Black Friday is overrated.
For the second year in a row, protesters are planning to block shoppers from entering stores along North Michigan Avenue on the day after Thanksgiving, the busiest shopping day of the year.
The effort, planned by a diffuse network that includes Black Lives Matter, the Chicago Alliance Against Racist and Political Repression and area churches, seeks to draw attention to a wide range of issues, including police shootings, racism and economic inequalities that keep Chicago’s South and West sides mired in poverty and violence.
The organizers say they hope this year’s turnout will be larger than last year’s, when hundreds of people temporarily obstructed access to retailers along Chicago’s most famous shopping strip and cost some stores a reported 50 percent of their sales on Black Friday.
“We’re expecting a bigger turnout this year, though this is not an exact science,” one of the self-identified organizers, Frank Chapman, a field organizer with the Alliance Against Racist and Political Repression, told Crain’s. “The reason we’re looking for a bigger turnout is that Trump is the president-elect and, boy, are people pissed.”
An official permit has been pulled for a Nov. 25 protest along North Michigan Avenue, the Chicago Police Department’s Special Events Department confirmed. The department declined to say who the organizers are or provide any more details.
Chapman said protesters remain angry about the Chicago police shooting of 17-year-old Laquan McDonald, and about what they say is Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s ineffective police accountability legislation. But he also said that the protesters were not defined by race alone. “We’ve been calling everyone who has a grievance: the African-American community, Latino people, the white working class,” he said. “I’m not going to write the white working class off as racist.”
He said several unions, including the Chicago Teachers Union and the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees, also plan to participate in the protest.
HT: Marathon Pundit