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The New York Times slammed as 'woke police' for report targeting Mount Rushmore The New York Times has faced intense backlash over its report about the history of Mount Rushmore.
July 02, 2020 at 06:12AM
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Trump at Rushmore: Jets and Fireworks, but Masks Optional
When President Donald Trump speaks at the Mount Rushmore national memorial before the first fireworks show there in years, he'll stand before a crowd of thousands of people who won't be required to socially distance or wear masks despite the coronavirus pandemic.
Friday night's event, with 7,500 tickets issued, will feature a patriotic display at a monument known as "the Shrine of Democracy" in a swath of country largely loyal to Trump. But it has also sparked controversy and concern. Public health experts say the lack of social distancing and enforced mask wearing could lead to a surge in the disease, while the fireworks risk setting the surrounding forest ablaze.
Native American tribal leaders and activist groups have also spoken out against the memorial, saying it desecrates an area they consider sacred and that the mountains on which it is carved were wrongfully taken from them.
Limit on journalists
Event organizers said this week that space was so tight they had to strictly limit the number of journalists who could cover it. The 7,500 people who received tickets will be ushered into two seating areas: A group of about 3,000 will watch from an amphitheater and viewing decks near the base of the monument, while the rest will have to bring lawn chairs to watch the fireworks from a gravel parking lot outside the memorial grounds.
Many without tickets are expected to crowd into other areas around the monument where they can get a glimpse of the president and the fireworks. The pyrotechnics alone will run $350,000, with the state bearing the cost.
Republican Governor Kristi Noem, a Trump ally who has largely avoided ordering restrictions during the pandemic, said this week that the event wouldn't require social distancing or masks, though masks will be available to anyone who wants one. She cast it as a personal choice for attendees, telling Fox News: "Every one of them has the opportunity to make a decision that they're comfortable with."
Most of the thousands of attendees at Trump's June 20 rally in Tulsa, Oklahoma, didn't wear masks or practice social distancing, though unlike the Mount Rushmore event, that one was held indoors, where experts say the virus is more likely to spread.
South Dakota has had declining rates of confirmed cases of COVID-19 and hospitalizations from the disease over the last two weeks.
But surges in cases in many Southern and Western states prompted Dr. Anthony Fauci, the government's top infectious-disease expert, to warn senators on Tuesday that the country is "going in the wrong direction" and needs to redouble efforts to get people to take precautions against infections, especially by wearing masks.
Dr. Benjamin C. Aaker, president of the South Dakota State Medical Association, told The Associated Press that events like the Rushmore fireworks don't just pose a risk to people who attend. The health of the entire community could be threatened if people unknowingly catch the virus at the event and then spread it at their homes and workplaces, he said.
Western South Dakota has seen less of the virus than other parts of the state so far, with 518 confirmed cases and 16 deaths in Pennington County, where Mount Rushmore is located. But Aaker said that should not lull people into thinking the region is safe from a surge in cases.
"If we continue to have these events, we worry that it's going to be a much more significant outbreak," he said. "We know that if that outbreak were to occur, it would not take very long to run out of [hospital] beds and to run out of personal protective equipment."
Threat of fire
The pandemic isn't the only thing that has some locals concerned. Several former officials who oversaw the wildfire danger at Mount Rushmore have spoken out against the pyrotechnics display. Fireworks displays were canceled after 2009 because a mountain pine beetle infestation had dried out trees near the memorial and in the national forest that surrounds it.
"Some people are very excited about it, they were sad to see the fireworks end," said Cheryl Schreir, who retired from serving as the superintendent at Mount Rushmore National Memorial last year. "But the people who truly understand the preservation and protection understand that this is not a good idea to light fireworks in the middle of a forest."
Schreir said that testing by the National Park Service has also revealed that the drinking water at the memorial has high levels of perchlorate, a chemical found in fireworks.
The National Park Service conducted an environmental assessment to study the potential impact of the fireworks and found that it would not significantly damage the memorial or forests around it. But it did note that in a dry year, pyrotechnics could start a large wildfire that would impact the entire ecosystem and landscape of the monument.
Bill Gabbert, a local wildfire expert who oversaw wildfire management at Mount Rushmore between 1998 and 2003, said conditions are dry this year and the region is experiencing a moderate drought. He described how in previous years, park officials would have dozens of firefighters on site who had to work through the night, scrambling up steep, rocky slopes to put out small fires from the fireworks.
Event organizers are monitoring the fire conditions leading up to the event and will decide Friday whether the fireworks will be safe. The National Park Service has also carried out controlled fires in the memorial grounds to burn off dry material. Organizers are working with a "Go/No Go" checklist, but the National Park Service has not released the checklist, citing security concerns.
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Gun Rights Activist Defeats Five-Term Congressman in Colorado Primary
A gun rights advocate and restaurant owner who defied her state's COVID restrictions has defeated an incumbent five-term Colorado Congressman, winning the right to run for the seat in November.
Lauren Boebert defeated Colorado U.S. Representative Scott Tipton in Tuesday's Republican Party primary for western Colorado's Third Congressional District. The Washington Post reports Tipton was trailing Boebert by 8,700 votes when he conceded the race.
Boebert ran a campaign in which she accused Tipton of not being sufficiently supportive of U.S. President Donald Trump, even though the president had endorsed Tipton, and Tipton is the Trump campaign's co-chair for Colorado.
Trump congratulated Boebert on Twitter, saying, "Congratulations on a really great win."
She will run in November's general election against Diane Mitsch Bush, a former state lawmaker who won the Democratic nomination on Tuesday by defeating businessman James Iacino. Bush lost to Tipton in the 2018 race for the seat.
Boebert made a name for herself earlier this year after loudly protesting Democratic Governor Jared Polis's orders to close businesses to fight the coronavirus pandemic. She opened her Shooters Grill gun-themed restaurant in defiance of closure orders.
Earlier this year, Boebert said in an interview that she was "very familiar" with the QAnon far-right conspiracy theory, but she stopped short of saying she was a follower.
QAnon followers believe that Trump is fighting enemies in the "deep state" and a child sex trafficking ring run by satanic pedophiles and cannibals.
The QAnon name comes from online clues purportedly posted by a high-ranking government official known as "Q."
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White House Adviser Supports Bar Closings as US COVID Cases Surge
A top White House adviser voiced support Wednesday for closing bars as the U.S. faces a new surge in coronavirus cases partly fueled by younger people socializing shoulder to shoulder at drinking establishments.
At least 19 of the 50 U.S. states have paused reopening their economies as more than 40,000 new COVID-19 cases have been reported in each of several recent days. In 37 states, the number of confirmed cases is increasing, not falling as had mostly been the case.
Governors in at least six states have ordered bars closed after weeks ago saying they could reopen. New York Governor Andrew Cuomo said Wednesday that indoor dining in New York City "will be postponed until the facts change and it is safe and prudent."
White House counselor Kellyanne Conway, in an interview on Fox News's "Fox & Friends" show, cast decisions facing states as something of a choice between closing bars now and being able to reopen schools in August and September.
"I have something to say: We need to have priorities in our states and in this nation," she said. "Do you want to open the bars now, or do you want to open the schools and the day-care centers in a few short weeks?"
She concluded, "I vote for the latter, and not just because I have four school-aged children but because we know that opening our schools and getting our children back to their normal routines and their structural support is really the key.
"I think it's the essential nervous system to this nation, and then people will be able to go back to work," she said.
Concern from Fauci
But the decisions for U.S. school districts and parents of school-age children are often not easy.
School and university officials throughout the country are grappling with how – and whether – to reopen schools in a few weeks that were abruptly closed in March as the coronavirus pandemic swept the country and mostly forced teachers and professors to fitfully conduct their classes online. Such decisions for the upcoming school term, many still in the making, vary widely throughout the country.
Outside Washington, in one suburban school district, parents were given a choice for the fall term: have their children taught full-time online or have them go back to school two days a week and watch classes at home on three days. Then the teachers balked at the plan for even limited in-school instruction.
Dr. Anthony Fauci, the top U.S. infectious disease specialist, told lawmakers on Tuesday that he is "quite concerned" about surges of coronavirus cases in the country.
"We are now having 40,000 new cases a day," Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, told a Senate health committee. "I would not be surprised if we go up to 100,000 a day if this does not turn around. And so, I am very concerned."
Optimism from Pence
Nonetheless, Vice President Mike Pence, who heads the White House Coronavirus Task Force, emphasized the positives in the current state of the outbreak ahead of his trip Wednesday to Arizona, one of the areas with the biggest spike in infections.
"Fatalities are at the lowest level since March," Pence told reporters Tuesday during a visit to U.S. Public Health Service headquarters. "We're in a much better place than four months ago, even two months ago."
In addition to Arizona, Pence is also visiting Texas this week, another of the hardest-hit states.
At the Tuesday hearing, Republican Senator Lamar Alexander stressed the importance of reopening schools and called on President Donald Trump and the public to wear masks to help prevent further increases in the spread of COVID-19.
"Unfortunately, this simple lifesaving practice has become part of a political debate that says if you're for Trump, you don't wear a mask. If you're against Trump, you do," Alexander said in opening remarks. "That is why I have suggested the president should occasionally wear a mask, even though there are not many occasions when it is necessary for him to do so."
Alexander added that Trump "has millions of admirers," who "would follow his lead."
White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany was asked about that during a Tuesday briefing.
"The president is the most tested man in America" for COVID-19, and thus does not need to wear a mask, she replied.
The U.S., with more than 127,000 coronavirus deaths and more than 2.6 million confirmed cases, has been the hardest-hit country in the world.
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Hollowed Out US Public Health System Faces More Cuts Amid Virus
The U.S. public health system has been starved for decades and lacks the resources to confront the worst health crisis in a century.
Marshaled against a virus that has sickened at least 2.6 million in the U.S., killed more than 126,000 people and cost tens of millions of jobs and $3 trillion in federal rescue money, state and local government health workers on the ground are sometimes paid so little, they qualify for public aid.
They track the coronavirus on paper records shared via fax. Working seven-day weeks for months on end, they fear pay freezes, public backlash and even losing their jobs.
Since 2010, spending for state public health departments has dropped by 16% per capita and spending for local health departments has fallen by 18%, according to a KHN and Associated Press analysis of government spending on public health. At least 38,000 state and local public health jobs have disappeared since the 2008 recession, leaving a skeletal workforce for what was once viewed as one of the world's top public health systems.
KHN, also known as Kaiser Health News, and AP interviewed more than 150 public health workers, policymakers and experts, analyzed spending records from hundreds of state and local health departments, and surveyed statehouses. On every level, the investigation found, the system is underfunded and under threat, unable to protect the nation's health.
Robert Redfield, the director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, said in an interview in April that his "biggest regret" was "that our nation failed over decades to effectively invest in public health."
So when this outbreak arrived — and when, according to public health experts, the federal government bungled its response — hollowed-out state and local health departments were ill-equipped to step into the breach.
Over time, their work had received so little support that they found themselves without direction, disrespected, ignored, even vilified. The desperate struggle against COVID-19 became increasingly politicized and grew more difficult.
States, cities and counties in dire straits have begun laying off and furloughing their limited staff, and even more devastation looms, as states reopen and cases surge. Historically, even when money pours in following crises such as Zika and H1N1, it disappears after the emergency subsides. Officials fear the same thing is happening now.
"We don't say to the fire department, 'Oh, I'm sorry. There were no fires last year, so we're going to take 30% of your budget away.' That would be crazy, right?" said Dr. Gianfranco Pezzino, the health officer in Shawnee County, Kansas. "But we do that with public health, day in and day out."
Ohio's Toledo-Lucas County Health Department spent $17 million, or $40 per person, in 2017.
Jennifer Gottschalk, 42, works for the county as an environmental health supervisor. When the coronavirus struck, the county's department was so short-staffed that her duties included overseeing campground and pool inspections, rodent control and sewage programs, while also supervising outbreak preparedness for a community of more than 425,000 people.
When Gottschalk and five colleagues fell ill with COVID-19, she found herself fielding calls about a COVID-19 case from her hospital bed, then working through her home isolation. She only stopped when her coughing was too severe to talk on calls.
"You have to do what you have to do to get the job done," Gottschalk said.
Now, after months of working with hardly a day off, she says the job is wearing on her. So many lab reports on coronavirus cases came in, the office fax machine broke. She faces a backlash from the community over coronavirus restrictions and there are countless angry phone calls.
Things could get worse; possible county budget cuts loom.
But Toledo-Lucas is no outlier. Public health ranks low on the nation's financial priority list. Nearly two-thirds of Americans live in counties that spend more than twice as much on policing as they spend on nonhospital health care, which includes public health.
More than three-quarters of Americans live in states that spend less than $100 per person annually on public health. Spending ranges from $32 in Louisiana to $263 in Delaware, according to data provided to KHN and AP by the State Health Expenditure Dataset project.
That money represents less than 1.5% of most states' total spending, with half of it passed down to local health departments.
The share of spending devoted to public health belies its multidimensional role. Agencies are legally bound to provide a broad range of services, from vaccinations and restaurant inspections to protection against infectious disease. Distinct from the medical care system geared toward individuals, the public health system focuses on the health of communities at large.
"Public health loves to say: When we do our job, nothing happens. But that's not really a great badge," said Scott Becker, chief executive officer of the Association of Public Health Laboratories. "We test 97% of America's babies for metabolic or other disorders. We do the water testing. You like to swim in the lake and you don't like poop in there? Think of us."
But the public doesn't see the disasters they thwart. And it's easy to neglect the invisible.
A history of deprivation
The local health department was a well-known place in the 1950s and 1960s, when Harris Pastides, president emeritus of the University of South Carolina, was growing up in New York City.
"My mom took me for my vaccines. We would get our injections there for free. We would get our polio sugar cubes there for free," said Pastides, an epidemiologist. "In those days, the health departments had a highly visible role in disease prevention."
The United States' decentralized public health system, which matches federal funding and expertise with local funding, knowledge and delivery, was long the envy of the world, said Saad Omer, director of the Yale Institute for Global Health.
"A lot of what we're seeing right now could be traced back to the chronic funding shortages," Omer said. "The way we starve our public health system, the way we have tried to do public health outcomes on the cheap in this country."
In Scott County, Indiana, when preparedness coordinator Patti Hall began working at the health department 34 years ago, it ran a children's clinic and a home health agency with several nurses and aides. But over time, the children's clinic lost funding and closed. Medicare changes paved the way for private services to replace the home health agency. Department staff dwindled in the 1990s and early 2000s. The county was severely outgunned when rampant opioid use and needle sharing sparked an outbreak of HIV in 2015.
Besides just five full-time and one part-time county public health positions, there was only one doctor in the outbreak's epicenter of Austin. Indiana's then-Gov. Mike Pence, now leading the nation's coronavirus response as vice president, waited 29 days after the outbreak was announced to sign an executive order allowing syringe exchanges. At the time, a state official said that only five people from agencies across Indiana were available to help with HIV testing in the county.
The HIV outbreak exploded into the worst ever to hit rural America, infecting more than 230 people.
At times, the federal government has promised to support local public health efforts, to help prevent similar calamities. But those promises were ephemeral.
Two large sources of money established after Sept. 11, 2001 — the Public Health Emergency Preparedness program and the Hospital Preparedness Program — were gradually chipped away.
The Affordable Care Act established the Prevention and Public Health Fund, which was supposed to reach $2 billion annually by 2015. The Obama administration and Congress raided it to pay for other priorities, including a payroll tax cut. The Trump administration is pushing to repeal the ACA, which would eliminate the fund, said Carolyn Mullen, senior vice president of government affairs and public relations at the Association of State and Territorial Health Officials.
Former Iowa Sen. Tom Harkin, a Democrat who championed the fund, said he was furious when the Obama White House took billions from it, breaking what he said was an agreement.
"I haven't spoken to Barack Obama since," Harkin said.
If the fund had remained untouched, an additional $12.4 billion would eventually have flowed to local and state health departments.
But local and state leaders also did not prioritize public health over the years.
In Florida, for example, 2% of state spending goes to public health. Spending by local health departments in the state fell 39%, from a high of $57 in inflation-adjusted dollars per person in the late 1990s to $35 per person last year.
In North Carolina, Wake County's public health workforce dropped from 882 in 2007 to 614 a decade later, even as the population grew by 30%.
In Detroit, the health department had 700 employees in 2009, then was effectively disbanded during the city's bankruptcy proceedings. It's been built back up, but today still has only 200 workers for 670,000 residents.
Many departments rely heavily on disease-specific grant funding, creating unstable and temporary positions. The CDC's core budget, some of which goes to state and local health departments, has essentially remained flat for a decade. Federal money currently accounts for 27% of local public health spending.
Years of such financial pressure increasingly pushed workers in this predominantly female workforce toward retirement or the private sector and kept potential new hires away.
More than a fifth of public health workers in local or regional departments outside big cities earned $35,000 or less a year in 2017, as did 9% in big city departments, according to research by the Association of State and Territorial Health Officials and the de Beaumont Foundation.
Even before the pandemic, nearly half of public health workers planned to retire or leave their organizations for other reasons in the next five years. Poor pay topped the list of reasons.
Armed with a freshly minted bachelor's degree, Julia Crittendon took a job two years ago as a disease intervention specialist with Kentucky's state health department. She spent her days gathering detailed information about people's sexual partners to fight the spread of HIV and syphilis. She tracked down phone numbers and drove hours to pick up reluctant clients.
The mother of three loved the work, but made so little money that she qualified for Medicaid, the federal-state insurance program for America's poorest. Seeing no opportunity to advance, she left.
"We're like the redheaded stepchildren, the forgotten ones," said Crittendon, 46.
Such low pay is endemic, with some employees qualifying for the nutrition program for new moms and babies that they administer. People with the training for many public health jobs, which can include a bachelor's or master's degree, can make much more money in the private health care sector, robbing the public departments of promising recruits.
Dr. Tom Frieden, a former CDC director, said the agency "intentionally underpaid people" in a training program that sent early-career professionals to state and local public health departments to build the workforce.
"If we paid them at the very lowest level at the federal scale," he said in an interview, "they would have to take a 10-20% pay cut to continue on at the local health department."
As low pay sapped the workforce, budget cuts sapped services.
In Alaska, the Division of Public Health's spending dropped 9% from 2014 to 2018 and staffing fell by 82 positions in a decade to 426. Tim Struna, chief of public health nursing in Alaska, said declines in oil prices in the mid-2010s led the state to make cuts to public health nursing services. They eliminated well-child exams for children over 6, scaled back searches for the partners of people with certain sexually transmitted infections and limited reproductive health services to people 29 and younger.
Living through an endless stream of such cuts and their aftermath, those workers on the ground grew increasingly worried about mustering the "surge capacity" to expand beyond their daily responsibilities to handle inevitable emergencies.
When the fiercest of enemies showed up in the U.S. this year, the depleted public health army struggled to hold it back.
A decimated surge capacity
As the public health director for the Kentucky River District Health Department in rural Appalachia, Scott Lockard is battling the pandemic with 3G cell service, paper records and one-third of the employees the department had 20 years ago.
He redeployed his nurse administrator to work round-the-clock on contact tracing, alongside the department's school nurse and the tuberculosis and breastfeeding coordinator. His home health nurse, who typically visits older patients, now works on preparedness plans. But residents aren't making it easy on them.
"They're not wearing masks, and they're throwing social distancing to the wind," Lockard said in mid-June, as cases surged. "We're paying for it."
Even with more staff since the HIV outbreak, Indiana's Scott County Health Department employees worked evenings, weekends and holidays to deal with the pandemic, including outbreaks at a food packing company and a label manufacturer. Indiana spends $37 a person on public health.
"When you get home, the phone never stops, the emails and texts never stop," said Hall, the preparedness coordinator.
All the while, she and her colleagues worry about keeping HIV under control and preventing drug overdoses from rising. Other health problems don't just disappear because there is a pandemic.
"We've been used to being able to `MacGyver' everything on a normal day, and this is not a normal day," said Amanda Mehl, the public health administrator for Boone County, Illinois, citing a TV show.
Pezzino, whose department in Kansas serves Topeka and Shawnee County, said he had been trying to hire an epidemiologist, who would study, track and analyze data on health issues, since he came to the department 14 years ago. Finally, less than three years ago, they hired one. She just left, and he thinks it will be nearly impossible to find another.
While epidemiologists are nearly universal in departments serving large populations, hardly any departments serving smaller populations have one. Only 28% of local health departments have an epidemiologist or statistician.
Strapped departments are now forced to spend money on contact tracers, masks and gloves to keep their workers safe and to do basic outreach.
Melanie Hutton, administrator for the Cooper County Public Health Center in rural Missouri, pointed out the local ambulance department got $18,000, and the fire and police departments got masks to fight COVID-19.
"For us, not a nickel, not a face mask," she said. "We got (5) gallons of homemade hand sanitizer made by the prisoners."
Public health workers are leaving in droves. At least 34 state and local public health leaders have announced their resignation, retired or been fired in 17 states since April, a KHN/AP review found. Others face threats and armed demonstrators.
Ohio's Gottschalk said the backlash has been overwhelming.
"Being yelled at by residents for almost two hours straight last week on regulations I cannot control left me feeling completely burned out," she said in mid-June.
Many are putting their health at risk. In Prince George's County, Maryland, public health worker Chantee Mack died after, family and co-workers believe, she and several colleagues contracted the disease in the office.
A difficult road ahead
Pence, in an op-ed in The Wall Street Journal on June 16, said the public health system was "far stronger" than it was when coronavirus hit.
It's true that the federal government this year has allocated billions for public health in response to the pandemic, according to the Association of State and Territorial Health Officials. That includes more than $13 billion to state and local health departments, for activities including contact tracing, infection control and technology upgrades.
A KHN/AP review found that some state and local governments are also pledging more money for public health. Alabama's budget for next year, for example, includes $35 million more for public health than it did this year.
But overall, spending is about to be slashed again as the boom-bust cycle continues.
In most states, the new budget year begins July 1, and furloughs, layoffs and pay freezes have already begun in some places. Tax revenues evaporated during lockdowns, all but ensuring there will be more. At least 14 states have already cut health department budgets or positions or were actively considering such cuts in June, according to a KHN/AP review.
Since the pandemic began, Michigan temporarily cut most of its state health workers' hours by one-fifth. Pennsylvania required more than 65 of its 1,200 public health workers to go on temporary leave, and others lost their jobs. Knox County, Tennessee, furloughed 26 out of 260 workers for eight weeks.
Frieden, formerly of the CDC, said it's "stunning" that the U.S. is furloughing public health workers amid a pandemic. The country should demand the resources for public health, he said, just the way it does for the military.
"This is about protecting Americans," Frieden said.
Cincinnati temporarily furloughed approximately 170 health department employees.
Robert Brown, chair of Cincinnati's Primary Care Board, questions why police officers and firefighters didn't face similar furloughs at the time or why residents were willing to pay hundreds of millions in taxes over decades for the Bengals' football stadium.
"How about investing in something that's going to save some lives?" he asked.
In 2018, Boston spent five times as much on its police department as its public health department. The city recently pledged to transfer $3 million from its approximately $60 million police overtime budget to its public health commission.
Looking ahead, more cuts are coming. Possible budget shortfalls in Brazos County, Texas, may force the health department to limit its mosquito-surveillance program and eliminate up to one-fifth of its staff and one-quarter of immunization clinics.
Months into the pandemic response, health departments are still trying to ramp up to fight COVID-19. Cases are surging in states including Texas, Arizona and Florida.
Meanwhile, childhood vaccinations began plunging in the second half of March, according to a CDC study analyzing supply orders. Officials worry whether they will be able to get kids back up to date in the coming months. In Detroit, the childhood vaccination rate dipped below 40%, as clinics shuttered and people stayed home, creating the potential for a different outbreak.
Cutting or eliminating non-COVID activities is dangerous, said E. Oscar Alleyne, chief of programs and services at the National Association of County and City Health Officials. Cuts to programs such as diabetes control and senior nutrition make already vulnerable communities even more vulnerable, which makes them more likely to suffer serious complications from COVID. Everything is connected, he said.
It could be a year before there's a widely available vaccine. Meanwhile, other illnesses, including mental health problems, are smoldering.
The people who spend their lives working in public health say the temporary coronavirus funds won't fix the eroded foundation entrusted with protecting the nation's health as thousands continue to die.
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G4 virus
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Harmeet Dhillon: Supreme Court's Espinoza ruling – religious freedom, school choice win. Here's how Tuesday the Supreme Court slapped down a state law that denied state-sponsored scholarships to faith-based schools on the basis of their religious affiliation.
July 02, 2020 at 12:50AM
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Confederate Flag Losing Prominence 155 Years After Civil War
Long a symbol of pride to some and hatred to others, the Confederate battle flag is losing its place of official prominence 155 years after rebellious Southern states lost a war to perpetuate slavery.
Mississippi's Republican-controlled Legislature voted Sunday to remove the Civil War emblem from the state flag, a move that was both years in the making and notable for its swiftness amid a national debate over racial inequality following the police killing of George Floyd in Minnesota.
Mississippi's was the last state flag to include the design.
NASCAR, born in the South and still popular in the region, banned the rebel banner from races earlier this month, and some Southern localities have removed memorials and statues dedicated to the Confederate cause. A similar round of Confederate flag and memorial removals was prompted five years ago by the slaying of nine Black people at a church in Charleston, South Carolina. A white supremacist was convicted of the shooting.
Make no mistake: The Confederate flag isn't anywhere close to being gone from the South. Just drive along highways where Sons of Confederate Veterans members have erected gigantic battle flags or stop by Dixie General Store, where Bob Castello makes a living selling hundreds of rebel-themed shirts, hats, car accessories and more in an east Alabama county named for a Confederate officer, Gen. Patrick Cleburne.
"Business is very good right now," Castello said Monday.
But even Castello is surprised by how demonstrations over police brutality became a wave that seems to be washing over generations of adoration for the Confederate battle flag by some. He wonders what might happen next.
"This could go on and on," he said. "There's just no limit to where they could go with it."
The Confederacy was founded in Montgomery in 1861 with a Constitution that prohibited laws "denying or impairing the right of property in negro slaves." The South lost, slavery ended, and Confederate sympathizers almost ever since have argued the war wasn't just about slavery, instead advocating the "lost cause" version centered around state's rights, Southern nobility and honor.
To some, the Confederate battle flag — with its red background, blue X and white stars — is a down-home symbol of Southern heritage and pride. The band Alabama, one of the top-selling country music groups ever, included the banner on five album covers in the 1980s and '90s while at the height of its popularity.
Patty Howard, who was visiting a huge carving of Confederate Civil War generals at Georgia's Stone Mountain Park with her husband, Toby, on Monday, said they aren't offended by the flag, but they also don't fly it at their home in Hendersonville, North Carolina.
"I don't see it as related to slavery," said Howard, 71. "To us, it just represents being from the South."
But the flag has a dark side. It has been waved for decades by the Ku Klux Klan, neo-Nazis and other white supremacists who oppose equal rights. The banner's use by such groups, combined with a widening sense that it is time to retire the symbol of a defeated nation once and for all, has led to change.
"The argument over the 1894 flag has become as divisive as the flag itself and it's time to end it," Mississippi Gov. Tate Reeves said of the state's current flag, which was adopted by lawmakers at a time when white supremacists were actively squelching political power that African Americans had gained after the Civil War.
Georgia — which added the battle emblem to its state flag in 1956 in response to U.S. Supreme Court decisions to desegregate public schools — adopted a flag without a rebel banner in 2003.
Alabama flew the battle flag atop its state Capitol until 1993, when it was removed following protests by Black legislators. Additional Confederate flags were removed from around a massive Confederate memorial just outside the building in 2015, when South Carolina also removed its battle flag from the state Capitol grounds after the shooting.
It has taken longer in Mississippi. Not long after the Charleston shooting, House Speaker Philip Gunn became the state's first prominent Republican to say the Confederate symbol on the state flag was morally offensive and must be changed. People posted signs with the slogan, "Keep the Flag. Change the speaker," but Gunn was easily reelected twice.
During the past month, Gunn and Mississippi's first-year lieutenant governor, Republican Delbert Hosemann, persuaded a diverse, bipartisan coalition of legislators that changing the flag was inevitable and they should be part of it.
Hosemann is the great-grandson of a Confederate soldier, Lt. Rhett Miles, who was captured at Vicksburg and requested a pardon after the war ended in 1865.
"After he had fought a war for four years, he admitted his transgressions and asked for full citizenship," Hosemann said during the debate. "If he were here today, he'd be proud of us."
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Tucker Carlson: Ordinary Americans stand up as politicians continue to cower to the rage mob For weeks, we've asked who will stand up for our country. The answer, we're learning, is Americans.
June 30, 2020 at 10:54PM
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Social Media Platforms Face Reckoning Over Hate Speech
For years, social media platforms have fueled political polarization and hosted an explosion of hate speech. Now, with four months until the U.S. presidential election and the country's divisions reaching a boiling point, these companies are upping their game against bigotry and threats of violence.
What's not yet clear is whether this action is too little, too late — nor whether the pressure on these companies, including a growing advertiser boycott, will be enough to produce lasting change.
Reddit, an online comment forum that is one of the world's most popular websites, on Monday banned a forum that supported President Donald Trump as part of a crackdown on hate speech. Also on Monday, live-streaming site Twitch, which is owned by Amazon, temporarily suspended Trump's campaign account for violating its hateful conduct rules.
YouTube, meanwhile, banned several prominent white nationalist figures from its platform, including Stefan Molyneux, David Duke and Richard Spencer.
Social media companies, led by Facebook, now face a reckoning over what critics call indefensible excuses for amplifying divisions, hate and misinformation on their platforms. Civil rights groups have called on large advertisers to stop Facebook ad campaigns during July, saying the social network isn't doing enough to curtail racist and violent content on its platform.
Companies such as the consumer goods giant Unilever — one of the world's largest advertisers — as well as Verizon, Ford and many smaller brands have joined the boycott, some for the month of July and others for the rest of the year. New companies have been signing on to the boycott almost every day. While some are pausing ads only on Facebook, others have also stepped back from advertising on Twitter and other platforms.
On Monday, Ford Motor Co. put the brakes on all national social media advertising for the next 30 days. The company says hate speech, as well as posts advocating violence and racial injustice, need to be eradicated from the sites.
While the ad boycott has dinged Facebook's and Twitter's shares, analysts who follow the social media business don't see it as having a lasting effect.
Raymond James analyst Aaron Kessler noted that YouTube has faced several ad boycotts in the past over hate speech and other objectionable material. Each time, it adjusted its policies and the advertisers returned. In addition, July is generally a slow month for advertising. Companies have also been cutting their ad budgets due to COVID-19, so the spending declines are not a surprise for investors. Kessler called Facebook's stock pullback — its shares fell more than 8% on Friday, then rallied a bit Monday — a "buying opportunity."
Reddit's action was part of a larger purge at the San Francisco-based site. The company said it took down a total of 2,000 forums, known as the site as "subreddits," most of which it said were inactive or had few users.
The Trump Reddit forum, called The_Donald, was banned because it encouraged violence, regularly broke other Reddit rules, and defiantly "antagonized" both Reddit and other forums, the company said in a statement. Reddit had previously tried to discipline the forum.
"We are cautiously optimistic that Reddit is finally working with groups like ours to dismantle the systems that enable hateful rhetoric on their platform," Bridget Todd, a spokeswoman for the women's advocacy organization UltraViolet, said in an emailed statement.
The group said its members met with Reddit CEO Steve Huffman via Zoom last week, encouraging him to address racism and hate speech on the platform.
Despite optimism from some critics, others said it is not clear if such measures will be enough. For years, racist groups "have successfully used social media to amplify their message and gain new recruits," said Sophie Bjork-James an anthropology professor at Vanderbilt University who specializes in white nationalism, racism and hate crimes.
"However, limiting access to a broader public will have unintended negative consequences. Far-right and white nationalist groups are increasingly gathering on encrypted apps and social media sites that do not monitor for offensive speech or violent content," she added. "This shift allows for coordinating more violent and radical actions."
The algorithms tech companies developed to keep users glued to their services "have provided perhaps the biggest boon to organized racism in decades, as they help racist ideas find a much larger and potentially receptive audience," Bjork-James said, adding that she is hopeful that the same companies that "helped this anti-democratic movement expand" can now help limit its impact.
For its part, Twitch pointed to comments the president made at two rallies, videos of which were posted on the site.
In one, a live stream of a rally in Tulsa, Oklahoma, Trump talked about a "very tough hombre" breaking into someone's home. The other was from a 2015 campaign rally that was recently posted on Twitch, in which Trump said Mexico sends rapists and criminals to the U.S. Twitch declined to say how long the suspension will last.
The White House referred a request for comment to Trump's reelection campaign. Tim Murtaugh, the campaign's director of communications, said that people who want to hear directly from the president should download the campaign's app.
Reddit has tweaked its rules and banned forums for white nationalists over the years in an attempt to rid its platform of vitriol, sometimes producing significant user backlash as a result.
CEO Steve Huffman said earlier this month that Reddit was working with moderators to explicitly address hate speech.
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Beyoncé's Message, Epic Performances Stand Out at BET Awards
Beyoncé used her platform Sunday while accepting the BET humanitarian award to relay a direct appeal to viewers: Go vote.
"Your voices are being heard and you're proving to our ancestors that their struggles were not in vain," said the superstar singer at the BET Awards, which celebrated its 20 years of highlighting excellence in Black-led entertainment. But the ceremony, filmed virtually because of the coronavirus pandemic, kept much of its focus on topics such as systematic racism and equal rights.
Beyoncé was honored for her philanthropic work and relief efforts during the COVID-19 crisis. She said voting in the upcoming election was the way to end a "racist and unequal system" in America.
"I'm encouraging you to take action," she said following an introduction by former first lady Michelle Obama.
The singer dedicated her award to the Black Lives Matter movement, and encouraged activists to continue to push forward.
"We have to vote like our lives depend on it, because it does," she said.
Here are some additional highlights from the three-hour show broadcast on CBS, BET and BET Her.
DaBaby's message
Rapper DaBaby lay on the pavement while an actor playing a police officer pressed his knee on the rapper's neck.
The reenactment at the beginning of the multi-platinum rapper's performance offered a glimpse into the last moments of the life of George Floyd, killed by Minneapolis police last month. DaBaby rapped a verse from the Black Lives Matter remix of his hit song "Rockstar" with Roddy Ricch at the awards.
While holding a baseball bat, DaBaby then stood on a stage behind a group of people who had their fists raised high while others held "Black Lives Matter" signs.
His performance also featured images from protests, a reflection of the current world in the wake of Floyd's death and the deaths of others, including Breonna Taylor and Ahmaud Arbery.
Weezy honors Kobe
On a virtual stage, Lil Wayne paid tribute to the Black Mamba.
The rapper honored the late Kobe Bryant with a performance of his song "Kobe Bryant," highlighting the NBA icon's biggest moments. He paid tribute to Bryant who died in a helicopter crash in January that killed eight others, including his 13-year-old daughter, Gianna.
Wayne weaved in new lyrics as Bryant's No. 8 and 24 flashed behind him. His performance showed video clips of the Los Angeles Lakers star dunking on Dwight Howard and Steve Nash, hitting game-winning shots and highlights from his 81-point game against the Toronto Raptors in 2006.
"I call him King Bryant," Wayne rapped. "Now let the crown show."
Little Richard bop
Wayne Brady transformed from his normal actor-comedian self into the flamboyant character of the late Little Richard.
Wearing a gold glittery tuxedo, Brady put on his best emulation during a tribute to Richard, who died of bone cancer in May. He rolled around on the top of a piano as he sung a medley hits from Richard, considered one of the chief architects of rock 'n' roll.
"Shut up!" Brady blurted out in the same manner as Richard. Some of Richard's hits Wayne performed included "Lucy," "Good Golly," "Miss Molly" and "Tutti Frutti."
Mad Stallion
Megan Thee Stallion took to the desert in a performance themed after the "Mad Max" films.
Sporting a feathered crop top, she danced and twerked alongside her dancers who wore masks and maintained social distance amid the coronavirus pandemic. She performed her Beyoncé-assisted hit "Savage Remix" and "Girls in the Hood," a revamp of Easy E's 1987 song "Boyz-N-The Hood."
In the post-apocalyptic setting, she and her dancers rode through the desert landscape on dusty ATVs. The rapper closed out her performance after jumping on a silver-spike vehicle.
Megan Thee Stallion's performance came after she won best female hip-hop artist.
Stirring opening
It didn't take long for host Amanda Seales to touch on equal rights for African Americans.
In a stirring monologue, Seales said she was chosen to host the show because she's been "telling y'all everybody's racist." She touched on several topics including the death of Breonna Taylor, racial equality and took a jab at actor Terry Crews who faced recent backlash for his "Black supremacy" comment.
Seales joked she would rather talk about issues other than race, but "racism always beats me to it."
Her monologue came after an all-star performance of Public Enemy's 1989 anthem "Fight the Power." The performance featured group members Chuck D and Flavor Flav along with Nas, Black Thought, Rapsody and YG — who added lyrics to the song and name-dropped Taylor.
During the performance, video clips were shown of the national protests over the deaths of unarmed Black people including Floyd, Arbery and Taylor.
The 12-year-old sensation Keedron Bryant also performed in a cappella "I Just Wanna Live," a song about being a young black man that earned him a record deal.
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Spanish Colonial Monuments Fuel Race Strife in US Southwest
Statues of Spanish conquistador Don Juan de Oñate are now in storage after demonstrators in New Mexico threatened to topple them. Protesters in California have pulled down sculptures of Spanish missionary Junipero Serra, and now schools, parks and streets named after Spanish explorers are facing uncertain futures.
As statues and monuments associated with slavery and other flawed moments of the nation's history come tumbling down at both the hands of protesters and in some cases decisions by politicians, the movement in the American Southwest has turned its attention to representations of Spanish colonial figures long venerated by some Hispanics but despised by Native Americans.
Protesters say figures such as Oñate, who led early Spanish expeditions into present-day New Mexico, shouldn't be celebrated. They point to Oñate's order to have the right feet cut off of 24 captive tribal warriors after his soldiers stormed Acoma Pueblo. That attack was precipitated by the killing of Onate's nephew.
They say other Spanish figures oversaw the enslavement of Indigenous populations and tried to outlaw their cultural practices.
Some Hispanics who trace their lineage to the early Spanish settlers say removing the likenesses of Oñate and others amounts to erasing history — a complicated history both marred by atrocities against Indigenous people and marked by the arduous journeys that many families made for the promise of a new life or to escape persecution in Spain.
That history remains tightly woven into New Mexico's fabric as many Native American Pueblos still are known by the names given to them by the Spanish and many continue to practice Catholicism — something even Pueblo leaders acknowledge.
"New Mexico is a special place for all of us. We are all neighbors. We share food, we work together, and in many cases, our family relations go back generations," said J. Michael Chavarria, chairman of the All Pueblo Council of Governors and governor of Santa Clara Pueblo.
Earlier this month, demonstrators tried to tear down an Oñate statue outside an Albuquerque museum using chains and a pickax. A fight that broke out resulted in gunfire that injured one man. The next day, Albuquerque removed the statue and placed it in storage.
Another Oñate statue was removed by Rio Arriba County officials ahead of a planned protest that sought its removal, drawing praise from activists and some Pueblo leaders.
Albuquerque City Councilor Cynthia Borrego, who is Hispanic, acknowledged the sordid aspects of history during a city-sponsored prayer and healing event prompted by the protests.
"We also have to remember, those were times of war ... but we can't go back 500 years," she said.
Daniel Ortiz, 58, a retired financial adviser in Santa Fe, can trace his family's roots over 14 generations. He said the statues' removals amount to anti-Hispanic sentiment and a dismissal of Hispanics' unique contribution to area.
"This is the work of a small, radical Native American group, not our Pueblos," Ortiz said. "They've hijacked the Black Lives Matter movement and our Anglo leaders are too scared to stand up to them."
Ortiz is leading a online petition calling for the monuments' return.
Others have taken to social media to call the vandalism an act of "Hispanicphobia," linking it to anti-immigrant sentiment.
Even the Spanish Embassy in the U.S. has weighed in, saying that defending the Spanish legacy is a priority and educational efforts will continue for "the reality of our shared history to be better known and understood."
Spanish explorers were the first Europeans to set foot in the present-day American Southwest. It started with expeditions in the 1540s as the Spanish searched for the fabled Seven Cities of Gold. Decades later, colonization ramped up and Santa Fe was established as a permanent capital in 1610.
Spanish rule over the New Mexico territory lasted for about two centuries until the area briefly became part of the Republic of Mexico before it was taken over by the U.S.
Spain's enduring hold over the territory made it unlike other areas in the Southwest and opened the door for memorializing the Spanish influence.
Some scholars say the phenomenon of commemoration is linked to efforts that originated more than a century ago as Hispanics tried to convince white members of Congress that New Mexico should become a state.
During the 19th Century, white people moved into the territory and held racist views toward the region's Native American and Mexican American population, according to John Nieto-Phillips, author of "The Language of Blood: The Making of Spanish-American Identity in New Mexico, 1880s-1930s."
"They derided particularly the Mexican population as mongrels and mixed-blood who were incapable of governing themselves," said Nieto-Phillips, the diversity and inclusion vice provost at Indiana University.
As a result, Nieto-Phillips said elite Hispanics in the region took on a solely Spanish American identity over their mixed heritage as a means to embrace whiteness. Some Hispanics adopted notions about "pure" Spanish blood as part of the eugenics movement that peaked in the 1920s and '30s to argue they were racially different than other ethnic Mexicans in Texas and California, he said.
It's an identity that continues today. The conquistador image has appeared on university emblems, moving truck companies, and once was the mascot of Albuquerque's minor league baseball team. Meanwhile, Latinos in other southwestern states often identify as Mexican American or mestizo, a mixture of Spanish and Native American ancestry.
Yet, in recent years, the Spanish conquistador and all the effigies connected to it have seen intense criticism thanks to a new politicized coalition of Native American and Latino activists. Protests have forced the cancellation of Santa Fe's annual "Entrada" — a reenactment of when the Spanish reasserted themselves following the Pueblo Revolt.
In California, people have been defacing Serra's statues for years, saying the Spanish priest credited with bringing Roman Catholicism to the western United States forced Native Americans to stay at the missions after they were converted or face brutal punishment. Protesters in Los Angeles and San Francisco recently brought down statues of Serra.
The recent violence in New Mexico has forced some elected officials to consider removing public art and renaming schools linked to Spanish conquistadors.
Vanessa Fonseca-Chávez, who grew up in Grants, New Mexico, and is the author of an upcoming book on colonial legacies in the Southwest, said she understands how Hispanics can be excited about being able to trace their history to early New Mexico settlements that predate even the Massachusetts Bay Colony.
But along with those prideful reflections should come a critical examination of colonial legacy and the anger spurred by those monuments.
"These incidents didn't happen in a vacuum," said Fonseca-Chávez, an assistant English professor at Arizona State University. "This has been building for more than 20 years ... people are really getting frustrated at the lack of historic and social consciousness about New Mexico's history."
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UP board result.nic.in 2020
June 27, 2020 at 06:00PM
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Native Americans Protesting Trump Trip to Mount Rushmore
President Donald Trump's plans to kick off Independence Day with a showy display at Mount Rushmore have angered Native Americans, who view the monument as a desecration of land violently stolen from them and used to pay homage to leaders hostile to Indigenous people.
Several groups led by Native American activists are planning protests for Trump's July 3 visit, part of Trump's "comeback" campaign for a nation reeling from sickness, unemployment and, recently, social unrest. The event is slated to include fighter jets thundering over the 79-year-old stone monument in South Dakota's Black Hills and the first fireworks display at the site since 2009.
But it comes amid a national reckoning over racism and a reconsideration of the symbolism of monuments around the globe. Many Native American activists say the Rushmore memorial is as reprehensible as the many Confederate monuments being toppled around the nation.
"Mount Rushmore is a symbol of white supremacy, of structural racism that's still alive and well in society today," said Nick Tilsen, a member of the Oglala Lakota tribe and the president of a local activist organization called NDN Collective. "It's an injustice to actively steal Indigenous people's land, then carve the white faces of the colonizers who committed genocide."
While some activists, like Tilsen, want to see the monument removed and the Black Hills returned to the Lakota, others have called for a share in the economic benefits from the region.
Trump has long shown a fascination with Mount Rushmore. South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem said in 2018 that he once told her straight-faced that it was his dream to have his face carved into the monument. He later joked at a campaign rally about getting enshrined alongside George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Theodore Roosevelt and Abraham Lincoln. And while it was Noem, a Republican, who pushed for a return of fireworks on the eve of Independence Day, Trump committed to visiting South Dakota for the celebration.
Some wildfire experts have raised concerns the pyrotechnics could spark fires, especially because the region has seen dry weather this year. Firefighters called in crews from two other states to help Thursday as a blaze consumed approximately 150 acres (61 hectares) about 6 miles (10 kilometers) south of the monument.
The four faces, carved into the mountain with dynamite and drills, are known as the "shrine to democracy." The presidents were chosen by sculptor Gutzon Borglum for their leadership during four phases of American development: Washington led the birth of the nation; Jefferson sparked its westward expansion; Lincoln preserved the union and emancipated slaves; Roosevelt championed industrial innovation.
And yet, for many Native American people, including the Lakota, Cheyenne, Omaha, Arapaho, Kiowa and Kiowa-Apache, the monument is a desecration to the Black Hills, which they consider sacred. Lakota people know the area as Paha Sapa — "the heart of everything that is."
As monuments to Confederate and Colonial leaders have been removed nationwide, some conservatives have expressed fear that Mount Rushmore could be next. Commentator Ben Shapiro this week suggested that the "woke historical revisionist priesthood" wanted to blow up the monument. Noem responded by tweeting, "Not on my watch."
The governor told Fox News on Wednesday, "These men have flaws, obviously every leader has flaws, but we're missing the opportunity we have in this discussion to talk about the virtues and what they brought to this country, and the fact that this is the foundation that we're built on and the heritage we should be carrying forward."
Tim Giago, a journalist who is a member of the Oglala Lakota tribe, said he doesn't see four great American leaders when he looks at the monument; he sees four white men who either made racist remarks or initiated actions that removed Native Americans from their land. Washington and Jefferson held slaves. Lincoln, though he led the abolition of slavery, approved the hanging of 38 Dakota men in Minnesota after a violent conflict with white settlers there. Roosevelt is reported to have said, "I don't go so far as to think that the only good Indians are dead Indians, but I believe nine out of every 10 are ..."
The monument has long been a "Rorschach test," said John Taliaferro, author of "Great White Fathers," a history of the monument. "All sorts of people can go there and see it in different ways."
The monument often starts conversations on the paradox of American democracy — that a republic that promoted the ideals of freedom, determination and innovation also enslaved people and drove others from their land, he said.
"If we're having this discussion today about what American democracy is, Mount Rushmore is really serving its purpose because that conversation goes on there," he said. "Is it fragile? Is it permanent? Is it cracking somewhat?"
The monument was conceived in the 1920s as a tourist draw for the new fad in vacationing called the road trip. South Dakota historian Doane Robinson recruited Borglum to abandon his work creating the Stone Mountain Confederate Memorial in Georgia, which was to feature Robert E. Lee, Jefferson Davis and Stonewall Jackson.
Borglum was a member of the Ku Klux Klan, according to Mount Rushmore historian and writer Tom Griffith. Borglum joined the Klan to raise money for the Confederate memorial, and Griffith argues his allegiance was more practical than ideological.
Native American activists have long staged protests at the site to raise awareness of the history of the Black Hills, which were seized despite treaties with the United States protecting the land. Fifty years ago, a group of activists associated with an organization called United Native Americans climbed to the top of the monument and occupied it.
Quanah Brightman, who now runs United Native Americans, said the activism in the 1970s grew out of the civil rights movement of the 1960s. He hopes a similar movement for Native Americans comes from the Black Lives Matter movement.
"What people find here is the story of America — it's multidimensional, it's complex," Griffith said. "It's important to understand it was people just trying to do right as best they knew it then."
The White House declined to comment.
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In Belgian town, Monuments Expose a Troubled Colonial Legacy
For a long time, few people in the small Belgian town of Halle paid much attention to the monuments. They were just fixtures in a local park, tributes to great men of the past.
But these are very different times, and yesterday's heroes can be today's racist villains.
And so it was that three weeks ago, a bust of Leopold II, the Belgian king who has been held responsible for the deaths of millions of Congolese, was spattered in red paint, labeled "Murderer," and later knocked off its pedestal.
Nearby, a pale sandstone statue formally known as the "Monument to the Colonial Pioneers" has stood for 93 years. It depicts a naked Congolese boy offering a bowl of fruit in gratitude to Lt. Gen. Baron Alphonse Jacques de Dixmude, a Belgian soldier accused of atrocities in Africa.
These monuments, and others across Europe, are coming under scrutiny as never before, no longer a collective blind spot on the moral conscience of the public. Protests sweeping the world that followed the death of George Floyd, a Black man killed last month by Minneapolis police, are focusing attention on Europe's colonial past and racism of the present.
Eric Baranyanka, a 60-year-old musician who came to Halle as a refugee from Belgium's African colony of Burundi when was 3, said he has always found the statue of Jacques "humiliating."
"I had this pride being who I was. It was in complete contradiction with that statue," he said.
But Halle Mayor Marc Snoeck appears to be more representative of his citizenry. He said he "never really noticed" the monuments until an anti-colonial group raised awareness of them a dozen years ago in the town of 40,000 people about 15 kilometers (10 miles) south of Brussels.
"I'm part of an older generation and I heard precious little during my studies about colonialism, the Congo Free State and the Belgian Congo," said the 66-year-old Snoeck, noting he was taught about how Europeans brought civilization, not exploitation and death, to the heart of Africa.
Statues of Leopold, who reigned from 1865 to 1909, have been defaced in a half-dozen cities, including Antwerp, where one was burned and had to be removed for repairs. It's unclear if it will ever come back.
But Leopold is hardly the only focus. Snoeck found it remarkable that protesters have not targeted the statue of Jacques, which he called "possibly even worse."
The mayor said the statue is known locally as "The White Negro," because of the hue of the sandstone depicting the Congolese youth offering the fruit to the colonial-era Belgian who condoned or was responsible for murders, rapes and maiming workers in the Congo Free State.
Baranyanka was lovingly raised by a white foster family in Halle and said he never experienced prejudice until after he had been in Belgium for about a decade.
His 98-year-old foster mother Emma Monsaert recalls others in town asking her if she was really going to take in a Black youth in the 1960s: "I said, 'Why not, it is a child after all.'"
But at school, Baranyanka found out how others felt about race.
One teacher poured salt on his head, he recalled, saying it would make it whiter. When he wanted a part in a school play of the 17th century fairy tale "Puss in Boots," he was denied a role, with a teacher telling him: "Mr. Baranyanka, in those days there were no Blacks in Europe."
He counts himself lucky to have had a close circle of friends that survives to this day. As a teenager, he often talked to them about the monuments, his African roots and Leopold's legacy.
"They understood, and they were grateful I explained it," he said.
On Tuesday, Congo celebrates 60 years of independence from Belgium. The city of Ghent will remove a statue of Leopold to mark the anniversary and perhaps take a healing step forward.
Eunice Yahuma, a local leader of a group called Belgian Youth Against Racism and the youth division of the Christian Democrats, knows about Belgium's troubled history.
"Many people don't know the story, because it is not being told. Somehow they know, 'Let's not discuss this, because it is grim history,'" said Yahuma, who has Congolese roots. "It is only now that we have this debate that people start looking into this."
The spirit of the times is different, she said.
"Black people used to be less vocal. They felt the pain, but they didn't discuss it. Now, youth is very outspoken and we give our opinion," Yahuma added.
History teachers like 24-year-old Andries Devogel are trying to infuse their lessons with the context of colonialism.
"Within the next decade, they will be expecting us to stress the impact of colonialism on current-day society, that colonialism and racism are inextricably linked," Devogel said. "Is contemporary racism not the consequence of a colonial vision? How can you exploit a people if you are not convinced of their second-class status?"
The colonial era brought riches to Belgium, and the city of Halle benefited, building a rail yard that brought jobs. Native son Franz Colruyt started a business that grew into the supermarket giant Colruyt Group with 30,000 employees — one of them Baranyanka's foster father.
Halle has escaped the violence seen in other cities from the protests, and officials would rather focus attention on its Gothic church, the Basilica of St. Martin, as well as its famous fields of bluebells and Geuze beer.
Baranyanka, who will soon stage a musical show of his life called "De Zwette," — "The Black One," returned recently to the park and the monuments.
Despite the hostility and humiliation he felt as a youngster, he didn't consider their destruction as the way to go.
"Vandalism produces nothing, perhaps only the opposite effect. And you see that suddenly such racism surges again," he said. "It breeds polarization again. This thing of 'us against them.'"
Devogel, the teacher, says it is the task of education "to let kids get in touch with history."
"Otherwise, it will remain a copper bust without meaning," he said of the Leopold II monument. "And you will never realize why, for all these people, it is so deeply insulting."
