Hundreds rally in Black Lives Matter protest at State Fair

[riversedge]

Hundreds rally in Black Lives Matter protest at State Fair
By Will Ashenmacher
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Posted: 08/29/2015 12:01:00 AM CDT | Updated: about 18 hours ago


Hundreds rally in Black Lives Matter protest at State Fair
Black Lives Matters demonstrators gathered in front of the locked main gate at the Minnesota State Fair Grounds in Falcon Heights, on Saturday, August 29, 2015. Hundreds of fairgoers watched from behind barricades inside the grounds. (Pioneer Press: John Autey)

Black Lives Matters demonstrators gathered in front of the locked main gate at the Minnesota State Fair Grounds in Falcon Heights, on Saturday, August 29, 2015. Hundreds of fairgoers watched from behind barricades inside the grounds. (Pioneer Press: John Autey)............................

The march, called the BlackFair protest, targeted The Great Minnesota Get-Together on its opening weekend as a way to highlight economic and social disparities. Police estimated the crowd at 350 to 500, and they said about 100 officers were on the scene.

"There are going to be thousands of people, low-income people, in St. Paul who are going to smell that food, but they're not going to be able to have any," BlackFair organizer Rashad Turner said. "A lot of people want to put the (Black Lives Matter) in a box and say, 'You should focus on police brutality,' but it's also about the economic and social justices and how they're interrelated."

Earlier in the week, Turner and others said they believed minorities weren't adequately represented among the Fair's vendors. Fair officials denied that claim. On Saturday morning, before the march began, organizers seemed pleased with the array of ethnic backgrounds present among the marchers. Representatives from the Asian-Pacific Islander community spoke in favor of the Black Lives Matter movement and several speakers called for attention to be paid to transgender women of color and sexual minorities.
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[Romulox]

1. Ummm...should we protest at the White House? State House? Governor's Mansion? No...let's harass State Fair goers!

[Travis_0004]

2. Do they have any proof

Beyond 'there are not enough black food vendors'

Have food vendors been denied because of their skin color? Or did a lot just not apply? What are the demographics of food vendors? For a state that is 85% white, if 85% of food vendors were white, that would not be surprising.