U.S. faces new week shaken by violent George Floyd protests, coronavirus pandemic

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With cities wounded by days of violent unrest, America headed into a new week with neighborhoods in shambles, urban streets on lockdown and shaken confidence about when leaders would find the answers to control the mayhem amid unrelenting raw emotion over police killings of Black people.

All of it smashed into a nation already bludgeoned by a death toll from the coronavirus pandemic surging past 100,000 and unemployment that soared to levels not seen since the Great Depression.

Sunday capped a tumultuous weekend and month that saw city and state officials deploy thousands of National Guard soldiers, enact strict curfews and shut down mass transit systems. Even with those efforts, many demonstrations erupted into violence as protesters hurled rocks and Molotov cocktails at police in Philadelphia, set a fire near the White House and were hit with tear gas and pepper spray in Austin and other cities. Seven Boston police officers were hospitalized.

In some cities, thieves smashed their way into stores and ran off with as much as they could carry, leaving shop owners, many of them just ramping up their business again after coronavirus pandemic lockdowns, to clean up their shattered storefronts.

In others, police tried to calm tensions by kneeling in solidarity with demonstrators, while still maintaining a strong presence for security.

The demonstrations were sparked by the death of George Floyd, a Black man who pleaded for air as an officer pressed a knee into his neck. Floyd’s death in Minneapolis came after tensions had already flared after two white men were arrested in May for the February shooting death of Black jogger Ahmaud Arbery in Georgia, and the Louisville police shooting death of Breonna Taylor in her home in March.

The scale of the coast-to-coast protests rivaled the historic demonstrations of the civil rights and Vietnam War eras.

“They keep killing our people. I’m so sick and tired of it,” said Mahira Louis, 15, who was at a Boston protest with her mother Sunday, leading chants of “George Floyd, say his name.”

Tensions rose Sunday outside the White House, the scene of three days of demonstrations, where police fired tear gas and stun grenades into a crowd of more than 1,000 chanting protesters across the street in Lafayette Park. The crowd ran, piling up road signs and plastic barriers to light a raging fire in a nearby street. Some pulled an American flag from a building and threw it into the blaze. A building in the park with bathrooms and a maintenance office went up in flames.

The district’s entire National Guard — roughly 1,700 soldiers — was called in to help control the protests, according to two Defense Department officials who insisted on anonymity because they were not authorized to publicly discuss the matter.

As the protests grew, President Donald Trump retweeted conservative commentator Buck Sexton who called for “overwhelming force” against violent demonstrators.

Former Vice President Joe Biden, the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee, visited the site of protests in his hometown of Wilmington, Delaware, and talked to demonstrators. He also wrote a post on Medium expressing empathy for those despairing about Floyd’s killing.

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