Trump Sees Upcoming Rally On Freedom Day As 'Celebration,' Black Leaders Find It Insulting

WASHINGTON (UrduPoint News / Sputnik - 13th June, 2020) President Donald Trump said his political rally in Oklahoma next week should be seen as a celebration just as rival black leaders are calling it an insult because it falls on a day of festivity for African-Americans.

"Think about it as a celebration, don't think about it as an inconvenience," Trump told Fox news on Friday.

Trump's June 19 rally, which will be his first since the COVID-19 lockdown began, will be held near the site of a 1921 massacre of African Americans - a move that has enraged local black leaders such as Alicia Andrews, chair of the Oklahoma Democratic Party.

Earlier in the day, Andrews told The Oklahoman, the state's largest daily newspaper, that the president's decision to hold the event in the state capital Tulsa during Freedom Day, which marks the end of African slavery in America, is an insult.

"It feels like an insult, like a deliberate insult at worst and insensitive, unthinking and calculated at best,'' Andrews said.

Trump has had a strained relationship in recent weeks with the US black community after the May 25th death of unarmed African American, George Floyd, at the hands of a white police officer in Minneapolis, Minnesota.

While Trump has publicly condemned the killing, he has also railed against the nationwide street protests that erupted in the aftermath of Floyd's death, potentially disenfranchising black voters who could be important to his reelection in November. Trump has also taken to Twitter in recent days to criticize de-funding and disbanding of police departments in Democratic-controlled states, calling street demonstrators behind such action "anarchists".

Trump's Tulsa rally has also drawn controversy for another reason: fear that it could help accelerate a second wave of coronavirus infections in the United States, just as the earlier outbreak from end-February appeared to be coming under control. His team has issued an online registration for the rally that requires attendees to agree that they will indemnify the campaign from lawsuits should they get infected by the virus.