Eleanor Holmes Norton: “I want to thank my good friend from New York for his leadership this evening--it is the kind of leadership he has…”

“I want to thank my good friend from New York for his leadership this evening--it is the kind of leadership he has provided ever since he has come to the Congress--and for the critique he has just offered. But I come to the floor this afternoon to try to convert that critique into an understanding of the big picture. Demonstrations have been going on, even though we are days away from the day when the indictment did not come down. In a country where you haven't seen demonstrations all across the United States for some time, why have demonstrations by young people broken out all across America? There is a message here that comes from the demonstrations and from the words of the parents of Michael Brown. His father pleaded that Michael Brown not have died in vain. The people in the streets are there to see that Michael Brown did not die in vain; that probable cause, once again, becomes color blind, to see that, when a young Black man goes into the street, he is not consistently and constantly profiled because of the color of his skin. These demonstrations show that issues of detention and stopping of Black men, especially Black men in the streets, has been simmering below the surface until this tragedy became a way for it to find an outlet. The provocative stops in the street--Eric Holder, a former U.S. Attorney, now the Attorney General of the United States, has been stopped in the streets of the Nation's Capitol. And I say to my good friends, this is a progressive city.…”