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August 15, 2017

Durham, NC: Activists Topple Confederate Statue Amid Nationwide Protests Against White Supremacy
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Massive protests against white supremacists and the Trump administration
continued nationwide on Monday, from the streets of North Carolina,
where a crowd of activists toppled a confederate statue in Durham, to
the halls of Washington, where three separate corporate CEOs resigned
from Trump's American Manufacturing Council over Trump's failure to
quickly condemn the deadly white supremacist violence in
Charlottesville, Virginia, over the weekend.

In Durham, the crowd of activists shouted "We are the revolution!" as a
woman climbed up a ladder, looped a rope around the top of the
Confederate Soldiers Monument in front of the old Durham County
Courthouse, and then pulled the statue to the ground, as the crowd
erupted in cheers.

Protesters: "We are the revolution! We are the revolution! No Trump! No
KKK! No fascist U.S.A.!"

Meanwhile, in Nashville, Tennessee, activists rallied around the bust of
Confederate Army General Nathan Bedford Forrest, putting a black cloth
over his head and demanding the bust be removed from the state Capitol.
In Gainesville, Florida, workers removed a Confederate soldier's statue
from downtown, while officials in Baltimore, San Antonio and
Jacksonville, Florida, all said Monday they would take steps to remove
Confederate statues from public spaces.

Major protests were also held in Washington, D.C., in Naples, Florida,
in Minneapolis, Minnesota, where activists burned an effigy of a Nazi,
and in New York City, where thousands of people poured into the streets
to protest as President Trump arrived home to Trump Tower. This is
Brooklyn resident Jelani Wilson.

Jelani Wilson: "The American people are not going to sit back and take
the rise of the far right in the United States sitting down. We have
seen this before, and we know what to do. We stand up, we make our
voices heard, and we do not stop. We're going to send these trolls right
back to their caves. They will have no power in this country. They might
be up in the White House. They might be hiding behind plastic shields
and in right-wing cosplay. But it's the power of the people that makes
this country work, and we're going to prove that. And we will prove it
again and again and again, for as long as we have to, to show that there
is no place for hate in the United States."