"This is our city", simply explains, one of the volunteers. Saturday, May 30, Minneapolis (Minnesota) is barely awakened from a night of riots, when a cloud of locals equipped with shovels and brooms is already at work to clean the smoking rubble, just extinguished by the firefighters at dawn.
In Midtown, on Lake Street, and especially at the intersection with Chicago Avenue, the stigma is severe. Five days after the death of George Floyd – an African-American – during his arrest by a white policeman, Derek Chauvin, in South Minneapolis, and only a few hours after the announcement of the indictment of the latter for murder, the destruction have had no respite.
In the absence of the police and the National Guard, occupied, east of the city, to secure the ruins of the police station of the third district, burnt down the day before, and, in the west, to block access to the Fifth district post, still standing, the thugs had all night to spend their rage on the street shops, which burned until the last hours of the night. It was not until around 5 a.m. that firefighters, accompanied by members of the National Guard, appeared. The buildings are already just a memory.
Who is responsible for this disaster? With great unanimity, everyone designated the "Antifas", far left activists. Groups of thugs who allegedly came from other states. A very convenient scarecrow.
Runaway
For traditional representatives of African Americans – one of them, at a press conference with the governor of the state, clearly pointed the finger " whites " -, it helps divert the attention of their community, but also of their own discrepancy with an angry youth who no longer wants to be satisfied with prayers and quotes from Martin Luther King. The local authorities, they, dilute the responsibility for their obvious failure and try to put a corner in a mobilization of which they do not understand the springs. As for President Donald Trump, who claimed without proof that "80% of the rioters came from outside the state", it remains in its usual register.
The runaway hit news channels on Saturday. An MSA retiree from anti-terrorism appeared on the MSNBC learnedly explaining, confined to his office hundreds of miles from Minnesota, that many protesters were wearing " distinctive signs " antifas. And a noise has even spread like wildfire in the traumatized city: it is in fact activists from the far right who have come to throw oil on an already alive fire.
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