“Voter Rally” Broken Up By Police Was Not As The Media Portrayed It

You may have heard about police in Graham, North Carolina “suppressing” the right to vote by dispersing some demonstrators at a voter rally and arresting others. If you get your news from CNN, Buzzfeed, or the Washington Post, you likely shook your head, chalked it up to “Trump’s America”, and left it there.

Every other discerning adult with a brain started to ask questions. Did they have a permit for the rally? Did they respond to police requests to disperse before they were arrested? And what silly little twat organized an “I Am Change” voter rally that ends at 2 pm when polls close at 3 pm and really thought more than 100 attendees would then get in to vote?

Revered Gregory Drumwright, whose church is not located in Graham but 25 miles away in Greensboro, is a multifaceted faith leader and a well-connected social justice organizer. Alongside his pastoral duties at The Citadel Church, Drumwright teaches Public Speaking and Human Communication as a professor at High Point University, and he serves as Senior Principal Consultant for Leadership Enhancement and Academic Development. He is a commencement speaker, an internationally-traveled activist, and a three-time White House concert performer. Gregory Drumwright is currently working on the release of his latest album. He is also the only non-legislative representative on the NC Courts Commission, appointed by Roy Cooper himself.

In other words, Reverend Gregory Drumwright is well connected across many forums. In fact, I’m sure I missed a few things. But you can visit his webpage to learn more about him.

Drumright was among the eight people arrested at the rally. Alamance County deputies state that while there was a valid permit for the event, “after violations of the permit, along with disorderly conduct by participants leading to arrests, the protest was deemed an unlawful assembly, and participants were asked to leave.”

One of those violations was blocking traffic. When the crowd stopped to observe a nine minute moment of silence to recognize George Floyd, participants were blocking traffic in all directions. Drumwright had applied for a permit to block the street, but the request was not made before the required deadline and it was denied. It is unclear as to whether or not the crowd was aware that they were not permitted to block the street but Drumwright, the organizer, was told “blocking the roadway was a prohibited activity that would be strictly enforced.”

Drivers and nearby business patrons were allegedly heard yelling for people to get out of the road. These people were described as Trump supporters and white supremacists by other news sources. I mean, what else would they be, right? GTFOH. I listened to Drumwright’s entire speech about our white supremacist nation, but I didn’t hear anyone yell, “This is MAGA country.” Maybe the cameras weren’t rolling then.

The crowd marched and sang through the streets before ending at a monument, where they were supposed to get off the streets. When they failed to move to the designated area as requested, and officers released pepper spray into the ground. After the crowd moved, there were subsequent (unspecified) actions during the course of the rally that caused law enforcement to deem the rally “unsafe and unlawful.” The crowd was told to disperse and warned about the use of crowd control methods.

After five minutes of repeating the order, pepper spray was again directed at the ground to deter the few participants who remained. Or, depending on your news source, officers targeted potential voters including children (who couldn’t possibly be potential voters!) with pepper spray without giving them proper time to disperse from the congested area. Those who refused to leave the area were then arrested.

I don’t know about you, but if an officer tells me to get out of the street, I’m moving. Leave the area? Cool bro, I was only here to vote and that ain’t here anyway.

I will not say that this rally had a clear agenda outside of voting. I will say that the march was promoted as honoring “Black people whose deaths have fueled protests over racial injustice, including George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and Trayvon Martin,” according to a flyer.

Speakers included George Floyd’s niece, Brooke Williams, and Ben Crump, attorney for numerous families suing for police brutality. The rally was scheduled for a 3 hour period, starting at Wayman’s Chapel AME Church, and stoping at Court Square, which has been a location for contentious debate about statues and monuments, before continuing to the polling place that closed at 3 pm.

There seemed to be very little concern with voting.

A previous “I Am Change” voter rally was conducted in nearby Greensboro without a hitch, but the rally in Graham was far less simple. Referred to as “I Am Change”, “Souls to the Polls”, and also a Black Lives Matter event, packing too many causes into the rally may have left law enforcement officers with unclear event expectations, and the participants may have been confused as to their goal.

Either way, it certainly got the publicity it wanted, with many news organizations covering the story of “police hostility” and “voter suppression and intimidation” within hours of the event, and Gregory Drumwright’s arrest added another badge to his political activist jacket.

The lesson here: Don’t trust any news source to give you the whole story. They rely on our trust and our laziness to excuse their shoddy journalism. It’s time to start calling these so-called “journalists” out for not doing their jobs. People deserve to know the whole story.

You can read more about it here, or visit YouTube to watch the titillating speech and march.