Dallas civil rights activists plan new police brutality protest in the wake of shootings

As protests against police killings proliferated across the US this weekend, Dominique Alexander, president of the Next Generation Action Network, said he and other campaigners were 'putting in a lot of hours to make sure that tensions don’t rise'

Dominique Alexander speaks at a protest against police abuses in Dallas in 2015 (Reuters)

As the protests over police killings of black men continued in several US cities this weekend, the organiser of last week’s demonstration in Dallas, which ended when a gunman opened fire on police, has said he hopes to stage a new rally in the coming days.

Civil rights campaigner Dominique Alexander, the 27-year-old founder and president of the Next Generation Action Network (NGAN), said his group was in the process of planning another protest against police abuses in the Texas city this Wednesday.

“We’re thinking about making it a silent march, what is called an ‘Enough Said’ march, meaning that enough has been said already, and there’s nothing else we can say now because our government already knows what needs to be done,” Mr Alexander told The Independent.

A peaceful demonstration organised by NGAN last Thursday night was violently interrupted when Micah Johnson, a 25-year-old former US Army reservist, staged an ambush in downtown Dallas, shooting dead five police officers and wounding seven further officers and two civilians. Before he was killed using an explosive device carried by a robot, Johnson allegedly told police that he had intended to kill white people, especially white officers.

Activists were concerned that the attack could derail the momentum of the Black Lives Matter movement, whose national campaign had gathered steam and sympathy following the police shootings of Alton Sterling in Louisiana and Philando Castile in Minnesota last week. Both killings were captured on video, provoking widespread outrage.

Texas Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick was among several conservatives to criticise campaigners in the wake of the Dallas shootings, suggesting they had helped to incite the bloodshed. “I do blame people on social media with their hatred towards police. I do blame former Black Lives Matter protests,” Mr Patrick told Fox News, adding: “This has to stop.”

“There are some who would use these events to stifle a movement for change and quicken the demise of a vibrant discourse on the human rights of Black Americans,” the Black Lives Matter network said in a statement. “We should reject all of this. Black activists have raised the call for an end to violence, not an escalation of it.”

Mr Alexander, whose group is not part of the Black Lives Matter network but stands in solidarity with the organisation, said he was concerned that comments such as Mr Patrick’s would cloud the national conversation around race and policing.

“We are putting in a lot of hours to make sure we keep control of the narrative, to make sure that the hate doesn’t breed, to make sure that tensions don’t rise in the police reform activist community and the police community,” he said. “People will try to raise tension between us, but I’m trying to eliminate that tension and prevent retaliation.”

Protests over police brutality continued in multiple cities on Saturday. In Baton Rouge, Louisiana, where Mr Sterling was shot dead by police, nationally prominent Black Lives Matter activist Deray McKesson was among 125 people arrested during a peaceful march.

In St Paul, Minnesota, close to where Mr Castile was killed during a traffic stop, officials said some 100 protesters were arrested after blocking a freeway and throwing bottles, bricks and fireworks at police, allegedly injuring more than two dozen officers. Marchers also took to the streets in cities including New York, Washington DC, Miami and London.

Mr Alexander, an ordained minister at the True Love Missionary Baptist Church in Fort Worth, Texas, said he founded the NGAN in 2014 following the death of Michael Brown, an unarmed black teenager shot and killed by a white police officer in Ferguson, Missouri. The group now has several hundred members and chapters in four other cities.

Mr Alexander said he was inspired by civil rights leaders such as Dr Martin Luther King Jr, Nelson Mandela, Gandhi, and Malcolm X. “They were all under the age of 40 when they started – some of them never lived past 40 – but they formed very impactful movements. I believed today’s young generation was being choked from being able to lead change, and I wanted to create a social justice organisation structured, organised, and led by young people.”

Arrested several times for minor offences in the years before he became a minister, Mr Alexander, a father of three, still has an “up and down relationship with the Dallas Police Department,” he said.

He and Jeff Hood, a white pastor with whom he organised and led Thursday's rally, both condemned the attack that ensued. “We echo the words of President Obama yesterday when he stated that because black lives matter, it does not mean blue lives do not matter,” Mr Alexander said at a press conference on Friday. “Although officers volunteered to risk their lives, they certainly do not deserve to die.”

Speaking to The Independent, the NGAN founder emphasised that the converse was also true. “Those bullets had no names on them,” he said. “Everybody is talking about the officers who were hit, but there were also two protesters injured – including a mother who took a bullet while she was shielding her boy. That’s a child who could have been hurt. The rhetoric since then shows that to some people, officers lives are still more valuable than civilian lives.”