NEW ORLEANS (AP) - Hundreds of people marched Saturday through New Orleans’ City Park as part of a continuing movement of protests against racial injustice and police brutality in America.
With chants of “No Justice, No Peace,” the crowd marched as others have across the nation, leaving the park in the early afternoon under gray skies and light drizzle.
“You can’t take a rain check on black lives,” the marchers chanted as the rain began falling harder, The Advocate reported.
Saturday’s rally came a day after thousands gathered around Jackson Square in the French Quarter for an hours-long protest over the death of George Floyd in Minneapolis and others at the hands of police. The crowd filled much of the square in front of St. Louis Cathedral and spilled onto Decatur Street, the main thoroughfare in the Quarter that had been closed to traffic by police.
As night fell, the demonstration ended peacefully.
Jackson Square itself was blocked off to the public, as demonstrators called for the removal of the statue at its center and other Confederate symbols across America.
“We know that we cannot exist in a place of justice and equity for black and brown and marginalized and oppressed people if we are raising up our boys and girls and our young siblings to look at symbols that represent a system that’s against them,” said one of the demonstrators from New Orleans who goes by the name A Scribe Called Quess.
He told the crowd, many holding signage with pictures and names of black men killed by police, “The patterns and the trends ain’t changed much over 300 years.”
Protests in New Orleans have been mostly peaceful, except for one held Wednesday night, when demonstrators attempted to push past a police line on the Crescent City Connection bridge, and officers deployed two tear gas canisters to disperse the crowd.
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Associated Press writer Stacey Plaisance contributed to this report.
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