COURIER L 4 IFE, JULY 24-30, 2020
Dueling demos
at Marine Park
Black and Blue Lives Matter supporters
butt heads ahead of peaceful protests
Black Lives Matter protesters and pro-police supporters clashed at the dueling events on
July 19. Photo by Jon Farina
BY JESSICA PARKS
Youth organizers say they were
criticized on social media for their support
of the Black Lives Matter movement
ahead of a pair of peaceful propolice
protests and counter-protests in
Marine Park over the weekend.
“I post on Facebook pages where
a lot of people in the community are
really active,” said 20-year-old Alana
Maisel, a lifelong Marine Park resident
who co-founded Marine Park Political
Youth in June, an organization
for younger, left-leaning Marine Park
residents. “But every time I get a post
on there, I get a lot of pushback. We’ve
gotten a lot of threats and uncertainty
from adults in the neighborhood.”
Maisel and other members of Marine
Park Political Youth had planned
to host an art-making event in Marine
Park on Saturday, July 18, where attendees
created signage for a Black
Lives Matter protest scheduled for
the following day. The event aimed to
engage youth in social justice movements
through art, she said.
“We wanted to create a space for
everyone’s individual political goals,
feelings and expression, which is what
we tried to foster with our previous
event,” Maisel said. “We also are planning
workshops in the park, any sort
of thing that can happen in the public
space where we are sharing our ethos
of community togetherness and autonomous
action.”
But, when Maisel advertised the
group gathering on a local Facebook
page, some community members
branded the youth group as radical
and said she should expect to see propolice
protesters — who also planned
to rally at the sprawling park on Sunday
— at her event.
Some users threatened to crash the
youth group’s meeting and one local
resident warned he would rip up the
young activists’ signs.
Despite the online pushback, the
sign-making event on Saturday remained
mostly peaceful, Maisel said —
much like Sunday’s opposing protests.
“The threats never really seem to
turn into anything real,” Maisel said.
“When we actually got there, we had a
few intimidating stares, people walking
really slow and we had police offi -
cers from the local precinct on the corner…
but that was the extent of it.”
The next day’s Black Lives Matter
protest — organized by a popular
southern Brooklyn bodybuilder
who goes by the name Chula — was
scheduled to counter a pro-police rally
hosted by the Lieutenant Benevolent
Association.
Police offi cers outnumbered protesters
at both July 19th demonstrations,
which drew about 50 Black Lives Matter
protesters and a dozen pro-police
supporters, observers told AMNY. The
weekend’s high temperatures may have
led to a drop in attendance, as well as
mixed messages about whether or not
the pro-police rally had been cancelled.
A post on social media from the Lieutenant
Benevolent Association said the
pro-police rally had been postponed due
to the extreme heat — but a small, passionate
group of local residents came
out anyway to back the blue.
While some demonstrators exchanged
heated words, no physical
altercations broke out and no arrests
were made.