In a video-taped interview provided to Breitbart News, Missouri State Sen. Maria Chappelle-Nadal (D-Universal City) sounded off on the turmoil that has embroiled Ferguson, MO, which lies within her 14th Missouri State Senate district, involving the killing of Michael Brown and the subsequent protests.
Chappelle-Nadal talked about the early stages of the protests and explained how she became involved. She talked how tensions escalated between the law enforcement and protesters, and then later the Clergy Coalition of St. Louis and the protesters.
“They were intimidating them and I got in the middle of them and I said, ‘Get away from these kids, now. Let them express themselves the way they want to express themselves. It is not up to you to dictate how these young people are going to exemplify their First Amendment rights. So leave them alone. And they were mad and frustrated. And the clergy left thankfully after a 10-minute intervention. And so earlier that day, these kids literally wanted to die for justice. I said, ‘Let’s sit down.’ I said I’m going to join you. They didn’t know who I was. They didn’t know my title. They just wanted an older person who is sitting down with them to verify what they’re doing is OK.”
Chappelle-Nadal later turned ire toward Gov. Jay Nixon (D-MO) with a scathing rebuke of his lack of involvement concerning minority communities as a whole and accused of him of only participating in situations those concerns out of political motivations.
“He doesn’t care,” she said. “The governor is a coward and he’s been completely disconnected from the black community for his entire career. The only time he comes to the minority communities is when he is running for office or when it is politically expedient. And so the rumor are that he’s either going to run for U.S. Senate, or run for president or vice president or seek an appointment. And what he always does – he thinks that if you send a black employee to a black representative or senator, we’re just going to jump the broom and do whatever he says. But he’s been absent from the very beginning. He doesn’t care about black people. He’s not even come to ground zero and listen to these young people’s concerns.”
Earlier, Chappelle-Nadal had taken to Twitter to express her frustrations with Nixon in less polite terms.
The Universal City, MO Democrat also admitted she was “scared and nervous” as the protests were playing out and explained that it was a sense of fear more than at any other time in her life.
“If I was scared and nervous – and let me tell you, I’m pretty courageous, pretty darn courageous,” Chappelle-Nadal added. “You know, hardly anything scares me. There’s no other time in my life – I’ve climbed the Sydney Harbor Bridge, I’ve been on top of whatever mountain in Rio de Janeiro, I’ve been in Iraq fired upon, nothing has ever scared me more than war zone that I have to call my district right now.”
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