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Using a megaphone to speak directly to a crowd of protesters, Bottoms, a Democrat, said her political success is owed to her enslaved forefathers, who she said “believed there was something better on the other side.”
“And what I’m saying to you all today: There is something better on the other side of this. There’s something better on the other side of this for us, and there’s something better on the other side for our children’s children,” she told the demonstrators.
The comments from the mayor come as the country is experiencing what many are describing as a national reckoning with America’s complicated racial history following a number of recent killings of black Americans by police officers, including that of George Floyd, a black man who died last week at the hands of a white police officer in Minneapolis.
In her remarks to the protesters on Thursday, Bottoms thanked them for honoring the slain Americans, saying, “Their lives matter. And I’m out here to tell you: You all matter to me.”
The mayor also compared the widespread protests and the attention to police abuse they’re drawing to the civil rights movement.
“In the same way the civil rights movement was not a day — it was not a moment in time, it was a movement — we are in the midst of a movement in this country,” she said.
“But it’s going to be incumbent upon all of us to be able to get together and articulate more than our anger,” she added. “We’ve got to be able to articulate what we want as our solutions.”
Bottoms has in recent days been among the most vocal elected officials as the protests have played out.
“This has been a really tough balance, because I feel helpless. I feel angry. I feel frustrated,” Bottoms told CNN’s Dr. Sanjay Gupta.
CNN’s Gregory Krieg and Paul LeBlanc contributed to this report.
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