George Floyd protests: Minneapolis city council to abolish police department as calls for defunding sweep US
Floyd’s body has been flown to his hometown of Houston, Texas, where mourners will be able to view his casket today
- Minneapolis lawmakers vow to disband police department
- Police arrested over 10,000 protesters, many non-violent
- What does ‘defund the police’ mean?
- Who was Edward Colston and why was his Bristol statue toppled?
I’ve been contacted by a reader who said they grew up near the city of Vidor, in east Texas. He wanted to alert me to a Black Lives Matter protest there on Saturday that consisted of just around 150 people. But it is significant, the reader said, because of Vidor’s reputation.
Here’s an excerpt from the Texas Monthly magazine, which covered the protest:
Vidor has been known for many things—among them the activities of the local Ku Klux Klan; its status as a “sundown town,” in which blacks were not allowed in city limits after dark; and an ugly fight in the early nineties over a federal effort to desegregate public housing in the city, which caused Texas Monthly, in a cover story that year, to describe Vidor as Texas’s “most hate-filled town.” The census estimates it to be 91 percent white.
So when word started to circulate that a Black Lives Matter rally was being planned in Vidor, many people on social media thought it was a trap—and expressed skepticism the event’s supposed planner, 23-year-old Maddy Malone, even existed. (She does.) To black folks with knowledge of the region, who had been told never to stop in Vidor, the idea seemed insane. “A civil rights rally in Vidor” is the punchline to a joke, not a thing that could happen in this world. C’mon.
Big news from the weekend is certainly that the Minneapolis city council pledged to disband the police department. The embattled agency responsible for George Floyd’s death will now be replaced by an alternative model of community-led safety.
The council vote was passed by a supermajority, meaning Mayor Jacob Frey, who opposed the move, cannot override it.
Continue reading…