The Limits of Protest in Charlotte

“ ‘Peace’—that language can be tricky,” the Rev. William Barber II said in Charlotte yesterday afternoon. Barber, a big man in his early fifties, is the president of the N.A.A.C.P. in North Carolina, and for the past three years he has been locked in conflict with the state’s Republican governor, Pat McCrory, over voting rights, the minimum wage, and social services for the poor. Barber, whose church is in Goldsboro, a mostly black city about an hour’s drive from Raleigh, had arrived in Charlotte just as the protests over the police killing of Keith Lamont Scott, on Tuesday, grew more intense. He was there in part to observe, but also to make the case that what was happening was not a riot but a protest—that it was mostly controlled, that it had a political history, that the calls for “peace” by those in power were, in fact, just pleas for the protesters to calm themselves without winning any concessions.

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

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Afternoon Cartoon: Friday, September 23rd
Morning Cartoon: Thursday, September 22nd
Afternoon Cartoon: Wednesday, September 21st