Holder Kicks Off ‘Community Dialogue’ on Ferguson, Race in Atlanta

On Monday, Attorney General Eric Holder will travel to Atlanta to kick off a series of events with community activists and police officers nationwide to discuss their relationship after the Ferguson shooting. 

According to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, “Holder has been instructed by the president to attend such forums across the country” and “Atlanta’s will be the first such meeting.” On Monday, President Barack Obama had a series of cabinet meetings about Ferguson and police militarization with various community activists, including Al Sharpton, and law enforcement officials. 

The 6 PM town hall at Ebenezer Baptist Church is called “The Community Speaks,” which the Church is reportedly describing as “a community dialogue that ties the killing of Michael Brown, the grand jury’s decision on Wilson and the case at large to the greater issues of racial profiling and discrimination targeting communities of color.”

“The events in Ferguson bring into sharp focus the need to change America again until all enjoy the protection and promise of our justice system, ‘equal treatment under the law,'” Ebenezer pastor Dr. Raphael Warnock said in a statement. “I am honored to welcome our nation’s first black attorney general to America’s Freedom Church.”

After a Ferguson grand jury found no evidence to charge officer Darren Wilson in the shooting death of Michael Brown, Holder said the federal government’s civil rights investigation was still open. Holder would have to find that there was probable cause that Wilson, who has said that he would not have acted differently had Michael Brown been a white teenager, targeted Brown because of his race. 

On Sunday, former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani remarked that “Holder is going to have to take a case in which a jury couldn’t find probable cause to indict and he’s going to have to find probable cause in front of a federal grand jury when there are seven African-American witnesses supporting the police officer’s testimony.”

“Having read the transcripts of the grand jury FBI interviews and all of that, and having been a prosecutor for thirteen years, I don’t see how this case normally would even have been brought to a grand jury,” Giuliani said on Fox News Sunday. “This is the kind of case, had it not had the racial overtones and the national publicity, where a prosecutor would have come to the conclusion that there was not enough evidence to bring to the grand jury.”