Protests over BART shooting turn violent:
The mob smashed the windows at Creative African Braids on 14th Street, and a woman walked out of the shop holding a baby in her arms.
“This is our business,” shouted Leemu Topka, the black owner of the salon she started four years ago. “This is our shop. This is what you call a protest?”
Wednesday night’s vandalism victims had nothing to do with the shooting death by a BART police officer of Oscar Grant on New Year’s Day – but that did little to sway the mob.
“I feel like the night is going great,” said Nia Sykes, 24, of San Francisco, one of the demonstrators. “I feel like Oakland should make some noise. This is how we need to fight back. It’s for the murder of a black male.”
Sykes, who is black, had little sympathy for the owner of Creative African Braids.
“She should be glad she just lost her business and not her life,” Sykes said. She added that she did have one worry for the night: “I just hope nobody gets shot or killed.”
Nia, if you think vandalizing an unrelated, black-owned business is a fine and dandy way to protest against racism, and if you think that violent protests will ever result in anything other than someone getting “shot and killed”, then you’re such a fucking moron that rational thought is most likely a stretch you’ll never make. But maybe you could at least try…
There was a comment on this post, by someone calling himself “Oakland Dude”, which had an invalid contact address. I don’t publish anything with an obviously fake address, but I will include his mention that Nia Sykes says she was quoted out of context (for what it’s worth) and provide what the commenter couldn’t: a link to her letter to the editor.
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2009/01/10/ED9P154NS8.DTL&hw=nia+sykes&sn=002&sc=475