On Friday, a group of mostly Native American protesters blocked the main road to the Mount Rushmore monument in South Dakota ahead of President Donald Trump’s…
Speaking at a pre-Independence Day event near Mount Rushmore in South Dakota, US President Donald Trump blamed George Floyd protesters for waging “a merciless campaign to wipe out our history”.
The Mount Rushmore monument, created in October 1941, features 60-foot-tall faces of Presidents George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln, and Theodore Roosevelt. Two of them, Washington and Jefferson, owned slaves.
The speech followed weeks of demonstrations against racial injustice and police brutality across the US sparked by the 25 May death of an African American man at the hands of a white policeman in Minneapolis. During the protests, some demonstrators destroyed or damaged Confederate monuments and statues.
He pledged that the South Dakota memorial would “stand forever as an eternal tribute to our forefathers and to our freedom”, adding, “this monument will never be desecrated, these heroes will never be defaced”.
POTUS also said that “those who seek to erase our heritage want Americans to forget our pride and our great dignity, so that we can no longer understand ourselves or America’s destiny”.
