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Trump destroying civil rights movement: Analyst

Azikiwe

US President Donald Trump’s support for white supremacists and other far-right groups is “insulting” to racial minorities and risks harming the civil rights movement, says an analyst in Detroit.

Abayomi Azikiwe, an editor at the Pan-African News Wire, made the remarks in an interview with Press TV about the controversies surrounding the opening of a civil rights museum in the state of Mississippi.

The event, attended by Trump, had been boycotted by several African-American leaders in protest of the president's policies and record on race relations.

Black congressman John Lewis, a civil rights icon who marched with Martin Luther King Jr. in the 1960s, said on Thursday that he would not go to the museum opening because of Trump’s presence.

The Democratic lawmaker from Georgia had also skipped Trump's presidential inauguration in January.

Calling Trump’s attendance a “stain” on the event, Azikiwe said the president had done “everything in his power to destroy the legacy and the gains of the civil rights movement.”

“Trump came to Jackson, Mississippi, not as an effort to commit to the realization of African American liberation and freedom, but as a way of deflecting attention away from his gross anti-civil rights, pro-racist and neo-fascist agenda,” he added.

Azikiwe said Trump had “insulted” people from many races and not just African Americans.

He said the Republican president’s recognition of Jerusalem al-Quds as the new capital of Israel was another example of his lack of respect for people of different races and religions.

“There has to be a fundamental transformation of the US society in order to eliminate racism and in order to eliminate all forms of national oppression and exploitation in the United States and indeed throughout the world,” he concluded.

Trump has a controversial record on race relations. In August, he provoked a firestorm of criticism for saying that both white supremacists and counter-protesters were at fault for the violence at a neo-Nazi rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, where one woman died.


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