Democratic presidential contender Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., planned to give two speeches in Seattle, Wash. Saturday — but one was cancelled when two Black Lives Matter protesters took over the stage and refused to give back the microphone. The second speech drew 15,000 people, the largest crowds yet.
At an event in Westlake Park meant to celebrate the 80th birthday of Social Security on Saturday, a local Black Lives Matter chapter took over the stage and vociferously refused to turn back over the microphone unless they were allowed to speak.
Sanders’ spokesperson said they could speak after the senator, but they refused to leave the stage or allow him to speak, which drew booing and chanting from the “largely white audience,” reported the Seattle Times. “A few yelled for police to make arrests. Marissa Johnson, one of the protesters, shot back, ‘I was going to tell Bernie how racist this city is, filled with its progressives, but you did it for me,’ accusing the audience of ‘white supremacist liberalism.'”
After the protesters refused to let Sanders take the microphone, cancelling the speech, Sanders drew an overflow crowd of around 15,000 people at a college basketball arena later in the evening Saturday.
Per usual, Sanders decried the influence of the “billionaire class” and “pledged to fight for a full menu of progressive policies, including 12 weeks of paid leave for new parents, a federal minimum wage of $15 an hour, and an end to unequal pay for women,” the Seattle Times reports. The crowd went wild.
“This is not utopian dreaming,” Sanders said. “This is the country we can create if we are prepared to stand together.”
“When we stand together, when black and white stand together, when gay and straight stand together, when women and men stand together,” Sanders told the cheering crowd, which paid $200 to $1,000 to get in, “when we stand together, there is nothing, nothing, that we cannot accomplish.”
In a written statement addressing the Westlake protest, Sanders said he was “disappointed that two people disrupted a rally attended by thousands … I was especially disappointed because on criminal-justice reform and the need to fight racism there is no other candidate for president who will fight harder than me.”
In a news release posted on social media, local Black Lives Matter activists said they were holding Sanders and other white progressives accountable for failing to support their movement.
Citing the anniversary of [Michael] Brown’s death, they said, “We honor black lives by doing the unthinkable, the unapologetic, and the unrespectable.”
“Why would they pick Bernie Sanders to do this to? He has stuck up for civil rights,” said Diane Jerich-Domin, a Sanders supporter, to the Seattle Times.
The president of the Seattle King County NAACP, Gerald Hankerson, said he was “surprised” by how hostile the liberal crowd was to the protesters and “torn” by what happened.
“I know they were there to hear Bernie, but what was missed was the message of these two women,” Hankerson told the Seattle Times. “I would have loved to have seen Bernie respond to what they wanted.”
