protesters have crossed the perimeter security enhancements around the White House to try to rip down a statue of former president Andrew Jackson.
demonstrators in Washington have attempted on Monday to bring down a statue, located in front of the White House, former president Andrew Jackson, who supported slavery, before being pushed back by the forces of law and order.
By the end of the day, the protesters crossed the security perimeter reinforced around the White House since the beginning of the wave of protests against the racism that has engulfed the country, and hung in long ropes to the statue of the seventh and controversial american president to try to drop it, without succeeding, according to images circulating on social networks. On one side of the statue, located on Lafayette Square, the word “killer” (“killer”) was written in black letters.
Andrew Jackson, who occupied the White House from 1829 to 1837, is a controversial figure particularly for his past slavery and because he has also remained in history for having massively made to deport the indian tribes. “We had ropes, chains, a pulley to pull and we were going to (…) drop the statue,” said one protester, aged twenty years, preferring to remain anonymous. “The police attacked us and started to use of pepper gas,” said another protester fifty years.
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hundreds of people were still gathered on Monday evening on the newly renamed Black Lives Matter Plaza, a helicopter flying over the area while the police continued to disperse the gathering with shots of pepper.
Outrage of Donald Trump
The us president, Donald Trump has strongly criticized the protesters, announcing on Twitter the arrest of several persons “for the vandalism shameful, to Lafayette Park, the magnificent statue of Andrew Jackson”.
According to local media, several people have been arrested near Lafayette Square on Monday when the police intervened to disperse a camp made of tents, but this incident was not in connection with the attempt to bring down the statue of ex-president Jackson.
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The protest movement, triggered after the death of the black American George Floyd, asphyxiated by a white policeman at the end of may, has reopened the debate around monuments linked to slavery, several of which have been knocked down or vandalized. In Washington, a statue of the general of the south Albert Pike has been put down and degraded on Friday night.
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Donald Trump is an admirer of president Andrew Jackson, that he has in the past hailed as the first president “populist”. Five days after his inauguration, Donald Trump had displayed the portrait of his distant predecessor in the oval Office. He had also laid a wreath at the tomb of the latter to his plantation in Tennessee for the 250th anniversary of his birth.
