Days after five police officers were shot by a sniper in Dallas who supported the Black Power Movement, anti-police protesters in Chicago raised the black power salute.
The protest occurred on Saturday afternoon during the Taste of Chicago festival, where hundreds of Chicago restaurants — from gourmet to fast food — gather.
The protesters raised one of their hands in the air with a closed fist, a gesture first made famous by Tommie Smith and John Carlos in the 1968 Olympics.
On Micah Johnson’s Facebook page he also made the same salute, TheDC reported.
“Blacks lives what?!” the protesters, numbering in the hundreds, screamed. “Black lives matter!”
“Who shuts it down?” the protesters screamed repeatedly. “We shuts it down!”
Another chant was, “Hands up! Don’t shoot!”
This mantra has become a staple of the Black Lives Matter movement. It originated from a false story which purported that Michael Brown had his hands up and said “don’t shoot” in his confrontation with officer Darren Wilson. That story later turned out to be a lie.
“Sixteen shots and a cover-up,” the protesters screamed repeatedly at another point, a reference to the shooting of Laquan MacDonald in Chicago.
“We out here for Travon Martin; we out her for Mike Brown,” one of the protesters screamed at another point, alluding to two of the most high profile racially related deaths.
Another protester screamed of another controversial police related shooting: “We out her for my friend Warren Robinson who was shot by the CPD (Chicago Police Department); they shot him sixteen times.” Robinson was killed by Chicago police in July 2014.
Besides the McDonald killing the Chicago Police Department has a long sordid history involving police misconduct.
For near twenty years then Police Commander John Burge ran a torture ring where hundreds of individuals gave false confessions after being tortured.
Mark Clements is a victim of that ring. He spent nearly three decades in prison after being tortured and falsely confessing to a fire which killed four people when he was sixteen years old.
He was at the protest and told TheDC that more than one hundred individuals remain in prison based on false confessions from Burge’s torture ring.
The protests mirror those in other cities in the wake of police shootings of Philando Castlio and Alton Sterling this past week.
While some thought the protesters would let up after Johnson used a sniper rifle to kill five police officers in Dallas, anti-police protest were held in cities like St. Louis, Atlanta, New York, and Phoenix over the weekend.