On Wednesday night, demonstrators on the streets of Oklahoma City waved Confederate flags as President Obama’s motorcade arrived, a stark scene captured by a New York Times photographer.
The New York Times @nytimes 15 hours ago
The scene as President Obama’s motorcade arrived at his hotel in Oklahoma City tonight. Photo by @dougmillsnyt
What a gruesome, terrible place this country is in so many ways. The Declaration of Independence was written by a slaveowner, a guy who kept his daughters’ half-sister as a slave and impregnated her at least once. We’re all about the human rights and we’re racist as fuck.
The incident comes in the midst of a renewed national push to remove the battle flag from government sites after the massacre inside a historic black church in Charleston, South Carolina, last month. Similar counter rallies embracing the slogan “Confederate Lives Matter” were scheduled in Oklahoma City ahead of the president’s visit.
Following the attack in Charleston, Obama delivered an impassioned eulogy for Rev. Clementa Pinckney, a South Carolina state senator and one of the nine people murdered, in which the president called the flag’s enduring presence in the South a “reminder of systemic oppression and racial subjugation.”
Therefore it’s urgent to say “but racism is part of our great history and heritage.”