Family members of Jacob Blake, the Black man shot and gravely wounded by a white police officer in Kenosha last Sunday, led a large rally in the small Wisconsin city on Saturday afternoon, with chants of “Seven bullets, seven days” ringing out to mark the number of shots the young father reportedly took to his back. A crowd of around 1,000 heard Wisconsin Democratic congresswoman Gwen Moore address the rally, saying “I am mad as hell” about the injury that left Blake fighting for his life in the local hospital. Relatives including Blake’s father, Jacob Blake Sr, and sister, Letetra Widman, spoke, having not long returned from speaking at Friday’s huge “get your knee off our necks” civil rights march in Washington, DC, on the anniversary of Martin Luther King’s “I have a dream” address in 1963. The Washington rally and march was organized to protest the killing of George Floyd by a white police officer who knelt on his neck in Minneapolis in May during an attempted arrest. Some protesters had marched from Milwaukee, Wisconsin, 40 miles (64km) north of Kenosha, to the capital. But it served as a protest for the wounding of Blake and a demand for the end of years of racist attacks and police killings of African Americans. The rally in Kenosha on Saturday was peaceful but impassioned, following several days of calm demonstrations in the city since Tuesday night’s violent clash, in which armed white agitators appeared in town and shot at Black Lives Matter protesters, leading to two deaths. Jacob Blake Sr decried the local police to the crowd in Kenosha: “What gave them the right to think that my son was an animal?” he said. He pledged the protests would go on.“We’re not going to stop. We’re still suffering because there are two justice systems. There’s one for that white boy that walked down the street and killed two people and blew another man’s arm off. Then there’s one for my son,” he said. He was referring to Kyle Rittenhouse, the 17-year-old who appeared on the streets with an assault rifle on Tuesday night and walked through police lines after shooting protesters, with no consequences until he turned himself in in Illinois 12 hours later.


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Article Link: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2...


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