TOPLINE
Joe Biden, the presumptive Democratic nominee for president, said Thursday afternoon that the death of George Floyd in police custody is having a more significant worldwide impact than even the 1968 assassination of Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.
Civil rights leader Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr. delivers a speech to a crowd of approximately … [+] 7,000 people on May 17, 1967 at UC Berkeley’s Sproul Plaza in Berkeley, California. (Photo by Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images)
Getty
KEY FACTS
“Even Dr. King’s assassination did not have the worldwide impact that George Floyd’s death did,” Biden said.
Speaking at a roundtable discussion in Philadelphia on Thursday, Biden noted that the prevalence of cellphones today has allowed documented footage of police brutality against people of color to spread like it never has previously.
“It’s changed the way everybody’s looking at this,” Biden asserted.
He said the visual evidence provided by these videos has dramatically impacted opinions related to accusations of police brutality.
“Now you got how many people around the country, millions of cell phones,” said Biden. “Look at the millions of people marching around the world.”
He compared the ubiquity of smartphones to the increase in the number of households with a television in the 1960s, and how that reshaped views on racial inequality and the treatment blacks were receiving in America.
“It’s just like television changed the Civil Rights movement for the better when they saw Bull Connor and his dogs ripping the clothes off of elderly black women going to church and firehoses ripping the skin off of young kids,” Biden declared.
Key Background:
In the 17 days since George Floyd, a 46-year-old black man, died in police custody after a white Minneapolis police officer knelt on Floyd’s neck for almost nine minutes, protests and rallies have been held in countless countries around the globe. Germany, the UK, France, Mexico, Australia, Israel, Australia, south-east Asia and parts of Africa are just some of the locations that densely populated demonstrations have taken place. On Wednesday, protesters in Virginia tore down a statue of Confederate President Jefferson Davis on Richmond’s Monument Avenue a day after demonstrators toppled a statue of Christopher Columbus and tossed it into a lake. Protesters in Bristol, U.K. toppled a statue of slave trader Edward Colston on Sunday. Since then, other statues of colonial-era figures have been removed by authorities to be put into museums, including one of Belgium’s King Leopold II, and another of slave trader Robert Milligan in London.
Tangent:
Biden definitively declared, “I do not support defunding police,” in an op-ed Wednesday, as protesters around the country increase their calls for overhauling the criminal justice system, and President Trump attempts to tie Biden to the “Defund the police” movement. Biden, who has faced some criticism from progressives within his own party amid a rising tide of outrage aimed at police brutality, also stated he is proposing an additional $300 million to reinvigorate community policing in America. Shortly after the op-ed was published, Trump tweeted, “This Radical Left agenda is not going to happen. Sleepy Joe Biden will be (already is) pulled all the way Left. Many, like Minneapolis, want to close their Police Departments. Crazy!”
Further Reading:
Joe Biden Declares Definitively, “I Do Not Support Defunding Police” (Forbes)
