Howard University Protesters Interrupt James Comey Convocation Speech…
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https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/protesters-disrupt-former-fbi-director-comeys-speech-at-howard-university/2017/09/22/ae75d1c8-9fae-11e7-9c8d-cf053ff30921_story.html?utm_term=.c21793971305
Protesters disrupt ex-FBI director’s speech at Howard University
Former FBI director James B. Comey was heckled and jeered throughout a speech Friday at Howard University by a group of protesters chanting “No justice, no peace” in a loud, contentious standoff that didn’t end until he finished his remarks.
The scene made for a difficult reappearance for the man fired by President Trump in May. It was Comey’s first public speech since he testified before Congress in June about his firing, and few in the crowd of over 1,000 could hear much of what he said.
“Get out James Comey! You’re not our homie!” the group of about 20 protesters chanted.
Comey repeatedly asked to be permitted to speak, but the protesters continued chanting.
“No justice, no peace, no f---ing police!” they shouted.
Eventually, the larger audience began cheering “Let him speak!” But the protesters were not deterred or quieted.
University officials also repeatedly and unsuccessfully sought to persuade the protesters to let Comey speak, telling them to “be better than this’’ and allow for an open debate of ideas. In response, the protesters chanted, “White supremacy is not a debate!”
Comey, wearing black academic robes, sought to get the attention of the crowd, to no avail.
“I’m only going to speak for 12 minutes,” he said of his convocation address, joking that if the protesters kept it up they were all going to be late for lunch.
“I love the enthusiasm of the young folks. I just wish they would understand what a conversation is,’’ said Comey, trying to speak above the interruptions of the protesters.
At one point, university professor Bernard Richardson sought to quell the protest, saying, “That’s not the Howard University way.”
Comey remained quiet for about 10 minutes but then decided to deliver his speech over the shouting. Delivering his prepared remarks, Comey spoke of the importance of young people finding and expressing their voice but urged them to also seek understanding of their parents and the generations that came before them. Much of his remarks were drowned out by the protesters’ shouting.
“Our country is going through one of those periods where we’re trying to figure out who are we really and what do we stand for. It’s painful,” Comey said.
The former FBI director has agreed to take part in a lecture series at Howard this year. He ended his remarks to the crowd by saying: “Welcome to Howard. I’m honored to be here with you, and I look forward to adult conversation about what is right and what is true.’’
The crowd gave him a standing ovation.
“That was really crazy,” said Howard freshmen Taylor Davis. “Honestly, I’ve never seen anything like that before. I grew up in the suburbs.”
Davis said that she agreed with the protesters’ message but added: “I do think Comey deserved to speak. There was a lot of people, the majority in there, did want to hear him out and were ready to have a serious conversation.”
After the ceremony, a larger crowd of protesters outside the hall yelled more anti-Comey chants.
The protesting students issued a statement saying Comey “represents an institution diametrically opposed to the interests of black people domestically and abroad. While his tenure at the FBI has finished, his impact on our community remains.”
In particular, they faulted him with propagating what some officials have called “the Ferguson effect” — a theory that the rise in violent crime is due to police being fearful of facing public criticism for being too violent, and therefore avoiding confrontations with criminals.
One student, 17-year-old Dave Cassell, said he agreed with the message of the protesters.
“It makes sense due to the racial history between the FBI and black people,” Cassell said.
http://talkingpointsmemo.com/livewire/comey-howard-speech-protestors
The chanting continued as Comey went on with his boilerplate address about why colleges like Howard should be considered an important part of the “real world.” He did manage to work in another dig at the protestors, too.
“The rest of the real world is a place where it is hard sometimes to find people who will listen with an attitude that they might actually be convinced of something,” Comey said. “Instead what happens in most of the real world — and in about four rows of this auditorium — is that people don’t listen at all. They just try to figure out what rebuttal they’re going offer when you’re done speaking.”
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https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2017/09/james-comeys-rough-reception-at-howard-university/540870/However much Comey made sense as a convocation speaker, it makes sense that he’d face protests too. Even setting aside Comey’s specific background, Howard is a particularly engaged campus even among historically black colleges. Any former FBI director might have encountered a tough reception, but several of Comey’s statements during his tenure made him a particularly likely target for protests. The student group #HUResist has been criticizing Comey’s appointment for weeks, and it claimed credit for organizing Friday’s protests.
The FBI has long had a rocky relationship with African American communities, from spying on civil-rights activists and using its COINTELPRO operation to target the Black Panther Party on to the present day, with accusations of bias against both black civilians and black employees of the bureau. In a letter on Wednesday about Comey’s speech, Howard President Wayne A.I. Frederick tried to defuse some of those worries.
“When at the FBI, Mr. Comey made implicit bias an issue that the entire bureau had to understand. He made it mandatory for all agents and analysts to attend trainings, visit Martin Luther King’s monument, and study the FBI’s interaction with him,” Frederick wrote. (Notably, the bureau tried to push King to ? himself.) “He led this effort as a result of the FBI’s history of undermining Black-led organizations and leaders.”
#HUResist was having none of that. In a series of tweets, the group picked apart the letter, pointing to, among other things, FBI surveillance of Black Lives Matter activists during his directorship. Then the group disrupted the speech.
Over the past year, Comey has proven to be a political Rorschach test. When he announced he would not recommend charges against Hillary Clinton, he earned criticism from Republicans and praise from Democrats; his late October letter reopening the investigation won over Republicans and infuriated Democrats. When he fired Comey in May, President Trump reportedly believed Democrats would back the move, but suddenly they found reasons to respect Comey.
Comey’s record on race is similarly subject to interpretation. Comey may have been the most outspoken FBI director on race issues in the bureau’s history. Speaking to another campus crowd on the other side of Washington in February 2015, Comey said, “Little compares to the experience on our soil of black Americans. That experience should be part of every American’s consciousness, and law enforcement’s role in that experience—including in recent times—must be remembered. It is our cultural inheritance.” Speaking at Georgetown, he also focused on implicit bias in policing.
These were unusual sentiments for any FBI director to make, but other parts of Comey’s speech did not endear him to activists. “Let me be transparent about my affection for cops,” Comey said. “Racial bias isn’t epidemic in law enforcement any more than it is epidemic in academia or the arts. In fact, I believe law enforcement overwhelmingly attracts people who want to do good for a living.” And he argued that while police could do more to deal with racial bias, the impact of policing was limited.
Another speech, in October of that same year, raised more hackles. In that address, he lent credence to the idea of a “Ferguson effect”—the hypothesis that police officers, nervous about being filmed on cell phones after several high-profile shootings of black people by cops, were taking a hands-off approach, and consequently crime was rising. The problem was that despite various anecdotes, there was no evidence to support any nationwide crime wave, much less to connect that causally to intimidated officers.
“The question that has been asked of me, is whether these kinds of things are changing police behavior all over the country,” Comey said during a speech at the University of Chicago Law School. “And the answer is, I don’t know. I don’t know whether this explains it entirely, but I do have a strong sense that some part of the explanation is a chill wind blowing through American law enforcement over the last year. And that wind is surely changing behavior.”
The speech reportedly took other administration officials by surprise and upset them. A month later, Attorney General Loretta Lynch said there was no evidence for a Ferguson Effect.
In the same Chicago speech, Comey lamented mass incarceration of people of color but suggested it might have helped drive down the crime rate. “The pulling of those many weeds, as painful as that was, allowed churches, schools, community groups, and parents to plant seeds that have grown into healthy neighborhoods,” he said. “Neighborhoods that are free and alive in 2014 in ways that were unimaginable 25 years ago.” Most criminologists see no hard evidence that mass incarceration played more than a minor role in the the dramatic drop in crime rates. -
thats what he gets he really fuked everything up i really think trump bought him to make that announcement about hilary emails then he realize he made a deal with the devil and trump thought he had him in pocket then ? went south
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If the university respected the history of the 'convocation' then it would never have let James Comey deliver it... Terrible decision by Howard, but appropriate and respectable response by the students
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? howard let him speak they pay for him to speak then shout him down...in this world you will hear unpopular speech an if this is your reaction soon you will be in a cell...im so sick of ideas not being allowed to be discussed...
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yellowtapesport wrote: »If the university respected the history of the 'convocation' then it would never have let James Comey deliver it... Terrible decision by Howard, but appropriate and respectable response by the students
Yeah, I really don't understand why Howard would even invite him to begin with. -
yellowtapesport wrote: »If the university respected the history of the 'convocation' then it would never have let James Comey deliver it... Terrible decision by Howard, but appropriate and respectable response by the students
Yeah, I really don't understand why Howard would even invite him to begin with.
Black universities would invite david duke if it got them what they wanted -
yellowtapesport wrote: »If the university respected the history of the 'convocation' then it would never have let James Comey deliver it... Terrible decision by Howard, but appropriate and respectable response by the students
Yeah, I really don't understand why Howard would even invite him to begin with.
Black universities would invite david duke if it got them what they wanted
Not all of em..in fact, not most of them. This the 'new' HU administration -
yellowtapesport wrote: »If the university respected the history of the 'convocation' then it would never have let James Comey deliver it... Terrible decision by Howard, but appropriate and respectable response by the students
Yeah, I really don't understand why Howard would even invite him to begin with.
maybe he donated money to the school -
They invited them bcuz they wanted that white head nod. Older black folks need to move on. Remember the guy last year talking about if u leave u wont get a degree or sumN? Still seeking mastas approval. Bet $ Tariq Nasheed or Griff would never be invited to a white universities commencement speech. So backwards.
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yellowtapesport wrote: »yellowtapesport wrote: »If the university respected the history of the 'convocation' then it would never have let James Comey deliver it... Terrible decision by Howard, but appropriate and respectable response by the students
Yeah, I really don't understand why Howard would even invite him to begin with.
Black universities would invite david duke if it got them what they wanted
Not all of em..in fact, not most of them. This the 'new' HU administration
Right. I know for certain my HBCU and the chancellor didn't meet with Trump during that infamous Kellyane Conway couch incident, and the university has never invited anyone controversial at any of their convocations -
Angeles1son85 wrote: »thats what he gets he really fuked everything up i really think trump bought him to make that announcement about hilary emails then he realize he made a deal with the devil and trump thought he had him in pocket then ? went south
Facts.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bt3CqM8x5Lc
