The Progressive Pulse: “Trials of protesters who demonstrated in Graham last fall in support of the Black Lives Matter movement got underway on Wednesday, with the prosecutor dropping charges against two people, and the judge affirming misdemeanor charges against another individual without imposing a penalty.
The Alamance County town was the scene of multiple protests on a variety of topics in 2020. Triad City Beat tallied more than 70 charges filed against protesters last year from June through November, including those whose trials took place Wednesday. Among the events that gave rise to arrests:
- a June 27 “Black Lives Matter” protest,
- a July 25 NAACP “Call to Action” speaker meeting,
- a Sept. 8 protest against the county jail’s COVID response,
- a Sept. 26 “We Are Still Here” march around the courthouse where a Confederate monument stands, in which nine were arrested,
- an Oct. 31 “march to the polls” in which law enforcement officers pepper-sprayed marchers and charged some people with failure to disperse on command.
In August, a federal judge issued a preliminary injunction prohibiting a ban on protests around the courthouse that the sheriff’s office had sought to impose….
Other demonstrators’ cases that involve the Sept. 8 and Oct. 31 protests will continue and roll over to the following court sessions. More than 20 additional protest-related trials are scheduled every Wednesday from March 3 to April 7, according to court calendars released by Alamance County District Court.”