When protesters took to Chicago’s Michigan Avenue last week, grassroots activists at the Black Friday boycott had no interest in sharing the Magnificent Mile with “Black Lives Matter” activists from the University of Chicago, forcing protesters associated with the group off the street.
While media coverage from the periphery of the march showed images of protesters lined up in front of the high-end stores and reported on a unified movement for “justice” in the police killing of Laquan McDonald, it was anything but. Our footage from the core of the march reveals the contentious and disunited elements vying for control.
At the outset of the march, grassroots protesters commonly associated with the group Voices of the Ex-Offenders (V.O.T.E.) led the march north on Michigan Avenue and away from Jesse Jackson and his media entourage. The majority of viewers observing the events on television were unaware of how the march began as cameras and reporters remained trained on Jackson.
In doing so, media failed to capture the true tenor of the Black Friday march, including marked disunity among the groups represented that day, professional operatives attempting to stop our filming of the hostility toward Black Lives Matter activists by grassroots activists, and Black Youth Project 100 protesters inciting violence even as they chanted “peace,” as seen in our footage.
A white man from with the Black Youth Project 100 attempts to tell us we cannot film, and “we are not doing interviews,” just before a hispanic man with the group physically assaults me, attempts to prevent my camera from recording. During the encounter with the hispanic man, a hispanic woman warned me, that “for your own protection, you need to stop filming.”
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