Anti-racism becomes a global movement as cities around the world are flooded with protests
While other social causes are on pause due to the pandemic, the anti-racism demonstrations – one seen here in San Francisco on June 7, 2020 – have become the first global protest movement of the COVID-19 era.Shouts of George Floyd’s name, and the slogan “Black Lives Matter,” became a global phenomenon during the weekend, as anti-racism protesters took to the streets of cities around the world.
Earlier, demonstrators had knelt on the toppled statue’s neck in an apparent reaction to how Mr. Floyd was killed. There were similar scenes in Brussels, where a statue of King Leopold II, a 19th-century monarch who oversaw the brutal exploitation of what is now the Democratic Republic of the Congo, was defaced with the word “shame.” Millions of Congolese were killed during a campaign to extract rubber from Belgium’s then-colony, but on Sunday, protesters climbed the statue – which stands in front of the Canadian embassy in the city – and held aloft the flag of the DRC.
In Berlin, 93 people were arrested and 28 police officers suffered minor injuries during scuffles that broke out near the end of a rally on the city’s Alexanderplatz. Marchers in Rome took a knee for eight minutes and 46 seconds of silence, the precise amount of time Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin had knelt on Mr. Floyd’s neck before the Black man died.
But Bristol Mayor Marvin Rees – who is the first directly elected mixed-race mayor in Europe – said that while he could not condone criminal activity, he also couldn’t say that he was sad to see the statue gone.
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