The Dallas Police Department estimates the crowd at Saturday's rally against White Supremacy to be 2,500.
There was a tense moment when several people attending the rally confronted two men, including one who was holding a Confederate flag at Dallas City Hall Plaza.
The unidentified man told NBC 5, “I want to represent the rebel flag and represent the people that fly this flag.”
He was immediately confronted by a young man yelling and cursing at him to leave calling him a traitor and racist.
The two men were forced out of the plaza by people chanting ‘shame on you!’
Dallas police stepped in and kept the crowd from following the men beyond the plaza.
Peace was restored by the time the rally began shortly after 7:30 p.m.
Local
The latest news from around North Texas.
Several people spoke to the crowd including Pastor Michael Waters.
Waters gave a rousing speech that sounded like a sermon from the pulpit in which he criticized city leaders for not removing Confederate statues like Robert E. Lee’s at Lee Park.
“When we tear down monuments, we can lift up one another,” he told the crowd. “Will you fight for justice? Will you see this through? Well let’s continue to fight until justice flows like waters and righteousness like a mighty stream.”
As Waters and other speakers addressed the crowd, you could hear someone yelling ‘why now?’
That was Bennie Jeffery.
He held up a poster reading ‘Mayor Rawlings The Grand Wizard Ignore Racism Just Like The NAACP – Dirty Crooks.’
“When we had our first black mayor here these monuments stood,” Jeffery told NBC 5. “When we had a veteran commissioner like Price that can stand up and say he thinks it’s okay to keep a ‘whites only’ sign in a county building by a water fountain, that’s why I’m asking why now? Why do these monuments matter so much now that there’s a wave going across the country? No one has given me a concrete answer: Why now?”
As the peaceful event took place, a group of men and women dressed in all black unleashed a verbal assault on police officers.
Many had covered their faces.
One spoke with a bullhorn and called out alleged police brutality.
The group then walked out of City Hall Plaza and walked toward Pioneer Park.
Dallas police said there were no incidents to report of the rally. No arrests were made during the event.
