimore Sun says the meeting will be “a first-of-its-kind gathering of leaders who represent different generations of the civil rights movement, and said the discussion will focus on criminal justice reform and building trust between police and neighborhoods.”
No word from the White House or the Baltimore Sun who will be representing the police and their concerns at this trust-building exercise.
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