Juneteenth Rally Featured Inner City Realities, Solutions, Shattering Gascon Narrative
Long Beach, CA – On Saturday, June 19th Asian Industry B2B, Blexit and Recall Gascon Now held a rally in El Dorado Park attended by an array of community members as diverse as Los Angeles County. It kicked off with a self defense training at 10 AM led by Rooftop Korean, Tony Moon, who trained victims’ family members on basic self defense for an hour. There was then a potluck of food and appearances by musical act, Banded Future, who distributed beverages, sunglasses and other giveaways. Attendees then heard about a dozen different speakers crossing ethnic and partisan lines, including Jojo Afable from Sheriff Alex Villanueva‘s Community Advisory Council, encouraging people to get involved in neighborhood and ethnic committees, serving as community watch to keep neighborhoods safe. John McKinney (right) from “Proportional Justice.com” asserted that public safety depended on having, “Safe homes, safe schools, and safe neighborhoods,” and added that “letting dangerous people back into Black and Brown neighborhoods do not make the neighborhoods safe places.” Bishop Mendez (left) from Churches in Action went further to affirm the commitment of the churches in his organization to work to collect signatures for the recall of Gascon who he described as being, “Very harmful to the community” and going on to say that, “everything he is doing is against the community, this man does not stand for what is righteous, he stands for what is evil and wicked.” Recall Gascon Now Co-chair Marc Ang reflected that this event displayed, “Groups coming together to support real solutions for the African American community, and to work towards Martin Luther King Jr’s dream of true opportunity for African Americans, which has not been manifested in the inner cities who deal with day to day danger such as gang and property crime.” Other co-chair Harriette Reid reflected on priorities, and while celebrating Juneteenth, questioned the uplifting of criminals like George Floyd and urged her fellow black brothers and sisters to uplift positive role models instead.
Most powerfully, mothers and other family members of children killed by gang violence, spoke on reasons to recall Gascon from not doing the job of the District Attorney to prosecute crime, to not receiving justice for crimes committed against loved ones, to the grave threat to public safety that Gascon’s perilous policies pose, especially to persons of color in the communities where Gascon directives release criminals back into their neighborhoods.
Recall supporters have until October 27th to collect the 580,000 qualified signatures necessary to place Gascon’s recall on to the ballot and in the first month since the petition has been approved have already collected tens of thousands of signatures. Beginning in early July Recall Gascon Now will start targeted door to door signature gathering beginning in cities whose city councils have voted “No Confidence” in Gascon. The first city scheduled for the launch of that effort is Santa Clarita. |
