The Republican National Committee ripped Vermont Gov. Howard Dean on Friday after he compared the election of President Trump to the beating of civil rights marchers on the Edmund Pettus Bridge, and the killing of four college students at Kent State University.
Dean, speaking in Atlanta at a rally for South Bend, Indiana, Mayor Pete Buttigieg, said in a speech that he told students Trump’s victory was akin to those historical events that left people beaten, bloodied or lying dead.
“This is your Edmund Pettus Bridge,” he recalled telling students, according to the Washington Post’s Dave Weigel. “This is your Kent State.”
The RNC seized on this comment as disrespectful to the memories of people who were killed or severely injured.
“Howard Dean’s comparisons are unacceptable and troubling,” said Steve Guest, deputy press secretary at the RNC.
The Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama, was the scene of the infamous Bloody Sunday incident in which about 600 civil rights marchers, most of them black, were attempting to march out of Selma. Police on the other side of the bridge physically attacked the marchers, shoving and beating them and firing tear gas at the crowd. Seventeen marchers were hospitalized and 50 others had to be treated for their injuries.
At Kent State University in 1970, an anti-Vietnam War protest turned into a deadly confrontation after a night of violent protests led the state’s governor to send in the National Guard to quell the protests. A rally on May 4, 1970, turned violent when guardsmen shot tear gas at protesters who were throwing objects at them.
Members of the National Guard charged at the protesters with bayonets on their rifles and fired as many as 67 shots, killing four people and injuring nine others. Two of the four dead at Kent State were not participating in the protesters.
