41 protesters arrested after 35W shutdown in Minneapolis

[TexasTowelie]

Protesters shut down a major Twin Cities interstate Tuesday — the second time in a week — in a demonstration against police violence, this time during the morning rush hour.

State troopers arrested 41 demonstrators who blocked five lanes of southbound Interstate 35W starting about 7:45 a.m. near University Avenue just northeast of downtown Minneapolis.

The interstate reopened some 90 minutes after traffic was halted.

The demonstrators walked onto a bridge across the Mississippi River, joined hands and chanted “I believe that we will win.” They also parked four cars sideways across traffic lanes.

Read more: http://www.twincities.com/2016/07/13/35w-protest-shuts-down-interstate-near-downtown-minneapolis/

[840high]

1. Don't block interstates.

[Brickbat]

2. I thought this was interesting; you might, too:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2016/07/13/why-highways-have-become-the-center-of-civil-rights-protest/

Block a highway, and you upend the economic life of a city, as well as the spatial logic that has long allowed people to pass through them without encountering their poverty or problems. Block a highway, and you command a lot more attention than would a rally outside a church or city hall — from traffic helicopters, immobile commuters, alarmed officials.

“We’re the home of Dr. Martin Luther King," anxious Atlanta Mayor Kasim Reed said on Saturday, acknowledging the city's legacy of protest but drawing a line at the interstate on-ramp. "The only thing I ask is that they not take the freeways. Dr. King would never take a freeway.”

That is not strictly accurate: King led the 1965 march that iconically occupied the full width of the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Ala. But as protests in Atlanta approached the high-speed artery that courses through the city's downtown, Reed understood that the stakes were much higher, both for the safety of the protesters and the functioning of the region.

That, however, is precisely the point.

[question everything]

3. I don't think that cars were flying at 65MPH on the Edmund Pettus Bridge back in 1965

We all chided Christie's minions for "just" slowing traffic on the George Washington Bridge, but some are hailing this disruption?

A letter in the strib described a passenger who witnessed a car next to her, when the man was sobbing asking to keep his job.. He had two child seats in the back seat. This letter was rebutted the next day by "we don't care" letters.

When BLM blocks traffic and malls, how many African Americans who are hourly workers are going to lose wage or lose their jobs?

Oh, forgot, these "protesters" were whites who probably could not care less about such facts.