Barack Obama to Livestream Talk About Police-Brutality Protests
Former President Barack Obama will be doing a livestream via his website Wednesday at 5 p.m. EST to address protests surrounding the police killing of 46-year-old George Floyd. Floyd was killed by police on May 25th, after cops arrested him for allegedly using a forged $20 bill at a convenience store.
The livestream is part of the Obama Foundation’s My Brother’s Keeper Alliance Town Hall series and will also feature former Attorney General Eric Holder and activists protesting police brutality.
Earlier this week, Obama wrote an essay about “how to make this moment a real turning point to bring about real change.” In the piece, posted to Medium, Obama laid out three lessons today’s activists can learn from the past. “If we want our criminal-justice system, and American society at large, to operate on a higher ethical code, then we have to model that code ourselves,” he wrote, denouncing the faction of protesters resorting to violence. He also counseled them to make their demands clear.
The essay follows a statement that the former president released last Friday about Floyd’s death. “This shouldn’t be ‘normal’ in 2020 America,” he wrote. “It can’t be ‘normal.’ If we want our children to grow up in a nation that lives up to its highest ideals, we can and must be better.”